Trump reveals he grilled Secret Service chief over safety failures

Donald Trump grilled the Secret Service chief over the security failures at his campaign rally and dismissed the excuse that agents did not have the ‘manpower’ to secure the roof where a gunman opened fire at him as ‘crazy’, he has revealed.

Thomas Crooks, 20, shot the former president from a roof just 400ft away from the stage where Trump was speaking during an outdoor campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. 

Trump, 78, was wounded, with a bullet grazing his ear, and escorted off the stage by Secret Service agents. One rallygoer was killed in the attack and another injured.

The Republican 2024 nominee has now revealed that he questioned Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle over why they had not ensured agents were stationed on the ‘really close’ roof that had a ‘dead aim right onto the stage‘.

He claims she said they ‘didn’t have the manpower for it’ and pointed to the roof’s ‘slope’ when trying to explain the massive security failure.

Cheatle, who was brutally grilled in Congress Monday over the assassination attempt, admitted her agency failed in its mission to protect Trump and was met with demands from lawmakers of both major political parties that she resign.

The former president, during an interview Monday on Fox News, recalled his conversation with Cheatle, whom he says ‘came to see me’ after the attempt on his life. 

Trump said that although the Secret Service boss was ‘very nice’ and their meeting ‘went very nicely’, he still wants answers as to why ‘there was nobody on the roof’ from which Crooks shot him.

‘Somebody should have made sure there was nobody on that roof,’ he told host Jesse Watters. ‘That roof was a dead aim right onto the stage. And they said they didn’t have the manpower for it, which is crazy.’

Trump also addressed the close proximity of the roof from which Crooks opened fire at the rally, noting how it was only 130yd (400ft) from the stage. 

He said: ‘They said 130 yards is like sinking a one-foot putt. It’s considered really close. ‘It sounds like a lot, but it’s really, from that standpoint, it’s a very, you know, it’s very close.’

Trump added how he was told that from that distance ‘a bad shot would usually hit the target’.

‘Somebody’s got to be there,’ he urged: ‘And it’s essentially a flat roof. I mean, I noticed that she said, well, this is a slope roof where you think of like a barn where you have, this thing had just a little – a little upswing in it, a few degrees. This was a not – it essentially was a flat roof.’

Trump alleged he security chief was given ‘false information’ about the slope of the roof. He also demanded that someone be held responsible for the security failures.

‘I thought she was very nice. But, you know, you have to answer why couldn’t I have stayed off the stage for five minutes while they do their work,’ Trump said.  

‘Why couldn’t, you know, how does a situation happen where a roof that’s plainly in sight from the location where I was speaking, why would somebody not have seen that?’ 

Cheatle has called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s ‘most significant operational failure’ in decades, and vowed to ‘move heaven and earth’ to get to the bottom of what went wrong and make sure there’s no repeat of it.

During the Congressional hearing on Monday she acknowledged that the Secret Service was told about a suspicious person two to five times before the shooting at the rally. She also revealed that the roof from which Crooks opened fire had been identified as a potential vulnerability days before the rally. 

Trump was seen covered in blood after Crooks opened fire into his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13 and shot his ear.

The former president, during his Monday interview with Watters, also revealed how he heard the ‘zip, zip’ sound of bullets flying over his head after shots rang out and detailed his security agents’ immediate response to the incident.

‘They wanted to put me on a stretcher,’ he told host Jesse Watters on Monday. ‘And I said, ‘I’m not going on a stretcher,’ because I just felt it was the ear.

‘There was a lot of blood coming – I don’t know if you’ve heard this but the ear causes, they say the most in the body.’

He explained that his security team thought he had been hit in the chest area, but he reiterated: ‘I’m telling you, I’m ok.’

‘I’m fine, I’m going to get up. I want to get up. I am not going to be taken out on a stretcher,’ he added.

Trump argued with his agents, vowed to ‘get up’ and as he was escorted off the stage, defiantly fist pumped to a crowd of his supporters and encouraged them to ‘fight’.

He was was met with chants of ‘USA’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ from the crowd.

‘They thought it was over when I went down because they saw the blood immediately and then when I put the hand up everybody was happy. That was the time when they realized I was ok,’ he recounted.

He praised the crowd for being ‘brave’ and hailed America as an ‘incredible country’. 

‘It was a beautiful moment,’ Trump said of the aftermath. ‘The people on the stage were unbelievable and brave they were running past bullets.

‘They were all Secret Service that came running up and they were running past me with bullets – when I went down, bullets were coming over my head and you hear them, it’s like a zip, zip.’

Crooks was killed by law enforcement at the rally. It is not clear what his motive was for the shooting. 

Cheatle admitted Monday that her agency failed in its mission to protect Trump, as lawmakers of both major political parties demanded during a highly contentious congressional hearing that she resign over the security failures at the rally.

She was berated for hours by Republicans and Democrats, repeatedly angering lawmakers by evading questions about the investigation during the first hearing over the July 13 assassination attempt. 

‘The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders. On July 13th, we failed,’ she told lawmakers on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

Cheatle said she apologized to Trump in a phone call after the assassination attempt.

Yet she remained defiant that she was the ‘right person’ to lead the Secret Service, even as she said she takes full responsibility the security lapses. 

When Republican Rep. Nancy Mace suggested Cheatle begin drafting her resignation letter from the hearing room, Cheatle responded, ‘No, thank you.’

In a rare moment of unity for the often divided committee, the Republican chairman, Rep. James Comer, and its top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, issued a letter calling on Cheatle to step down.

The White House didn’t immediately comment on whether President Joe Biden still has confidence in Cheatle after her testimony.

Democrats and Republicans were united in their exasperation as Cheatle said she didn’t know or couldn’t answer numerous questions more than a week after the shooting that left one spectator dead. At one point, Mace used profanity as she accused Cheatle of lying and dodging questions, prompting calls for lawmakers to show ‘decorum.’

Lawmakers pressed Cheatle on how the gunman could get so close to the Republican presidential nominee when he was supposed to be carefully guarded, and why Trump was allowed to take the stage after local law enforcement had identified Crooks as suspicious.

‘It has been 10 days since an assassination attempt on a former president of the United States. Regardless of party, there need to be answers,’ said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York.

Cheatle acknowledged that Crooks had been seen by local law enforcement before the shooting with a rangefinder, a small device resembling binoculars that hunters use to measure distance from a target. She said the Secret Service would never have taken Trump onto the stage if it had known there was an ‘actual threat.’ 

Local law enforcement took a photo of Crooks and shared it after seeing him acting suspiciously, but he wasn’t deemed to be a ‘threat’ until seconds before he opened fire, she said.

‘An individual with a backpack is not a threat,’ Cheatle said. ‘An individual with a rangefinder is not a threat.’

Cheatle said local enforcement officers were inside the building from which Crooks fired. But when asked why there were no agents on the roof or if the Secret Service used drones to monitor the area, Cheatle said she is still waiting for the investigation to play out, prompting groans and outbursts from members on the committee.

‘Director Cheatle, because Donald Trump is alive, and thank God he is, you look incompetent,’ said Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio. ‘If he were killed, you would look culpable.’

Rep. Ro Khanna, one of the Democrats who joined the calls for Cheatle to resign, noted that the Secret Service director who presided over the agency when there was an attempted assassination of former Republican President Ronald Reagan later stepped down.

‘The one thing we have to have in this country are agencies that transcend politics and have the confidence of independents, Democrats, Republicans, progressives and conservatives,’ Khanna said, adding that the Secret Service was no longer one of those agencies.

Trump was wounded in the ear, a former Pennsylvania fire chief was killed and two other attendees were injured when Crooks opened fire with an AR-style rifle shortly after Trump began speaking.

Cheatle said the agency hopes to have its internal investigation completed in 60 days. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has separately appointed a bipartisan, independent panel to review the assassination attempt, while the department,s inspector general has opened three investigations.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan delegation of about a dozen members of the House Committee on Homeland Security toured the shooting site Monday. 

The lawmakers said they were the first group outside law enforcement to climb onto the roof where the shooter positioned himself.

Authorities have been hunting for clues into what motivated Crooks but have not found any ideological bent that could help explain his actions. 

Investigators who searched his phone found photos of Trump, Biden and other senior government officials and found that he had looked up the dates for the Democratic National Conventional as well as Trump’s appearances. 

He also searched for information about major depressive order.

The attack on Trump was the most serious attempt to assassinate a president or presidential candidate since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. It was the latest in a series of security lapses by the agency that has drawn investigations and public scrutiny over the years.

Cheatle took over two years ago as head of the Secret Service’s 7,800 special agents, uniformed officers and other staffers whose main purpose is protecting presidents, vice presidents, their families, former presidents and others.

In announcing her appointment, Biden said Cheatle had served on his vice presidential detail and called her a ‘distinguished law enforcement professional with exceptional leadership skills’ who had his ‘complete trust.’

Cheatle took the reins from James M. Murray as multiple congressional committees and an internal watchdog investigated missing text messages from when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

The Secret Service says they were purged during a technology transition.