A new video shows police in Butler, Pa., complaining that they warned the Secret Service of security issues before the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.
“I f—ing told them that they needed to post guys f—ing over here…I told them that f—ing Tuesday,” a Butler Township police officer was heard saying in audio from his body-worn camera obtained by The Wall Street Journal. “I talked to the Secret Service guys. They’re like, ‘Yeah, no problem. We’re going to post guys over here.”
In one of the videos, obtained by The Journal, showed one officer talking about a suspicious person they lost who he described as “a gentleman with a flat face that we were looking for earlier. He was creeping people out.”
“He was watching people out in the woods by the water tower. I’m not sure he is the gentleman down or not,” he said.
Around 10 minutes after the shooting, another officer arrived on the scene and was noticeably frustrated.
“I thought you guys were on the roof. I thought it was you. I thought it was you,” the officer said.
“No,” another explained and explained that there were no officers on the roof.
“What the f—,” the officer responded. “Why were we not on the roof? Why weren’t we?”
Another video shows an officer being assisted on to the roof but then quickly descending after seeing an armed would be assassin who pointed his firearm at him.
“He’s armed. I saw him. He’s laying down,” the officer said on the radio, a transcript showed.
“He turned around and I f—ing dropped,” the officer said.
The officer then ran to his squad car to get a rifle as other officers arrived on the scene.
“F—ing this close, bro. Dude, he turned around on me,” he said to other officers.
“He’s laying down, proned out, book bag next to him,” the officer said.
“Watch out cause he can f—ing come right down on you over there,” he said as other officers approached the roof.
In another video, the same officer who first spotted the would-be assassin climbed the roof again after the scene was secure, saying that he sent out an alert about the man.
“Dude, I was calling out, ‘On top of the roof!’” he said. “Were you on the same frequency?”
“I’m f—ing pissed,” another officer said while walking near the attacker’s body. “We couldn’t find him.”
Federal officials have said that they believed local authorities, including snipers, would secure the building.
But local authorities said that they informed the Secret Service that they would be inside the building with snipers on the second floor.
“Butler’s team didn’t want the snipers on the roof because they would have been exposed to temperatures over 90 degrees throughout the day, the official said. Also the sloped roof would have obscured some of the snipers’ vantage points, he said,” The Journal reported.
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“On the day of the rally, the Secret Service had limited interaction with local police, including the Butler County Emergency Services Unit, the official said,” the report said.
Butler Township police Lt. Matthew Pearson said last week that Butler Police will not reveal the names of the officers heard on the body camera audio because of the ongoing investigation.
“Butler Township Police are cooperating with an internal Secret Service investigation so we cannot comment at this time,” he said.
The Secret Service confirmed that it is reviewing the body camera footage to “ensure a tragedy like this never occurs again.”
“The U.S. Secret Service appreciates our local law enforcement partners, who acted courageously as they worked to locate the shooter that day,” the agency’s spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.
