by WorldTribune Staff, August 11, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
Secret Service incompetence explains a lot, but not all, about what happened on July 13 at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, residents of the county are saying.
“Somebody is hiding something. Somebody is not telling the truth yet,” Fox News cited a local woman as saying. “There’s no way a 20-year-old kid could do that alone. I’m not buying it anyway.”
Butler residents who have been interviewed remain angered by the attempt on Donald Trump’s life by Thomas Matthew Crooks, but also continue to ask questions about how the gunman was able in relative plain sight to scope out and then climb up to the building where he was able to get off eight shots before Secret Service snipers returned fire and killed him.
“There is a deep suspicion among residents in Butler County, which Trump won with around 66% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020, about the truth of what really happened coming out. Many say that plain incompetence just doesn’t pass the smell test, and the Secret Service’s lack of transparency is only adding fuel to their claims that there is more than meets the eye,” Michael Dorgan reported from Butler for Fox News Digital.
Bob O’Sterling, a vendor at the recent Butler Farm Show, said: “There’s too many inconsistencies or failures for this to happen. It has to be an inside job.”
“The Secret Service, the local police, the snipers that were there that were supposed to be covering that roof. Too many inconsistencies for that to be just a happenstance. It can’t be a happenstance,” said O’Sterling, who was at the July 13 rally, where about 50,000 people were in attendance.
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Paul Critchcow, who was also at the rally, said that Trump quickly rising to his feet stopped a stampede from happening.
“There could have been a lot of people trampled, and it didn’t happen, so it says a lot,” Critchcow said.
Butler’s residents told Dorgan that Trump’s actions “embodied the defiant spirit of their community and recalled that when potential rioters arrived in the city in 2020 during the height of the summer’s riots, open-carry residents lined streets in Butler City to deter them.”
Meanwhile, the Secret Service is now saying it was not involved in the break-in of a hair salon late last month at a Kamala Harris campaign event in Massachusetts.
“The allegations of Secret Service involvement arose after the salon’s owner, Alicia Powers, alleged that agents put duct tape over her security cameras and broke into her building by picking the lock,” Fox News Digital reported on Sunday.
Security camera footage shows an individual dressed in attire like that of a Secret Service agent approaching the door with a roll of tape and observing the locked door and camera before grabbing a nearby chair to boost up and put tape over the camera.
“The U.S. Secret Service works closely with our partners in the business community to carry out our protective and investigative missions,” agency spokeswoman Melissa McKenzie said in a statement.
“We hold these relationships in the highest regard and our personnel would not enter, or instruct our partners to enter, a business without the owner’s permission,” McKenzie said, stopping short of saying who was responsible.
Fox News had said in an earlier report that the Secret Service had apologized for breaking into the salon.
‘Inside job’: Unresolved anger in pro-Trump Butler, Pa; Secret Service apologizes to salon owner added by Editor Two on
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