Former President Donald Trump told Fox News host Jesse Watters he was never warned by Secret Service that there was a suspicious man in the area they identified an hour before he took the stage.
“They were monitoring this guy for an hour beforehand. No one told you not to take the stage?” Watters said to Trump.
“No, nobody mentioned it. Nobody said there was a problem. I would have waited for 15. They could have said, Let’s wait for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes, something. Nobody said, I think that was a mistake,” Trump responded.
“How did somebody get on that roof? And why wasn’t he reported? Because people saw that he was on the roof. When you had Trumpers screaming a woman in the red shirt, she was screaming, There’s a man on the roof. And then other people said, There’s a man on the roof who’s got a gun. And that was quite a bit before I walked onto the stage. So you would have thought somebody would have done something about it.”
Earlier this week, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, demanding answers on matters relating to the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
The letter follows several whistleblowers coming forward and sharing security details from Trump’s security team in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“Whistleblowers who have direct knowledge of the event have approached my office. According to the allegations, the July 13 rally was considered to be a ‘loose’ security event,” Hawley wrote in the letter. “For example, detection canines were not used to monitor entry and detect threats in the usual manner. Individuals without proper designations were able to gain access to backstage areas. Department personnel did not appropriately police the security buffer around the podium and were also not stationed at regular intervals around the event’s security perimeter.”
According to the whistleblowers, the “majority of DHS officials were not in fact USSS agents but instead drawn from the department’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).”
“This is especially concerning given that HSI agents were unfamiliar with standard protocols typically used at these types of events, according to the allegations,” Hawley wrote.
