Trump says he wasn’t warned by Secret Service about gunman Thomas Crooks before assassination attempt at Pennsylvania rally
Donald Trump revealed Saturday that he was not warned by the Secret Service about the gunman who shot him at a Pennsylvania rally last weekend — despite agents eyeing the suspect for hours before the attack.
“Nobody mentioned it,” Trump, 78, told Jesse Watters in an upcoming episode of the Fox News anchor’s primetime show.
“Nobody said it was a problem,” the Republican presidential nominee said.
“[They] could’ve said, ‘Let’s wait for 15, 20 minutes, 5 minutes.’ Nobody said…I think that was a mistake,” he added.
Trump questioned how gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to climb onto a roof with a rifle in hand just 130 yards away from the politician without the Secret Service taking action.
Police even saw Crooks on the building 26 minutes before he opened fire — and were alerted by frantically screaming witnesses — but didn’t take action.
The Secret Service didn’t make any moves until after Crooks squeezed off up to seven shots at Trump, grazing the candidate in the ear and killing one audience member.
“How did somebody get on that roof?” Trump said his interview. “And why wasn’t he reported, because people saw he was on that roof.”
“When you have Trumpers screaming, the woman in the red shirt, ‘There’s a man on the roof,’ and other people, ‘There’s a man on the roof and who’s got a gun’ … that was quite a bit before I walked on the stage. And I would’ve thought someone would’ve done something about it,” Trump added.
Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks first raised suspicions when he passed through the security screening area with a rangefinder, a device similar to binoculars used by hunters and target shooters to measure distances for long-range shots — three hours before he opened fire.
An officer spotted Crooks using the rangefinder and looking at his phone nearly an hour before Trump took the stage.
He was reported a third and final time minutes before the shooting. Two officers saw him on the roof and took pictures of the suspicious person for their alerts, which either weren’t acted on or received in time to avert the tragedy.
The Secret Service has been strongly criticized for failing to stop Crooks before he fired on the ex-president, with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle facing mounting pressure to resign.
Here’s the latest on the assassination attempt against Donald Trump:
Sources told The Post Saturday that top Secret Service officials repeatedly rejected Trump’s request for additional security in the two years before the assassination attempt.
The Republican’s personal security detail had to rely on local resources for the Pennsylvania event when the Secret Service headquarters denied its request for extra manpower, equipment and technology, insiders said.
The ex-president’s security has since been upgraded to match that of President Biden.
Watters’ interview with Trump will air on Monday at 8 p.m. It will feature the Republican hopeful’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
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