It’s the one-month anniversary of the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, and it’s still not clear what happened at that deadly July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Most of the primary evidence about the event—body camera footage, audio recordings, text messages and operations plans—has come from local police and event attendees. On the federal level, whistleblower disclosures have contradicted congressional testimony from top FBI and Secret Service officials. Federal and local authorities have also contradicted each other.
Still, the available evidence can provide a guide for investigators to ask the right questions.
What We Think We Know: Not Much
Based on text messages from the Butler and Beaver County Emergency Services Units, it looks like local law enforcement first spotted Trump shooter Thomas Crooks by 4:26 p.m.
More than 40 minutes later at 5:38 p.m., local counter snipers saw Crooks again, this time right beneath their second-story perch on the AGR building. It was at this point when they photographed Crooks and let the Secret Service know about him.
Officers then allegedly “lost track” of Crooks for about 20 minutes, according to reports on their radio communications. At 6:02 p.m., Beaver County sniper Greg Nicol again spotted Crooks on the side of the building facing away from the Trump rally.
How Nicol and the other local cops lost Crooks after that isn’t quite clear. But according to their radio comms, Nicol told his fellow officers that Crooks was headed to a Sheetz gas station about a quarter-mile outside the rally site.
Nicol, who shot himself in a “freak accident” last December, was wrong. Instead of going all the way around the AGR building to the Sheetz gas station, he instead made his way to an HVAC unit next to the AGR building—using that equipment to gain access to the roof of the building.
Hellbound and Down 