A Pennsylvania SWAT officer said his team did not have communication with Secret Service agents prior to the Trump rally in Butler.

“We were supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service snipers whenever they arrived, and that never happened,” Jason Woods, the Beaver County SWAT team’s lead sharpshooter, said on ABC News.

“So I think that was probably a pivotal point, where I started thinking things were wrong because that never happened,” he continued.

“We had no communication with the Secret Service,” he added.

“Another alarming security failure. A local SWAT officer in PA told ABC his team had no contact with Secret Service at the rally until after the assassination attempt on President Trump. Our House Task Force will find the answers the American people deserve,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.

WATCH:

Per ABC News:

In their first public comments since the assassination attempt, the SWAT team on the ground that day and their supervisors spoke exclusively with ABC News Senior Investigative Correspondent Aaron Katersky. It is the first time any key law enforcement personnel on-site July 13 have offered first-hand accounts of what occurred.

They explained that they did what they could to try to thwart the attack but now have to live with the failure.

The episode last week led to the resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. And, in the wake of the assassination attempt, a series of law-enforcement, internal and congressional probes have been announced – with communications and coordination a key focus of investigators’ attention.

The Secret Service, whose on-site team was supplemented as usual by local, county and state law-enforcement agencies, was ultimately responsible for security at the event.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi declined to respond directly to the comments from Woods and his colleagues. He said the agency “is committed to better understanding what happened before, during, and after the assassination attempt of former President Trump to ensure that never happens again. That includes complete cooperation with Congress, the FBI and other relevant investigations.”

Woods told ABC News he would have expected to have seen more coordination with the Secret Service and to have had greater communication between their team on the ground that day and the agents with Trump’s detail. The first communication between their group and the Secret Service agents on the scene that day, he said, was “not until after the shooting. By then, he said, “it was too late.”

The lack of communication between local police officers and Secret Service agents is the latest revelation of the abysmal failures during the rally on July 13th.

Earlier this week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said a whistleblower claimed local law enforcement offered the Secret Service drones to utilize at the rally.

However, the agency reportedly declined the offer.

“Whistleblower tells me local law enforcement partners & suppliers offered drones to Secret Service BEFORE the rally – but Secret Service declined,” Hawley wrote.

“According to reports, the shooter used a drone to survey the site in preparation for his attack. This was confirmed by FBI Director Christopher Wray in his testimony just yesterday. In fact, he confirmed that the shooter was operating the drone approximately two hours before President Trump took the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania,” Hawley said in the letter.

“According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally. This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the site. Secret Service said no. The whistleblower further alleges that after the shooting took place, USSS changed course and asked the local partner to deploy the drone technology to surveil the site in the aftermath of the attack,” he continued.

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From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Security preparations for presidential campaign visits are dayslong operations in which federal agents lead teams of local officers, often from across several jurisdictions, to protect both the candidate and crowds of supporters that can number in the thousands.

The meetings between the agencies are supposed to give every officer and law enforcement leader on scene a full picture of the security plan well before the candidate takes the stage.

“There are no secrets,” Donald Mihalek, a retired Secret Service agent and ABC News contributor, told the Post-Gazette just days after the shooting.

The breakdowns that led to the worst security lapse in decades for the Secret Service have come under intense scrutiny by congressional committees and federal agencies since the gunman fired eight rounds at the former president.

A central focus of the inquiries is how a gap in the security plan allowed the shooter to climb onto a rooftop — a location that should have been one of the biggest concerns for law enforcement — and open fire.

 

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