by WorldTribune Staff, December 10, 2024 Real World News
Would-be assassin Thomas Crooks was initially stopped from continuing his attempt to kill GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump by a gunshot fired by a Butler County, Pennsylvania police officer and not by a Secret Service countersniper as the FBI had contended, Rep. Clay Higgins said.
The Louisiana Republican does not dispute that the countersniper’s shot killed Crooks. Higgins identified the Butler County officer as Aaron Zaliponi, who testified before the House task force investigating the assassination attempt that the single shot he fired hit Crooks.
The FBI disputed that account, but Higgins said the physical evidence, his ballistics analysis, and layered expert testimony corroborate Zaliponi’s account, The Washington Times reported on Dec. 7.
“His one round — shot No. 9 at nine seconds from the first round fire — hit the buttstock of Crooks’ weapon, smashed that weapon into his jawline,” Higgins said of Zaliponi. “There’s a corresponding injury on Crooks’ jaw that I’ve observed from the medical examiner’s report, and those photographs precisely match the broken buttstock of Crooks’ rifle.”
The FBI, which has not provided any public updates on its investigation since Aug. 28, said it had no forensic evidence indicating that the round Zaliponi fired hit Crooks or his rifle. The bureau’s laboratory division tested Crooks’ rifle and concluded it was fully operational.
Crooks fired eight rounds. Oone of the bullets grazed Trump’s ear. His gunfire also killed a rallygoer and injured two others.
The House task force investigating the assassination attempt concluded its investigation on Thursday and will release its final report soon.
“I’m not done by a long shot,” Higgins told The Washington Times. “There’s many things that are not covered here in this report that I have in my investigative file.”
Higgins said his timeline of the assassination attempt had Crooks getting off eight shots before Zaliponi fired his round nine seconds into the shooting. Crooks did not fire any additional rounds before the kill shot from the Secret Service countersniper at 18 seconds.
Absent from the FBI’s narrative, he said, is what happened in those nine seconds between Zaliponi’s shot and the round from the Secret Service sniper.
Crooks “fired five rounds in his final three seconds of shooting,” Higgins said. “If he had not been stopped by the Butler County ESU shot No. 9, then you would presume he would have continued to fire at that rate, which means he would have dumped 15 more rounds in his remaining nine seconds of life had it not been for the Butler County ESU shot.”
Higgins added: “So I think the FBI was too fast on some of their own conclusions in the initial 24-36 hours of the investigation. And once they had moved forward in that direction, they were hesitant to back up.”
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