A COUNTER sniper flagged a suspicious man using a rangefinder to the US Secret Service some 20 minutes before a gunman opened fire at a Donald Trump rally, according to members of Congress briefed by law enforcement.
A clearer timeline of the events leading up to the assassination attempt has begun to emerge after closed briefings to lawmakers on Wednesday.
Local police had initially spotted the gunman, who was acting strangely, at Saturday’s Pennsylvania rally about an hour before the shooting, according to the briefings.
They lost him in the crowd before he was spotted again by the counter sniper.
The new information has raised more questions about why Trump’s would-be assassin was not stopped sooner and why the former president was allowed to appear on the rally stage.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old suspected gunman, was reportedly spotted early by local police, who flagged him as a skinny young man who was behaving in a suspicious manner.
They notified other police agencies, including the Secret Service, via radio. At the time, Crooks did not appear to have a weapon. They then lost track of him.
“He was identified as a character of suspicion because [he had] a rangefinder as well as a backpack. And this was over an hour before the shooting actually occurred,” Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, who was present at the briefings, told Fox News.
“So, you would think over the course of that hour, you shouldn’t lose sight of the individual.”
Later, around 17:45 local time, Crooks was spotted again, this time by a counter sniper officer around the Agr International building – the one the gunman later scaled up to aim at Trump.
The officer reportedly took a picture of the gunman looking through the rangefinder, according to CBS News, the BBC’s news partner, and immediately radioed to a command post to report the sighting.
By 17:52 – 19 minutes before the shooting – the Secret Service was made aware that Crooks was spotted with a rangefinder, and disseminated that information to other officers on site, CBS reported.
A rangefinder is an instrument that can be used to help measure the distance to a target.
It was also revealed during the briefings that the gunman had visited the site of the attack, the Butler County fairgrounds, at least once in the days before the assassination attempt and had previously searched on his phone for symptoms of a depressive disorder, an official familiar with the briefing told CBS.
The attacker had also used his phone to search for images of both Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. FBI Director Wray told lawmakers on the call that more than 200 interviews had already been conducted and 14,000 images reviewed.