Are Local Police Deflecting Blame for Assassination Attempt?

Ahead of Tuesday’s Senate grilling of acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe, local Pennsylvania police released a curious diagram from the July 13 rally in Butler that ended in an assassination attempt of former President Trump, the death of rally-goer Corey Comperatore, and injuries of two others.

The aerial photo of the event site, the Butler Farm Show, contained labels for the locations of Butler County and Beaver County police assets, including two local law enforcement “snipers” assigned to cover the American Glass Research building, where shooter Thomas Crooks perched with his AR-15 rifle about 150 yards from Trump’s onstage performance and fired eight bullets at the former president and the crowd.

The diagram includes a narrow red triangle, clearly labeled “Beaver Sniper Line of Sight.” That line of sight is narrowly conscribed between the location of the snipers inside the AGR building to the stage and pointedly does not cover any area of the rooftop where Crooks ran across and then stopped to open fire.

The narrow scope of the red triangle’s purported “line of sight” immediately stood out to some sources within the Secret Service community as purposefully narrowly constructed so as to try to prove that the local snipers never had any portion of the AGR building rooftop in their line of sight and therefore were not at fault for failing to monitor that rooftop.

“Either the red vector was drawn deliberately to avoid responsibility, or it does not include any part of the roof by sheer accident,” one source told RealClearPolitics. “Either way, no one had eyes on the [AGR] roof.”

The shooter likely moved to his left to put a tree between himself and the Secret Service counter snipers who were positioned behind the stage, the source suggested after watching a recently released cell phone video from a rallygoer showing Crooks – in plain view from the stage – running along the rooftop before stopping and firing the eight shots.

But the narrow nature of the red-triangle line of sight doesn’t sit well with many law enforcement sources who asserted that a local police sniper would have had a much wider line of sight perspective that included most of the AGR roof, if sitting close to the window’s edge and constantly looking out.

In other words, he would have seen Crooks, if he had properly done his job, the sources argued.

“If you are handling your window post properly, you would have seen and maybe heard him on the tin roof,” one source remarked. “If local snipers weren’t supposed to cover the roof, then what could possibly have been their role? Covering grass?”

Acting Secret Service Director Rowe, during his Senate testimony on Tuesday, put out a more simplified diagram showing a direct line of sight, or view of the entire AGR........

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