Sounds right to me.
This would make the Beaver County time line incorrect as GN reportedly saw him at 6:02 or 6:05. It would also conflict with the testimony of FBI Wray
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My hunch is that it was just bad testimony by a person who isn’t very smart. I even think it’s kind of understandable, because the first question from LaTurner mixed true stuff with probably false stuff, i.e., let’s say somebody did see Crooks around 5:45pm and did photograph him, but he wasn’t on the roof. To answer the question well, the person responding would have to say which parts are true and which parts aren’t.
Do we know what FBI report Cheatle is referring to?
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I would like to bring up something that to my knowledge wasn’t looked at so far.
In another thread I posted about the shooters glasses on the roof. The glasses lie on the left side of the shooter when they were first spotted from a bodycam.
As I wrote in an earlier post, Higgins isn’t 100% certain that a Hercules sniper 1 took the kill shot. But assuming he was, does it make sense the glasses are on the left side of the dead shooter?
There is a video by Jon Malis that shows the shooter just before the 10th shot rang out. He seems to be aiming at the stage in this moment. If he got shot by a Hercules 1 sniper in this position, in this case I would expect the glasses to be lying on his right side.
Graphic by Mike Bell (enhanced with red line)
After he’s shot dead, his head is facing direction west towards the ones watching, filming and screaming.
I assume here, none of the very first officers reaching the roof displaced the glasses before the bodycam officer, a few seconds later, caught them with his camera.
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Well the interesting thing about that is that Cheatle was actually confirming what several lawmakers had already been briefed on, according to an ABC News report on July 17th, which was 5 days before Cheatle testified on Capitol Hill:
"Law enforcement officials investigating the assassination attempt on Donald Trump told lawmakers Wednesday that 20 minutes passed between the time U.S. Secret Service snipers first spotted the gunman on a rooftop and the time shots were fired at the former president, according to several law enforcement officials and lawmakers briefed on the matter.
Officials said the snipers spotted the suspect, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, on the roof of a building outside the security zone at the rally Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, at 5:52 p.m. ET. The shooting happened at 6:12 p.m. ET, 20 minutes later, the sources said."
There is some discrepancy between what ABC reported on July 17th, and what Cheatle testified to on July 22nd, but both versions contain the astounding claim that Crooks was seen on the roof long before the time he was spotted by police a second time at 6:08.
The ABC report says it was 20 minutes before Trump was shot, and it was a Secret Service sniper who saw him.
Cheatle’s evidence, prompted by the questioning from the congressman, is that it was 18 minutes before the shooting started, and it was a Beaver County sniper who saw him, not Secret Service.
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Also note the language in the ABC News report, which doesn’t definitively state that Crooks was seen on THE rooftop that he fired from, but rather, “A” building outside the security zone."
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Wow. I bet it will turn out to be astoundingly bad reporting by the propaganda press, but I’ll go read about it. I wonder if there’s any way we can make it fit with what we think we know.
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I’m thinking it’s true, mainly because of the magnitude of the revelation.
This is something that would have elicited multiple “Are you sure about that?” questions from Cheatle, and others, to the FBI, because the implications arising from Crooks being seen that far in advance of the shooting, on a roof, are huge.
It just belies belief, in my view, that Cheatle wouldn’t have thoroughly verified that information from the FBI before she testified.
After all, we’re talking about something that she would desperately want to not be true in the first place.
The fact that it hasn’t been walked back yet by the FBI is also telling.
Makes me think they’re still trying to figure out how to do it, or if they have come up with a lie, they’re not sure it’s ready for prime time yet.
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The position of the glasses is a very good observation, but your terminology of right and left from the sniper’s perspective is confusing. The glasses are lying to the shooter’s left (east) near his head and they look fairly intact. If the shooter was shot from the south, either by the Hercules team and/or by the guy on the ground, the glasses should be on the right and probably further down the roof (further north). And I would expect that they would be badly shattered by a high powered round to the face.
Their presence to the shooter’s left suggests to me that they were displaced by a shot from the right, i.e., from the west, with an entry wound in the back right of the head. And the fact that both the head and the glasses are still fairly intact suggests to me that the shooter was not killed by a high-powered round.
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Let’s suppose it’s true. When they say “Secret Service” spotted him on the roof, they probably mean Hercules 2. Maybe that’s why they were looking through their actual scopes instead of just their binoculars. Maybe SS command heard H2’s report, and, wanting the death trap to proceed, just didn’t give any specific commands, or indicated locals would go handle it. But H2 may have continued to get worried, and thought the bad guy was using the tree to hide, and alerted H1.
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The independent investigations by Peak Prosperity and others have paved the way for DJT and RFK to seal the deal.
Yes, history repeats, but not as a circle. it is a Spiral. Onward and upward.
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Well, I’m thinking that if he was seen twice on the rooftop, he wasn’t up there all that long the first time.
He could have been down long before 6:02 after his first foray up there, which may have been a trial run to make sure he had good line of sight.
Trump hadn’t taken the stage yet, so if he was up there on an earlier occasion, he likely didn’t want to be up there waiting for Trump to come on stage.
He would’ve had no way of knowing how long it would take for Trump to appear, and he would’ve been aware that the longer he was up there, the more likely it would be that he would be spotted.
His worst case scenario would be getting spotted and confronted on the rooftop by police before Trump even made it to the stage.
Very plausible…
We’re restricted by the fact that we don’t know if the claim is true in the first place, and second, we don’t know which version is true, if in fact Crooks was up there 18 - 20 minutes before the shooting.
Was it Secret Service snipers who saw him, or the Beaver County guy?
My best guess is, if it is true, it was probably the Beaver County guy who saw him, because he was best positioned to see someone on the roof.
The other caveat is what I mentioned about the ABC News report.
It’s vague as to whether he was spotted earlier on the same roof he fired from, or from a different roof.
Worth remembering that even with his drone scouting a couple hours before the event really got going, that might not have been sufficient video intelligence for him to know in advance, without actually getting on the roof, whether he would be concealed from the north-facing Secret Service snipers.
So maybe he did go up earlier, for just that purpose, to make sure the tree foliage was dense enough to keep him out of sight of those two snipers.
He may well have needed to prove to himself that a) he’s physically able to scramble onto the roof and b) by doing it while unarmed, he demonstrates to himself that the police aren’t onto to him, which could provide the motivational boost that his plan might work.
I believe the sight line’s of the northern sniper team would have been able to see him, at his likely point of roof access, so it might make sense that they saw him testing the waters, 20 minutes out, before weapon retrieval.
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That’s true, it might give a twist in your brain but I just wanted to challenge the readers spatial imagination 
Maybe I’ll edit it, looking at the situation from the AGR6 shooters position.
Thanks for your take on the topic. Indeed it’s kind of curious the glasses look still very intact, it seems to be in one piece at least.
My interpretation on the close up of the dead shooter, the bullet entered just below his left eyebrow and exited below his right ear. Due to the bulge on the exit wound, I can’t see a possibility the bullet went the other way round.
The small picture I had in the post before also shows the shooter just a very short moment before he got shot by #10. He was watching towards the stage at this moment.
I know the sound analysis does speak against it, but what you think about a shot taken from the Grandstand location (10S1, Washington County SWAT, as seen in the Butler ESU DJT Detail)?
Another option could be, that he already lost his glasses when his rifle was hit (as in the Higgins report), or he at least got heavily distracted, by the 9th shot.
I’m not an expert on that but I also would assume the exit wound and his overall appearance would look more miserable when shot with a high-powered round.
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You are perhaps understandably reluctant to go there too quickly, but I think we can rule out a pandemic of incompetence that day. So if we do that, then we have to start looking at the events and the evidence in terms of an intentional plot, including its coverup, i.e., the deflection of culpability to one or more persons not in, or not fully in, on the plot.
Two things stand out for me in the behavior of the Beaver County sniper, Greg Nicol. First, he is the one generating most if not all of the pre-shooting evidence implicating Crooks, and second, even though he would have been one of the most likely people to spot Crooks on the roof, his own whereabouts during the crucial minutes around shooting are unknown.
Now consider the fact that Crooks was never photographed with the backpack. It was only Nicol’s last verbal report that associated him with the backpack and this report also possibly sent people looking in the wrong direction (toward Sheetz rather than the AGR building alcove).
You mentioned CERT today (in your Aug. 23rd video). What if Crooks was there as a CERT volunteer and actually knew Greg quite well (Greg might even have helped train him at the Clairton Sportsmens Club)? (On CERT, see Anna_esq’s excellent posts in the topic thread: Was this a LEO failure or something worse? #12, #16 & #19.) In other words, what if Greg was double-crossing Crooks and setting him up to be the patsy?
Further, you have been exploring the possibility of a second shooter, but you have been reluctant to embrace the possible presence of a Crooks lookalike, namely, Yearick. What if Yearick was also part of the CERT team and therefore dressed similarly to Crooks? What if it was not Crooks who retrieved the backpack, but rather Yearick, who then arrives on the scene for the first time and goes straight to the roof, while Crooks goes somewhere else, never to be seen again. In other words, this would be the perfect moment for a switcheroo to take place, replacing the inexperienced Crooks who had spent the afternoon wandering around publicly and establishing his presence at the scene (i.e., setting himself up to be the named patsy) with the older and more experienced Yearick to take the actual shots. Serious assassination plotters would not have wanted to depend on a 20-year old kid. This question might be resolved once and for all if we could see the security camera footage from a “local business” (=AGR) that supposedly shows someone climbing on a roof at 18:06. But I am expecting that it will have been tampered with by now just enough to obscure the features that would distinguish Crooks from Yearick.
Then, just after “Crooks” shoots and misses Trump, what if the kill shot comes from behind, from Greg Nicol’s pistol poking out for a moment of the window on the east side of Building 2? (See my comment at #30 above.) Where is this bullet now? Perhaps Greg’s wife Michelle knows, since she was first on the scene to attend to “Crooks.” Greg could have been the hero for taking this shot, but maybe someone decided that the Secret Service needed some of the glory. In any case, I suspect that Greg also double-crossed Yearick, who became another patsy and who in the official narrative has now been merged with the first patsy, Crooks.
Tell me why serious assassination plotters wouldn’t try to do something like this. At any rate, I think we need to stop pretending that this was all rampant incompetence and start thinking like serious plotters.
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To me the bulge around the neck wound could be due to swelling around the entry wound after some minutes, especially in the hot sun. Perhaps some more experienced medics could chime in on this possibility.
What I don’t know, however, is how this scenario is compatible with the acoustic signature. Could a shot from the west (i.e., from inside the east side of Building 2) be silenced enough that it would not be picked up by the mics on the ground?
True, an expert opinion would be welcomed.
I heard at some point, actually only short after the event, somebody interviewing an emergency medicine doctor who also deals with gunshot victims a lot. I think they discussed the close up picture in my last post from a medical perspective. She made some interesting statements. Unfortunately I don’t remember where it was, maybe some YT channel or on X.
For your 2nd Question we might need one of our weapon specialists @sgt-raven Also a question mark if that would not have been recognised by all the audience watching&filming towards the shooter. But maybe not if that shot was taken from one of the east facing windows in the 2-storey building.
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I thought all this was very interesting and at least theoretically plausible. I keep waffling between thinking the shooter is crooks, but then his face looks more like Yearick and I simply haven’t been able to make up my mind. I think there are many here in the group that are convinced it looks like crooks, so I guess that is an important and critical piece to your analysis .
As a starting point, you’re analysis strongly implies that this is a “made it happen on purpose“ event rather than a simple “let it happen on purpose.“
Just to play a little bit of “devils advocate“ though, when you watch the “movements” of crooks, and also what we were told about what he did (If those things can be believed ) it does seem like he is actually doing the things he would want to do to make sure he was able to traverse and “settle” safely on the roofs. Another words, it’s he that knows that he must do certain things to carry out the mission.
I am simply suggesting that his every movement was not choreographed by a “handler” which I guess is always possible that in fact, he did have a handler-But, playing devils advocate. I’m assuming that’s not the case.
So those things would include walking on the south side of the building apparently seeing where the Secret Service snipers were, so that he could know what would be a safe place on the roof.
Also, if indeed he did fly a drone, something we’ve only heard about, but haven’t validated, that would also suggest he was doing the reconnaissance necessary to keep safe on the roof.
Finally, it would be sort of unexplainable as to how they got crooks off of the AGR grounds or how he himself managed to escape the AGR grounds without being seen. In any event, if you’re hypothesis is correct there’s no doubt that will never see Mr. Crooks again.
Just my two cents, because I thought your theory was fascinating
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