State Police Commissioner Drops Bombshell Information About Donald Trump Rally Shooting

Just days after the attempt on Donald Trump’s life at a Pennsylvania rally, investigators are diving deep into the 20-year-old gunman's past. Law enforcement has continued to conduct countless interviews with bystanders and has dissected every piece of video footage from the July 13 rally.

On Tuesday, during a House Homeland Security hearing, Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Christopher Paris gave his testimony, revealing more details regarding the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

According to his testimony, Paris spoke to lawmakers on the communications between the Secret Service and local law enforcement, who were the first to notice Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin.

He also laid out a more detailed timeline, from the moment officers first identified Crooks in the crowd to the terrifying moment the 20-year-old fired at Trump.

Paris testified that two local law enforcement officers exited a building with vantage points over the roof where Crooks had positioned himself before taking aim and firing shots at the former president. He also stated that two officers from the Butler County Emergency Services Unit, a tactical team with sniper capabilities, left their posts in the building to investigate a suspicious individual they had initially spotted and reported to other law enforcement.

That individual turned out to be Crooks.

On Monday, lawmakers viewed video footage from a congressional tour of the rally site, taken from the building where the ESU officers had left their post. The footage highlighted the roof where Crooks eventually climbed and fired shots at Trump, per CNN.

“So are you then saying, to your knowledge, those ESU officers left the location where they could look out the window to go in search of this person?” Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina asked, to which Paris responded, “That is my understanding."

"I don’t want to establish a timeline minute by minute because we don’t have that yet," he added.

Bishop then questioned whether the two officers who left their post could have seen Crooks climbing onto the roof had they stayed in their original positions. However, Paris said he did not have an answer.

As The Blast previously reported, the Butler County Sheriff's office claimed that an officer came face-to-face with the suspect seconds before the 20-year-old opened fire at the Donald Trump rally.

However, Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Christopher Paris says it was more like "minutes."

“If the first shots rang out at 18:11 (6:11 pm), the hoisting up of the officer occurred probably no more – again I’m going to give you a time, but I want to just put it in the context of a sequence of events – I would say at most two and a half to three minutes before that first shot rang out,” Paris testified.

“It was minutes. It was a very short period of time,” he clarified.

“But not seconds?” Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat, asked. “I would say minutes,” Paris said, reiterating that he was answering to the best of his knowledge.

The Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner also outlined the communications among law enforcement regarding Crooks before Trump took the stage at the rally earlier this month, claiming there was a "text thread going” with members of the Butler County Emergency Services Unitthose who first spotted Crooks and flagged him as a suspicious individual.

“At some point when he utilized the range finder, the suspicion was heightened,” Paris said of Crooks before testifying that State Police received both a call and a text from the ESU regarding Crooks' activity, which they promptly passed on to the Secret Service.

At the rally, local, state, and federal law enforcement operated from a unified command post.

Paris said state police “verbally turned right around and gave it to the Secret Service."

Just days after the assassination attempt, former President Donald Trump publicly asked why he was still allowed to take the stage, even though bystanders had spotted the gunman and alerted the authorities.

"Nobody mentioned it, nobody said there was a problem, and I would've waited for 15; they could've said, let's wait for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 5 minutes, something nobody said anything, that was a mistake," he said in an interview with Fox. "How did somebody get on that roof and why wasn't he reported?" Trump then asked. "Because people saw that he was on the roof. You had Trumpers screaming."

"The woman in the red shirt, she was screaming 'There's a man on the roof' and then other people screaming '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've thought somebody would have done something about it," he added.

A motive for the shooting is still being investigated.