Have you also been there on July 13th?
edit: sorry, question was meant for Rough_Country_Gypsy
Radio
No. I had secured two tickets and planned on attending, but it was blistering hot that day so I opted out.
Ed Lenz is quoted dropping some gems in this TribLive.com article, further discrediting SS.
(1) “According to Adams Township Sgt. Ed Lenz, who serves as commander of the Butler County ESU, four snipers met with the Secret Service’s countersniper team leader to confirm their locations — which were discussed that morning among ESU members — around 1:54 p.m.”
“Expectations of local law enforcement were communicated clearly leading up to the rally by the Secret Service’s countersniper and counterassault team leaders and at an informational meeting the week before the rally.”
→ So it was SS who defined and then confirmed local ESU locations. It was not that there was some miscommunication, and maybe ESUs were supposed to be on the roofs of AGR.
(2) “Lenz said there were two command posts: the Secret Service’s command post included state police. Butler County ESU’s command was stationed at the county post with Butler County Sheriff’s deputies.”
“Lenz said he had a portable radio for the state police, who would relay messages to the Secret Service.”
→ This discredits Ron Rowe’s claim that lack of unified command was the culprit for SS not to know what was going on in a timely manner. State PA embed got immediate radio messages and was inside SS command, able to relay fast. It’s possible that the PA state police embed, or SS command itself, was sabotaging the passing of information to SS snipers.
(3) “Time stamps from text messages released by Grassley show that at 5:38 p.m., a Beaver County sniper sent photos of Crooks to the Beaver, Butler and Washington snipers group chat. The photos were forwarded to state police, Lenz said. Shortly after, at 5:48 p.m., Lenz said a sniper team leader forwarded the photos to a Secret Service countersniper.”
→ So both PA State (the embed presumably) and SS sniper team leader got the picture.
(4) “Nobody sees him again till he’s already on the building,” Lenz said. “At 6:08 p.m., Butler Township spots him on the roof for the first time.”
“Looking at some videos, you can see the (Secret Service) countersnipers got the information,” he said. “They reposition. They change their focus toward that AGR building. Countersnipers can’t take action just for a suspicious person.”
→ Lenz’s testimony suggests that when SS countersnipers turned from facing southward to northward, just after 6:10:00, Crooks had become a threat rather than remained a mere suspect. This implies that SS failed to take out Crooks in time although he was a known threat to them. Did they not see him behind the sloped roof, or did they LIHOP?
(5) "At 6:11 p.m., Lenz said radio transmission indicated Crooks was armed and lying down on the roof.
“I had a bunch of different radios,” Lenz said.
“As soon as they confirm that he’s armed, (Crooks) changed from a suspicious person to an actual threat,” he said.
“I begin to deploy the quick response force,” he said. “They’re contacted on the radio, they answer. I start giving orders to deploy to the AGR roof.”"
→ So Lenz put out over several radios that boosted cop had seen Crooks with a rifle. He surely relayed this to the PA State police embed, who was in SS command. Southern SS snipers for a minute already were focused toward AGR, though they were not told by SS command that Crooks was on the roof of AGR 6 specifically.
All this paints Lenz as a fast communicator to SS, and SS as fully responsible for the failures to stick ESUs behind windows, cover AGR roofs, pass on local comms with full detail.
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No. Simply there were too many cell phones at the area.
By the way, how many cell phones are in a football stadium or similarly popular sport event?
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Well, this gem. Following the link to the related post here:
They literally could not talk to each other that day. It was COMPLETELY SILOED - not just partially siloed with the command post serving as a way to make it interoperable and share communications.
@ SenRonJohnson and his team of staffers were the first to bring up the siloing of communications in his initial report released publicly on 7/21.
It appears as if unified command centers at rallies and events --(made up of Secret Service supervisors and their local law enforcement counterparts) before Butler were limited to National Special Security Events ONLY.
Those events are major federal govt or public events considered to be nationally significant and designated by the president and/or the Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary – in this case Mayorkas. They, therefore, did not include rallies and campaign events for Trump.
With this Alejandro Mayorkas also sitting on the FirstNet Board.
edit: appears as if… As far as I remember, until recently the official line was “communication was not working”.
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Yeah i see your point. But how would you have gotten in and out? Time for preparation?
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FBI would have instant jurisdiction given the attempted assassination of a federal former President and person running for office. I don’t think that’s it. Besides it would invoke the ATF also but I don’t see how that might matter.
I’ve said before here, my theory is the van with IEDs proves or strongly suggests it was his escape distraction plan. It was parked a few miles north or north east and the bombs were unarmed. Someone else was to park it at the rally and arm it and Crooks would detonate it immediately after the shooting to draw attention away.
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He should have told PSP in SS command immediately that the shooter was on the roof.
Although I agree, secret snipers, turning from south to north should suggest and all we should have suggested that they knew there was a threat and not just a suspicion
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Probably with the help of law enforcement.
Could be, but I’ve lived in Butler, and 30 miles North now. Mad shit, is like the saying “beau coup shit” from back in the 70’s, accept everybody in Pittsburgh pronounced it boo coo when i was young. It was the bastardization of French from Vietnam that made it to blue collar Pittsburgh. “Mad shit” is so common in Butler that it use to get on my nerves hearing people say it all the time. “My bad” is another phrase that I quickly got sick of. Think George Orwell’s treatise on the corruption of language to get my annoyance.
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exactly.
and in many aspects it is much more practical to synchronize shifts: childcare, meal preparation, spending time together…
with synchronized shifts they spend more time together in the off-work days/hours…
Wow, so FirstNet manages a separate communications network exclusively for first responders (police, fire, medics, …). Are you suggesting that SS was using this network? Or supposed to have been using this network? And that Mayorkas maybe had a hand in handicapping it in that rally? Local LEO seemed to have no problem communicating among themselves via radio and phone texts.
Did Crooks really think he could get away with killing Trump, detonating a distraction van, and escaping? Too fantastic for someone so meticulous as Crooks.
FBI (Wray in fact, I think) said to Congress that the bomb was missing a key igniter and could not have exploded. If Crooks had developed the bombs himself, as an engineering student, would he not have learned of the need of an igniter? If he had any part in creating these bombs, it would seem he was given incomplete designs by someone of authority and believed the authority as to the soundness of the plans. This in turn suggests entrapment of Crooks by the state.
Is it not strange that over one month later we still have no information about the van’s license plate or registration?
The van raises lots of questions. Would an assassin drive a white van to the rally that he did not own or usually drive? Seems risky and attention-grabbing. Also, Crooks would have left his house around 1:30 pm after having gotten the AR-15 from his dad - surely not in a white van his dad had never seen before?
It’s possible the white van and bombs were unknown to Crooks, and placed there by the state simply to distract LEOs right after the shooting. No explosion would be necessary to have someone “find” a suspicious van that turned out to have apparent bombs, and in this way draw LEOs’ attention away from the shooting scene - convenient way to lighten up AGR 6 and facilitate the state to cover up the scene.
The van is confusing and maybe a rabbit hole.
The incomplete bombs are much more telling, imo, of possible state involvement than is the white van.
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Greg Nichols of TDOA has an updated video on YouTube.
Amazingly, his analysis hinges on no assumptions about bullet velocities, or even measurements of supersonic snicks:
“My analysis is based on hearing the rifle reports, not the cracks of the supersonic bullets. The reports travel at the speed of sound from the location of the rifle, so only the speed of sound is relevant in my current model. The bullet velocity is not relevant.”
He concludes that shots 1-8 all came from locations within one meter of one another, if using three stationary recordings he calls “Ross,” “Police cruiser” and “podium.”
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I would sure like to know where the car was parked, which I believe is the only vehicle he drove that day. One article I read or interview I heard was that dogs sniffed their way to the van from AGR, across a field Crooks could have taken to go put something in the van or take something out. The assumption being his handlers parked it there and wanted to connect him to it so gave him some reason to go to it. Anyways, there are two time periods I’m trying to account for what Crooks was doing. The van is about an 8-minute walk from AGR, likely less if you cut through the field, and so he easily could have went to the van during those periods.
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Oh, she also happens to be a deputy coroner for the county.
I’m sure everything is fine. No issues there…
My comment was only about both being on the ESU. Does the ESU have a written policy about relatives being on the team? Is there a County, State, or Federal policy on this subject?
Who cares?
It is statistically weird that the sniper who left his post and permitted an assassin to have free reign of the very roof he was supposed to be guarding…is also the husband to the medic who was on the scene with the dead assassin.
And she’s a deputy coroner too.
First event like this in 4 decades and it just happens to be a husband and wife deeply involved in the events? Those statistical improbabilities…
When you and your brother end up in this situation, be sure to let us know.
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