A law enforcement team assigned to monitor former President Donald Trump’s July 13 Pennsylvania rally was grappling with staffing shortages ahead of the attempted assassination, newly revealed text messages show.
A team leader with the Beaver County Emergency Services wrote in a text chain on July 8 — five days before the rally — that they needed to assist with the rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds, the messages obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed.
The group sent numerous messages back and forth, with one participant mentioning fears that staffing was tight because “everyone else is either working, on vacation or hurt.”
A few of the members of the text thread explained that they could not make the event either, with one relaying that they would be out of state at the time.
“Bravo has 2 that can stay the whole day and one that would have to leave early,” someone chimed in.
Beaver County officials did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday on the apparent manpower issue.
The trove of text exchanges shed light on the timeline leading up to the moment Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire from a rooftop near the rally site — grazing Trump’s ear, seriously wounding two attendees and killing a volunteer firefighter before being shot dead by the Secret Service.
Crooks, 20, was on law enforcement’s radar for a whole 90 minutes before he fired the first shot, the messages revealed.
At 5:38 p.m. — less than an hour before the shooting — one officer even took a photo of Crooks and sent it in a group chat regarding a suspicious person around the event.
“Kid learning around the building we are in. AGR I believe it is. I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him,” an officer wrote to the group.
“Call it in to command and have a uniform check it out,” an officer suggested.
The texts proved the authorities were aware of the suspicious person later revealed to be Crooks over an hour and a half before the assassination attempt — and not just an hour before, as was previously claimed at a congressional hearing.
The Secret Service has since weathered a litany of complaints as lawmakers questioned how the federal agency could have allowed Crooks to get close enough to come just centimeters from assassinating a former president.
A bipartisan task force helmed by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) slammed the security failures as “shocking” and vowed to “ensure accountability” for the incident.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned last week amid the backlash.