A Police Chief Breaks Down the Trump Assassination Attempt -
Updated: Sep 22
EconBuff Podcast #55 with Harry Hueston
Dr. Harry Hueston talks with me about what happened at the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt on then candidate for president Donald Trump on July 13, 2024. Dr. Hueston describes what the primary security lapses were that allowed the attempt on Trump’s life to occur. Dr. Hueston presents a detail description of how the gunman managed to bypass security measures and gain a vantage point to fire at Trump. We explore how the Secret Service and local law enforcement coordinated their response once the first shot was fired. Dr. Hueston discusses what we know about the firearm and ammunition used in the attack and compares this to weapons used in past assassination attempts. Dr. Hueston explains how the layout and scene of the event factored into the attempt and what security protocols exist for scanning and securing elevated positions at political events. We discuss the resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle following the incident, and Dr. Hueston lays out what leadership qualities he views as essential for overseeing the protection of high-profile individuals. Finally, we consider an analysis of the sequence of events during the attack and we conclude with Dr. Hueston’s view on how law enforcement agencies balance the need for public accessibility during political events with the imperative of ensuring the safety of the individuals involved.
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Show Notes:
"Assassination in the United States: An Operational Study of Recent Assassins, Attackers, and Near-Lethal Approachers" by Fein and Vossekuil.
Transcript:
LEE STITZEL: Hello and welcome to the EconBuff podcast. I'm your host, Lee Stitzel. With me today is Dr. Harry Hueston. Dr. Hueston is a retired professor of criminal justice at WTAMU. He's also a former police chief, after 30 years in law enforcement serving in various positions in Ohio, California, Arizona, and the U.S. Army Military Police. He's a certified peace officer in Ohio, Arizona, and the U.S. Army. He's also the author of three true-crime books, The Hut, The Hunt, and The Hope, all of which are available on Amazon.com. Harry, welcome.
HARRY HUESTON: Well, thanks for having me here, Lee, and I appreciate the opportunity to sit down and talk about this very interesting topic with you.
LEE STITZEL: So our topic today is what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, when there was an assassination attempt on then-candidate for president Donald Trump. But before we get to that, because I happen to know you have some experience with this stuff, which of course is why you're on the podcast, can you just tell us a little bit about your experience with assassinations, protective details, stuff like that?
HARRY HUESTON: Sure. I've been very fortunate in my career. The first major experience I had that would fit into this category actually was before you were born. It was in 1984, when I was the director of security for an Olympic weightlifting event at Loyola Marymount University. That event was planned for, worked at, and evolved security for over two and a half years before the first day of the event. That's what I feel is important: the planning.
The planning for this Olympic security event followed those events in Munich, and the amount of planning, training, and exercises was significant. There were 40 agencies involved in that one event. That provided me some insight into future examples of sitting presidents who actually came to the University of Arizona.
When you're talking about similar circumstances, when a sitting president comes to any event, there is a protocol. The protocol that was used then was that an advance team would come out six months ahead of the event. That was your start date, and then you worked almost hand in hand with every agency in the state that was going to be involved, even minutely, in the visit itself.
The critical part about all this was the integration of planning, the understanding of roles and responsibilities, and communications. What makes this difficult, and consistently makes it difficult, is when you're working with a federal agency and their communications are not meshing with state or local communications. So it's imperative that you have key personnel who are the decision-makers in the same room, with access to all three lines of communication.
At that time there was a model that was called ICS, Incident Command System. The fire department had used that type of planning since the 1950s. Police and law enforcement began to use that in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. That is a model now used by both police and fire in handling major incidents.
The closest I came to what we want to talk about today was when we had then-sitting Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Ms. Albright was going to be the featured commencement speaker at our May or June graduation. I'm not sure what year, late '90s. The real problem we had at that time was that the event itself was in a contained area called McKale Center. We could hold around 16,600 or so inside. The problem was, at that time, there was a large number of protesters. The estimated crowd size of these protesters ranged anywhere between 6,000 and 9,000 people. So you're looking at a threat level that is deemed very high, and then you have another additional threat outside.
That event really was a huge security nightmare, and we got through it because we had excellent cooperation with the people who were in charge. We had a whole nuance in that the Secretary of State brought her own security people, as well as the Secret Service. Then I had, I think, 10 other agencies involved, with the DPS, two county sheriff's offices, multiple city police departments, and my own police at the university.
That was a nightmare, but through great planning, communication, coordination, and the fact that we didn't have this territorial stuff, which I think is critically important, it worked. We had a lot of threats, and we were dealing with active intelligence. We knew there were at least three or four known, specific threats that we were looking for at this event, but we knew about them ahead of time. We had staffing. We were adequately equipped with deadly force if we needed to take those kinds of actions. We had a spirit of cooperation that you're not going to have anything happen to this person on our watch. That was an attitude that prevailed.
We got her in. We handled the demonstrators. We had people inside. We got them quickly out of the way. I thought it was a very successful event. She was in and out in about 90 minutes. That included giving her 30-minute speech, putting her into a limousine, and escorting her to the airport. Goodbye, thank you very much, appreciate this, and let's get on with normal life.
LEE STITZEL: There's a couple things that strike me there. One is, you got to do six months of preparation, but a president, or in this case a candidate for president, they're doing stops every day. They're going places every week. Is that happening in every single one of those?
HARRY HUESTON: I believe that, yes. Any time there is an individual who announces candidacy for president of the United States, they are going to be automatically assigned a detail, and the size of that detail is going to be predicated upon the event size and other circumstances that come up.
You're right, that stretches people and resources to the max. In this particular case, you're not looking at six months. You're looking at barely two weeks. That adds to the problem of security. That adds to the problem of site assessment. This site was outside, as opposed to contained inside.
You also have to deal with the fact that law enforcement today is not fully staffed like it was in the latter part of the 1990s. That is a fact of life. So right off the bat, you're dealing with a shortage of critical manpower because you do not have the numbers of people working in the field. That contributed drastically to the problems that we had here in Butler.
LEE STITZEL: So you said you've got 10 agencies that you're working with when you're coordinating for your commencement event. Is that because you need that kind of manpower, or is that because there are different strategic things that different agencies bring to a situation like that?
HARRY HUESTON: It's both. Within our police department, you can mandate that all off-duty officers who normally would have a day off come in to work just to staff posts or areas inside and outside where the venue is.
We knew McKale. Firsthand knowledge of the venue is a critical factor when you're dealing with any kind of incident that has a high threat level. You need the chief, the variety of chiefs, deputy directors, directors of the Department of Public Safety. Albright brought her own chief, and he had his officers out there. We all had various assigned duties and responsibilities. That was part of the Incident Command System that we could integrate, along with the lines of communication.
So manpower is critical. Then you hit another important thing. You have to bring in specifically trained people, in this particular case snipers. That is an incredible task, given the threat assessment or the title of the person involved. You don't have snipers that you run through a week-long course. Most of these snipers have years and years and years of training. To say that you have a large contingent of snipers is not true. You facilitate and bring in these specialists from a variety of agencies because you have strategic points that you've got to cover in your security evaluation of where this individual is going to be.
By the way, these are individuals who not only have to be specifically trained, they have to have a track record. You don't bring in a rookie sniper and say, "We're going to set you up." It doesn't work that way. You have trained personnel that have done this over years. The fact of the matter is, there are not a lot of them out there anymore because they have retired. We're trying to replace both law-enforcement personnel and specialty fields.
We haven't even talked about bomb threats. You need bomb squads. You need teams of bomb dogs. We had four different teams of bomb dogs going through not only the venue, but adjacent garages. We had to go through and do all that. Some of the venues are very large, where they have basements and cars driving in and out. That was the case here at McKale, where we could drive cars in and drive them out.
You've got to make sure that your venue is secure, and that is an ongoing process. I wish you could say it's going to end and start, but it really doesn't work that way. You've got to lock down and secure your facility to the best of your ability. When you're talking about a large facility, that's not a one-person operation. You've got to ensure that, even though you're interrupting people who are doing very particular jobs, you have somebody there at a designated point. Do they go in or not? They're signed in and signed out. Credentials are checked.
When you have a venue that's huge like McKale, or take one of these arenas like Dallas Stadium, you need literally dozens of security people or cops who are going to be able to secure the place and who are looking for and able to report suspicious activity. That is another thing that occurred at this particular site. It appears there was a failure to communicate in numerous instances here.
LEE STITZEL: One more thing I want to ask before you give us a brief rundown, overview, and then we get into this particular event. You mentioned you had three or four particular threats that you're looking for. Is it generally the case that when you're in this kind of situation you have specific people and threats and types, and therefore you might know something about them, what they look like, or what their tactics might be? Or can it be more of a general thing where it's like, we don't really know who might be a person of interest in this case?
HARRY HUESTON: That question is going to be predicated upon the history of individuals who have been known or have been involved in prior assassination attempts. Like I mentioned before, in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, in 1999 a group of researchers did a study called "Assassination in the United States: An Operational Study of Recent Assassins, Attackers, and Near-Lethal Approachers."
In my opinion, you've got to plan for everything and expect everything. That's what makes this kind of an incident so hard to prepare for. Your threats, depending upon the title or the office that the individual holds, can range from anywhere from 10 to 20 to thousands.
When Albright visited our venue, at that time we felt we had five viable possibilities. They involved assassination. They involved bombing. They involved a chemical substance, and some sort of disruption or diversion. That's another thing that you've got to always remember. You can set these things up. You can have a diversion, a fire alarm, somebody lights someplace on fire, something to draw the attention of those involved in the security away from the primary person they are protecting, and that's when you can get hit.
Those are the kinds of dynamics you're talking about. Welcome to planning for and dealing with that level of a specific target like a president, a vice president, a secretary, a judge, or whomever is visiting.
LEE STITZEL: Let's set the table here for the event that we're going to talk about. When I first approached you, I was like, man, there's been a couple. There was one successful high-profile assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, then two different attempts on candidate, now President, Donald Trump's life. For somebody that's my age, in my mid-30s, presidential assassinations, successful ones in particular, are a little bit in the distant past. So for that to be such a topic this year really piqued my interest, and that's why I wanted to bring this about.
It's a pretty pivotal moment in modern politics from the perspective of somebody that's my age. The attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13th of 2024, can you briefly describe that and set the stage for us?
HARRY HUESTON: Sure. On this particular date, there was a 20-year-old individual. His name was Thomas Crooks. Research on him, even today, the motive of his attack is still not clear. There's a bunch of speculation. The FBI and the Secret Service looked into all his electronic stuff. They really still haven't found the motive.
At 20 years old, he had gone to the venue. He lived about 30 miles away, so he lived relatively close. What attracted him to Donald Trump on that particular day is all speculation. He did research on Trump, Obama, and a few other people ahead of time. They scanned his computer and found all this stuff.
But on that particular day, in a nutshell, he climbed up onto a place called the American Glass Research building. This was an outside venue. He got on top of a roof and managed to get up that roof using an HVAC ladder that was available. Then he set up in a position on that roof that was approximately 400 feet from where Donald Trump would be speaking.
At, they estimated, 6:11, he opened up with an AR-15 that had a modified stock, shot eight bullets in the course of, I believe, as fast as you can pull a trigger on a semi-automatic rifle, and then was shot and killed by a sniper who was on a building that was in the line of sight across from where he was.
As a result of that, the president turned his head, or I believe he'd have been dead, but he got his right ear nicked. Unfortunately, one of the bystanders was killed at the scene, and two others were very seriously injured. That whole scenario, from the start of the shooting to finish, probably lasted 90 seconds before the president was down, covered, and the Secret Service took him out. But there's more to the story than just this incident.
LEE STITZEL: Okay, so you're teasing this. My automatic question is just, how does something like this happen? My instinct is actually to ask first: how do you allow somebody with a rifle within 130 yards of a candidate, on a roof that's visible from where he is?
As somebody who's a shooter myself, 130 yards with an AR-15, it's no chip shot, but it's makeable. I don't think this guy has to be one of your missing snipers. But probably somebody doesn't just, day one, get a rifle and make a shot like that. So what are the security lapses that allow somebody who seemingly has no training into a position like that on a day like this?
HARRY HUESTON: Okay. There are a number of issues that contributed to what happened at that time and date. Let's name a few. Number one: the venue. Open. Worst. Very difficult to secure.
LEE STITZEL: Is that because there are so many places you can come and go from?
HARRY HUESTON: Yes. You have an open venue. It was like a fair.
LEE STITZEL: Yeah.
HARRY HUESTON: So you have outside buildings. The candidate wants to be outside. They want to mix. They want to shake hands. They want to be integrated into the crowd. By the way, that is not just a philosophy or an attitude of this president. That is an attitude of most elected officials that I have been charged to either guard or provide some type of protection. They've got to get out and get into the crowd, which provides so many opportunities for these kinds of things to happen at close range, let alone a shot that's over 400 feet.
Through the grace of the good Lord above, he wasn't killed, but unfortunately there was a death and serious injury, and it occurred.
So let's start with the first thing. Where is the venue? What does it look like? How do you protect it? In this particular case, the venue is wide open. We're going to need to ensure we've got a way to secure the venue.
This is not from me, but the number of independent reviews that have been done just on this incident is incredible. One of the first things that comes in is your question: how does this happen? In this particular case, there are a number of things that were wrong. In my opinion, what made them wrong was the fact that you have candidates who are coming and going in relatively quick time periods. During a presidential candidacy, you see this all the time.
This means, first, you're limited with manpower. Then you're dealing with venues that are limited with manpower before any of this starts. So you're taking a limited resource and stretching it. That was one of the things that came up. We're told to do more with less. We've heard that before as a standard motto of today's world: do more with less, and do it more efficiently. That's one of the contributing factors here.
When you open up something that size, how are you going to secure it? The Secret Service doesn't have the manpower for that. That's going to fall on the local jurisdictions, which in this case were the Pennsylvania State Police, the Butler County Sheriff's Department, and then you have these little townships or boroughs. They're going to call in anybody and everybody just to have people to guard or secure the area.
The other thing in this particular case, because a lot of questions have come up since, is: how do you get a gun, let alone a rifle, into the place? Well, if you set the inner security at a certain distance, then what about those people who are outside?
The inner security for this was determined by the Secret Service, a specific perimeter where people who had signed up to go in would go in, and they were checked with the standard checking procedures in place. This building was outside that standard perimeter. By the way, that was a fact recognized by local law enforcement when they got there.
LEE STITZEL: So that brings up the next question. This guy, what did he do?
HARRY HUESTON: Well, this guy followed a pattern that has been documented and seen before. We're not reinventing a new wheel. Generally, this kind of individual, this is a lone wolf, a lone person who, for whatever reason, focuses on an individual and wants to kill them.
I want you to think about that. To kill a person, mentally, that's a huge step. This is a 20-year-old kid who's studying to be an engineer. People who were friends at his high school, graduating I think in '21, called him sort of a loner type, but he has no history of anything.
He's outside the perimeter, and here's where this communication issue comes in. There are actually pictures. One of the sniper teams, the Emergency Services Unit from Butler County, took a picture of this guy ahead of time. We're talking at least 30 to 40 minutes ahead of the shooting.
What has come out since that time is a lot more information. If you don't mind, I'll just sort of go over what is considered the timeline so that the audience understands this isn't a random thing.
When Crooks found out that Trump was coming, he goes ahead and signs up to go there. This occurred on July 13th. He goes to the site on July 7th, so that's a little less than a week. What do you think when a person goes to an area? Is there going to be anybody there? Chances are, come on, you can go to our own Tri-State Fair exposition and rodeo, and it's an empty parking lot and there are a lot of buildings. There may be staff people there, but I'm not even sure there was anybody here.
So he goes out. This is very interesting. This is pre-planning. He goes out and surveils the site. It's about a 30-minute drive, and then he comes back home.
Another interesting thing: the gun he used was legally bought by his father. No problems with it. We're not sure, but evidently he was given the gun or bought the gun from his dad. He did a lot of target practice. So to say this was the first time he went up and shot this weapon would be wrong. My guess is he was an individual who liked to go shoot. He was a loner. He didn't have many friends, if any, and so this is a great hobby where you could go out and shoot.
By the way, whenever you shoot any kind of weapon, you've got to get familiar with it enough so that, if you're shooting a handgun, for example, where is your sight picture going to be at 25 yards and at 50 yards? A rifle is the same thing. You've got a weapon there that can shoot a very long distance. So you put targets that are 50, 100 yards, maybe 150 yards away, depending upon the range, and you sight that gun in on that.
When you pull the trigger and retrieve that target, you get your pattern up there. You generally hope, when you become proficient, to have a nice tight pattern that's in what is called a kill zone, depending upon the type of target. You want to maximize. You want 10, because the 10 is the center of the target, and it goes 9, 8, 7. You understand?
LEE STITZEL: Okay. So in this case, if he's scouting out a week ahead, you're thinking perhaps he sighted the weapon to approximately the distance, because he wouldn't have known exactly where the stage would be, maybe?
HARRY HUESTON: Great question, and I believe you're absolutely right on that. He had to look at the environment, the venue. He did enough research to know that the Secret Service would bring snipers, so there would be snipers. He also knew, I believe, that the Emergency Services Unit from Butler County had snipers.
This is an outside event. You're going to need a number of snipers, and you're going to need them in positions where they can not only look over the venue area, but have coverage on the roofs of those buildings that are within range of a weapon like a rifle, an AR, that you can shoot in for 200, 250, 300 yards.
LEE STITZEL: So why isn't 200 yards or 300 yards inside the perimeter?
HARRY HUESTON: Because then that just makes the space you have to protect larger.
LEE STITZEL: Yeah. Okay. So then is it the snipers' role to be looking at the roofs that are outside the perimeter? It falls mostly on them, right?
HARRY HUESTON: That's everybody's role, not just one. But the snipers' positions are based upon accessibility to seeing other areas. When they do a walkthrough, you walk through with all sorts of people from the agencies involved because everybody's looking at a different security risk. You bring in a sniper, they look at things totally differently than a street cop would.
LEE STITZEL: Understandably so. Because in this situation, like you said, an up-close attack could have also been made with a handgun if somebody could get that into the right position. So I need people whose mindset is, I need to stop an attack from six feet away, and I need people whose mindset is, I need to stop an attack from 120 yards away.
HARRY HUESTON: Absolutely right. And then throw in a bomb or two and, like you said, chemical attacks. We all have to consider another thing, and he used this: drones.
LEE STITZEL: Oh, I didn't know this.
HARRY HUESTON: Yes. See, this is where the integration of information and any kind of countermeasures comes in. We have technology today that can be flown over things, and you can assess. You go up in a helicopter and look over an area, that's different than driving your car around. This drone provided that aerial view.
He had a drone on the day of the assassination attempt. He put up his own drone and flew it over the rally site for 11 minutes. The Secret Service has technology to have their own drones and to counter, basically alert that there's a drone in the area and take action. Well, on this particular day, about two and a half hours before the shooting, his drone is up. The Secret Service drone, they couldn't get it operational for some reason.
So you're adding another dimension. I didn't have drones when I was doing this. Drones and our technology are adding many more layers of concerns that we're now dealing with as facts of life.
LEE STITZEL: So is the shooter taking the drone and thinking, now I can assess: their sniper teams are here and here, this rooftop is open? Do you think that's a decision he made at that point, or do you think he had that rooftop in mind from a week before?
HARRY HUESTON: That's a great question, and I don't know if we're ever going to know the answer because he's dead. But you're absolutely right in saying it provides angles of attack, for lack of a better term.
As the day progresses, he is photographed ahead of time. What I mean by ahead of time, I believe, and I've got to look at my notes here, he was picked up and photographed at 5:30 by one of the SWAT officers as a suspicious person.
A couple other things here. His photo is then passed on. With our technology today, we can get it out all over the place, and that's exactly what happened. But they can't find him.
I think it's because we have two things going on. You're getting closer to the arrival of the president. That arrival sends electricity through the air, for lack of a better term. People are now really, okay, he's coming, he's going to be here. You've got all sorts of adrenaline highs and all this stuff. Then you throw in, okay, we've got this guy. We've got to find this guy. But you can't find him. That's going to drive cops. They're going to say, we've got to find this guy. They're hunting, and they can't find him.
LEE STITZEL: Is that because he was outside the perimeter?
HARRY HUESTON: Oh yeah, he's outside the perimeter. You're absolutely right.
LEE STITZEL: Are they looking outside the perimeter, or do we not know?
HARRY HUESTON: Yeah, they were, because that's where they got the picture. He was outside the perimeter by that AGR building.
Then he's seen again at 5:56. Remember, the shooting takes place about 6:10, 6:11. He's by this AGR building. They have a picture of this guy going up at 6:08, that he's on the AGR building.
They have two roofs on the building. They have a lower roof and an upper roof. The lower roof was hidden because they had snipers on that floor inside the building, and that's where they started looking at him.
One other thing I failed to mention. When he was photographed at about 5:30 or so, he was photographed using a rangefinder and looking at his phone.
LEE STITZEL: How many people walk around the site with a rangefinder? I'm just trying to play devil's advocate. That tells me something.
HARRY HUESTON: A separate device from his phone.
LEE STITZEL: A separate device, yeah. So like a rangefinder, like a golfer or a hunter.
HARRY HUESTON: A hunter, those kinds of things. You've got it.
LEE STITZEL: So immediate red flag, I would think. Four or five red flags.
HARRY HUESTON: You're absolutely right. And again, they can't find the guy. Then at 6:08 they see what appears to be him. They called him a subject. He's up on that lower roof. He got up, going up the HVAC ladder, and he's literally going on the roof.
LEE STITZEL: Okay, so let me ask this. I had heard that he had brought his own ladder. You're saying that's not necessarily true?
HARRY HUESTON: That's a question that is unanswered. He did buy a ladder, but there's no indication he used that ladder. Again, if you go out a week or so ahead of time to where this place is and do surveillance, you're going to get an idea of potential places that you could be to assassinate an individual.
Our mindset has to remember we're dealing with an individual who's been studying assassination. He is looking for tactical advantage. Another thing that's interesting about this: there's no plan to escape.
LEE STITZEL: When you say "plan," are you saying they found a plan? Or is the plan just what they sort of built up from the evidence of the different things that he did, visiting the site and buying different things? Did he have some kind of document?
HARRY HUESTON: What they did find, really, they looked at a variety of who he was talking to and what was on his computer. To say that they've got an exact plan, it didn't exist.
The other thing, and I could be all wet, but I believe he visited the site many times. If this is like a place where they had county fairs or anything like that, as a kid, sure, anything like that. So I believe he may have known the place.
LEE STITZEL: It's like you said before. That's why the local law enforcement has to be so involved, because local knowledge is so important.
HARRY HUESTON: That's the key.
LEE STITZEL: Whereas you or I, we couldn't go to Butler. We couldn't pull off an assassination, nor could we protect it, because we don't know anything about it.
HARRY HUESTON: Right. But again, I want to go back because there's one other thing that occurred here that I wasn't aware of. The local cops said, we've got to find this kid, and we're going to boost you up to this lower roof because that's where they thought he was.
Now this is very important. At 6:11, they get a cop on top of that lower roof. He's up there. He encounters the subject there, and the subject swings around with his AR-15 and points it at him.
The cop's reaction, he couldn't get his gun. I think what happened is he dropped to the ground. I don't know if that's a six-foot drop, an eight-foot drop. I understand that. The cop's reaction, you've got an AR looking at you, boom, you go down. Right after that is when the shots occurred, and then he was taken out.
LEE STITZEL: Who took him out?
HARRY HUESTON: The Secret Service snipers took him out.
LEE STITZEL: And that's the iconic picture that we see with the spotter and the sniper.
HARRY HUESTON: Yeah, that's that picture.
LEE STITZEL: Can I ask a little bit about the shooting itself?
HARRY HUESTON: Sure.
LEE STITZEL: I'm thinking, like you said, if you've got a target and you're trying to create a grouping, you're probably shooting a target like that in the body, not in the head. Do you think he was aiming for the head and missed by a little bit, or do you think he was aiming in the general direction and missed by a lot?
HARRY HUESTON: That is a great question. I don't think I can answer for one reason. For me to answer that accurately, I'd like to see a target that he had shot recently.
I have found, even shooting a handgun, that there are still basic things you've got to remember that I thought would be ingrained after being a police officer and carrying weapons for as long as I have. It goes back to reflex action. That's when your training kicks in.
So if you ask me that question, I would start by saying: what kind of scores did he post? Do they have any records? Let me see that.
The other thing is, with an AR, you've got a selector switch. He could have a magazine in it that has 15 to 30 rounds, a banana clip, all this stuff. That's a great question, but we've already seen the results. He would have killed the president. That would have been a death shot, and he had seven other opportunities.
LEE STITZEL: So let me ask you about that. In my naive head, and like I said, I've done a lot of shooting, so I'm an experienced shooter, but I'm sitting here thinking in that kind of setting, I'm not pulling the trigger as fast as I can pull it eight times in, whatever you said, six seconds or something like this. I'm trying to make the first one count.
Because I didn't know about this scenario where you said there was a police officer that had found him immediately before the shooting, that potentially explains that. If we had a professional sniper who was trying to make this shot, he's trying to make one bullet count.
HARRY HUESTON: Yes.
LEE STITZEL: And then follow up as necessary, probably. So in this case, perhaps the shooter got rushed because he was encountered.
HARRY HUESTON: I think you're right. I've been through similar experiences, and I can tell you what happened to me. You get a gun pointed at you, it's this big and it grows, and your reflex action is to take it down.
The distance from where that officer was to where that rifle was, I'm going to guess, was at least five or six feet because he had just gotten himself up on top. When he got up and Crooks turned and there was the AR-15, his immediate reaction was to go down. He went down off the roof and onto the ground.
Your point is a very good point. Here's a cop, and here's this kid who's trying to kill the president, and he's just been spotted. What is his reaction going to be? He's going to roll over and take him on. He's pulling the trigger as fast as you can pull that trigger. Those bullets are flying. Once that sound was made, they got him.
He got eight rounds off. My guess is, no, it wasn't nice and peaceful like you're at the range shooting a paper target that isn't moving and you've got all the time in the world. I believe he knew he was done. The cops had him. They knew he was up there. I believe he said, I'm taking this, and he went. Then he got shot and killed.
LEE STITZEL: I'd heard, I don't know if this is true, you know how media is these days, that one of the other sniper teams on the security side had already spotted him and requested permission to shoot him and didn't get a response in time. Is that true?
HARRY HUESTON: I've not heard that. The other thing is, this is where we get into issues with communications, areas of responsibility, and who's in charge of the event.
If the threat is a viable threat, in this particular case the sniper doesn't need any permission. There's no chain of command where you're waiting for permission to take them out. If he's already shooting, it's just that simple.
LEE STITZEL: So in that situation, let's say the coordination between the street officers who were checking the roof and the Secret Service sniper team is, "Hey, we're looking at this roof," and that's something the sniper team knows. Then they spot that individual, but he hasn't done anything yet. That's going to come down to whether or not they can make out a weapon, I would think.
If I get up on a roof for completely unrelated reasons to the president, I didn't know, I'm up here just checking the HVAC system, am I liable to get shot in that situation?
HARRY HUESTON: Again, we now know in retrospect he had a collapsible stock on that AR. We know that was inside his knapsack.
LEE STITZEL: The rifle was in a backpack?
HARRY HUESTON: Yeah, it was in a backpack.
LEE STITZEL: Okay. I was thinking you had to have a bigger backpack. Impressive.
HARRY HUESTON: They also found two remote detonators for two bombs that were inside his car. This was another aspect of this guy. He had ordered bomb-making material. He had constructed two bombs that were in his car. The detonator that he had was turned off. The bomb that he made at home was too primitive to go ahead, but it was in the developing stages.
So again: bombs, cars, diversion. You can speculate all you want, but what the evidence indicates is he built two bombs. They brought in the bomb squad once they found that detonator, found his car, and found the bombs inside the car. The bombs could have been operational except the detonator he had was turned off.
LEE STITZEL: Do we know if the Secret Service sniper team was aware of where they thought he was, or were they alerted by the shots?
HARRY HUESTON: That is a great question. I believe that the Secret Service sniper, that level of competency for a federal agency is extremely high. The equipment they have, you can only imagine, it's top of the line, the best of the best.
When these guys are up there, when I've talked to local SWAT teams, they traverse areas and they're looking at stuff with magnification where you're going to be able to tell whether you've got a gun or you don't.
I believe they knew. They had heard the chatter. They knew in what area this suspicious person was. It was confirmed by the sniper ESU Butler unit that they believed he was at the AGR building. Then they knew where that was, and once he opened up, they shot him.
LEE STITZEL: What was the reaction time between when the shooter took his shots and the Secret Service took its shots?
HARRY HUESTON: I believe within seconds.
LEE STITZEL: Okay. So either he's swiveling and shooting, which you're saying is possible because he's going to be that level of competent, or he's already looking that way and for some reason didn't shoot until after.
HARRY HUESTON: Again, I believe that the cop who spotted him threw his timing off. That would be a normal thing. He would know that he'd been spotted. He would know he had a fraction of time because he would know that they were there. All they had to do was go down a roof to get him, or up a roof, or through a window. So I mean, he said, "I'm going for it," and then opened up, and then he was dead.
The other thing is, we're not talking minutes here. We're talking seconds. I think that's hard for people who aren't familiar with the speed at which you can pull a trigger on a weapon, any kind of combat.
LEE STITZEL: Right.
HARRY HUESTON: You name it. And like I said, when you start dealing with the snipers who are with the FBI or at that level, even some of the snipers in these major departments, they are without a doubt professional.
LEE STITZEL: Do you think there were mistakes made at that juncture where one of the sniper teams had already seen him and didn't shoot for some reason? Or do you think they didn't have the information to even know where he was and they were just reacting to that situation?
HARRY HUESTON: Well, let me clarify. It was a sniper team on foot because they didn't have enough manpower. It was a part of the sniper team that called him in originally as a potential suspect. So to say there was a sniper team and they were up here, no. The sniper team was on the move. They weren't stationary because they didn't have enough manpower.
I believe that the cop they boosted up was part of the sniper team. When Crooks turned around and saw him, he was probably going to shoot him. The officer dropped, and I believe he dropped on the roof and then fell off the roof onto the ground. Then Crooks just rolled over and opened up.
LEE STITZEL: And where was the sniper team that took him out?
HARRY HUESTON: The sniper team from the Secret Service that took him out was in place on a building roof. That's the picture that you'll see.
LEE STITZEL: Okay, and that's the team that took him out.
HARRY HUESTON: Yeah. That's the team that took him out.
LEE STITZEL: You've talked about the weapon a little bit, so I don't necessarily want to belabor that.
HARRY HUESTON: Sure.
LEE STITZEL: But that's not a rare weapon. If I'm thinking about the kind of weapons that would be used in an attack, that's top of the list, and the details of it might be different, like you said. So it baffles me that a roof 130 yards away is not priority number one. I guess it's easy to look back, hindsight is 20/20.
HARRY HUESTON: Yeah. Again, you have to look at the rules and who's in charge. This is where you get back to what I call the Incident Command System, which is designed to have accountability and establish who is in charge. That is the most critical thing in instances like this.
There are a number of issues that have come out as a result of this. One of the biggest issues was that when you have incidents like this, you have what they call an Incident Command Center. By the way, there are a lot of initials. Incident Command System is ICS, Incident Command Center is ICC. The Secret Service and the FBI, titles and acronyms and initials, welcome to the world today.
One of the bigger problems was that you should have had a unified command center. There wasn't a unified command center here. You had the local police and the state police here, and you had the Secret Service over here.
You have communications at the federal level. You have communications at the state level. You have communications locally. If you're in two separate buildings, how do you join those communications to act?
The individuals who were in charge were senior, but the agents themselves appear to have been recently trained. These were not seasoned Secret Service people.
LEE STITZEL: Which Secret Service people were rookies?
HARRY HUESTON: The Secret Service people who were guarding the president. It appears that they had been recently trained.
LEE STITZEL: So you said candidates get Secret Service assigned to them all the time.
HARRY HUESTON: That's true.
LEE STITZEL: But past presidents?
HARRY HUESTON: Yes.
LEE STITZEL: Of which Trump was already one. This is confusing to me, that you're describing that we'd have rookie Secret Service people assigned to a past president who's a candidate. If you've got somebody who's the sixth-most-popular candidate on one side or the other and they get rookie detail, that doesn't necessarily surprise me.
HARRY HUESTON: Again, let's go back to what we reflected earlier. You have a presidential candidate jumping point to point to point to point. You do not have infinite manpower resources. So you make do with what you have, but you have to do it efficiently. Do more with less and make it more efficient. That's exactly what I think was going on here.
You've got to pick where the candidate is going. Then what resources do you have at that location that you can draw from? The agent who was in charge of this was drawing from Pittsburgh, a major place that had that, but again we're talking with limited manpower.
It was the same problem with the local police. They had snipers going off duty and on duty, and they could have used more manpower. We haven't even talked about who's running the security as they were checking there, and what about people outside the area? Why didn't we have people? Heck, I'd have had three or four drones up for extra eyes.
Again, we're looking at major issues that have resulted in a director "resigning."
LEE STITZEL: Yeah, so that's Kimberly Cheatle.
HARRY HUESTON: Yeah.
LEE STITZEL: What's your take on the reaction of the part of the Secret Service team that was on stage immediately adjacent to Trump? Because there are some pictures of the immediate aftermath that don't look so good, where a couple of Secret Service agents are bodily shielding President Trump and a couple of Secret Service agents seem to be not bodily shielding President Trump. Is that as bad as it looks, or is that just a function of when the picture was taken?
HARRY HUESTON: I believe it depends upon when that picture was taken. I'm going to be right up front with you: they did what they needed to do. Secret Service is trained to protect the individual. That means you sacrifice your life if necessary to save the president. So they make a human shield.
But then I'm going to insert something that I've seen before. We're dealing with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not going to cower down. We've seen indications with his prior term in office. His actions are not one of being cowardly. To me, when he pumped his fist up and he was out there, that's Donald Trump.
LEE STITZEL: Yeah. I mean, to say anything else, that's not Donald Trump.
HARRY HUESTON: Yeah. What you saw occurred. Those agents could try, but in my mind, he's going to get that fist up there. He's going to pump it up that he's okay. And they got him the heck out of there, and that's what they're trained to do.
Again, dealing with presidents, they want to go out into the crowd. That is a fact of life, and no matter how dangerous or what your threat assessment is or whatever the case may be, they're going to go out.
LEE STITZEL: Let me ask you this. I don't mean to put you on the spot too much. I'm just thinking as it goes here. Obviously, the most famous presidential assassination is a rifle, but then it seems like Lincoln, the Reagan attempt, Robert Kennedy Sr., these are all handgun attempts, right?
So if I'm the person coordinating protection in that kind of setting, after the fact somebody's sitting here going, why is there a roof 130 yards away? Even a kind of average-level shooter can probably make that shot on a man-sized target. It seems so obvious.
But maybe somebody who's putting together that protection is thinking that, historically, most of our assassinations in the U.S. of high-level political figures, a lot of those are handguns. It's going to be way harder to get a rifle into an event than a handgun. How much of a role do you think that played in this particular situation?
HARRY HUESTON: Well, if you do a little more research, the AR-15 has been used in most of the mass shootings in the United States since 2000.
LEE STITZEL: I mean, mass shootings, that's a lot of different scenarios. I'm talking specifically where we're trying to assassinate one particular person, a targeted thing.
HARRY HUESTON: I would say that the availability of these types of weapons has increased. There could be a variety of reasons for that. I look at Vietnam-era weapons and then you have modifications. But the accessibility of handguns and the accessibility of rifles, we have all these laws in place, but there are so many ways to circumvent them.
In this particular case, it was not circumvented. He has no record. He's a loner. His mom and dad cooperated fully. My guess is they are suffering through this like a family who lost somebody unexpectedly. A 20-year-old has a lot of life ahead. They shouldn't be doing stuff like this.
LEE STITZEL: So in this case, you're saying there are a lot of different failures. Some of which we would chalk up to trying to cover too much area in an open space with not enough manpower. Some of it seems to be strategic and technical types of issues.
But if I were playing the opposite of devil's advocate, if I were trying to defend this case and said, well, it seems like they would focus on handguns, you're saying no, that's not a viable defense of the people that are organizing this protection.
HARRY HUESTON: Well, if you were playing devil's advocate, you saw the results. Again, I am not an expert, but when you read the experts who are involved with the review of this and you see consistent errors in command responsibility and accountability, and you see communication gaps, these things are critical.
When it goes down, you've all got to be on the same page. You can't be in separate areas. You've got to have a unified command center with equipment where you've got a person who's seeing something and going to act, getting a message to the person in charge to make that decision, sometimes in nanoseconds.
I really understand the manpower stuff, which I feel was a critical error, as was communications. But there was, to me, a lack of what they call unified command. That's where that Incident Command System was never in place that I found at this incident.
When you have the locals who know the things and are working, the sheriffs, the townships, in this particular place the state police, these guys work together all the time. This is not some new deal. But when you bring in a federal agency, another thing was the federal agency on the day of this rally didn't go to a briefing.
LEE STITZEL: Oh, okay.
HARRY HUESTON: That was another thing that was brought up. They did not attend that briefing. There was nobody from the federal agency there.
LEE STITZEL: So you have a breakdown of communication in several areas that, again, to me appears to be a much bigger issue.
I want to turn to the fallout of all this in a minute, but you kind of teased when you were setting this up that there were some other things that are not widely known. Did you get all those things worked into our conversation? Did you have some other twists for us?
HARRY HUESTON: No. I literally, in my opinion, spent a week reading what was written on this. I even went back to see Gerald Ford, two assassination attempts, handguns. I tried to find after-action reports on that.
I found two things. One was that Ford wanted to change things, which a president has the authority to do, whatever he wants. The modification with Ford, they gave him a London Fog trench coat that was bulletproof, and he didn't like that, so he wore a bulletproof vest that matched his suit.
LEE STITZEL: Do you think that explains why the shooter might not have wanted to risk a body shot, because he didn't know if Trump was wearing some kind of armor?
HARRY HUESTON: Again, do we know if Trump was wearing armor? I don't know the answer to that. But again, AR-15, head shot, 400 feet. Not knowing this guy, but knowing this guy had practiced, you saw he almost got him.
LEE STITZEL: Yeah. He did kill people directly behind him that were at a level. He hit Trump.
HARRY HUESTON: Oh yeah, he hit him. He didn't kill him, but he hit him.
LEE STITZEL: So those are relevant, maybe. Sorry. Continue with your stuff about Ford. I didn't mean to interrupt.
HARRY HUESTON: The only other thing I can add to this is this has become a benchmark for a lot of things. What I mean by that is the Secret Service has changed. They're mandating changes now, at the cost of a human life, or almost four human lives. But actually you've got to count the shooter, so now we're up to five.
This is driving change. Unfortunately, that's a direct reflection that change, many times if not all the time in our society, is after a crisis. That's what you have going here.
I also believe that the leadership of the Secret Service is under very close scrutiny. The idea of complacency, routine, that's something you battle every day in law enforcement. The longer you're in, that battle is harder and harder because, well, here comes another traffic stop, or here's another domestic, or here's this, or here's that. So now you're struggling between experience versus complacency.
LEE STITZEL: Yeah, yeah.
HARRY HUESTON: Then there's communication. We had radios. I had three radios at an event. I had the federal agency radio. I had the state agency, and I had all the locals. But I had a team of officers, many of which were commanders, who were involved in that Incident Command Center with specific responsibilities.
When you're dealing at this level, it's the Secret Service that's in charge of the venue because of who's involved.
LEE STITZEL: So let's talk about the fallout. Who ended up sort of paying the price? We've talked a little bit about the director of the Secret Service here. Who else paid the price, if you will, and why?
HARRY HUESTON: I don't know if we're ever going to get a good picture on that because once you get inside an agency, that's a personnel action. "I have no comment." Have you ever heard that before?
You realize, I expect that anybody in a command position following this, their careers are terminated and they're done. That's what I expect because of the magnitude.
LEE STITZEL: So not just the director? Who else?
HARRY HUESTON: I think the director who was in charge of the planning of that, who was actually on site, and the commander of that. I mean all the checkpoints down the line. I think it's a domino effect.
In fact, I'm about willing to bet you a million dollars that's exactly what happened, but you're not going to find that because of the agency involved, and this is a personnel matter. When you have those kinds of incidents, from some of my experiences in law enforcement, it starts with the chief.
LEE STITZEL: Do you think that's just on the Secret Service side, or do you think the local and state side too?
HARRY HUESTON: I really believe that the state and local police did all they could do in this incident. I truly believe that. I see no indication, after the testimony and the experts who reviewed it, that the local cops didn't do what they were supposed to do. The failure lies in the Secret Service.
LEE STITZEL: Some of that seems to be at a commander level, and some of that seems to be at a level of having inexperienced people, in part because they're spread too thin.
HARRY HUESTON: Right.
LEE STITZEL: That's really fascinating. Are there then changes that you would see for law-enforcement agencies to prevent similar types of events in the future? Procedural things, maybe?
HARRY HUESTON: The biggest change that I would see is the need to come together and work the problem as a joint operation with a specific model, which is this Incident Command Center model. Areas of responsibility, who is in charge, delineated and known.
Other things: what are the known threats? So you have intelligence. You have technology threats now that you have to be careful of. You have incredible staffing things that you have to now take a look at.
The biggest thing is reliance upon people that you've never worked with, but your lives depend upon. That is a fact of life. You're relying, you know, it's like a chain-link fence. It's only as good as the weakest link. Same principle here.
The other thing is your leadership has to create an environment: hey, let's work together on this. You saw a working together in our country after the 9/11 events. I have had, in my experience, issues with those federal levels in a number of areas. Here, this one incident is a great example of, we're in two camps here. There's none of this.
This is yet a reminder that when it comes to the security of an individual, this is not a federal responsibility when it comes into your venue. It's a joint responsibility where information flows freely and nobody is taking credit for this or that. We have to jointly come together and solve the problem.
You saw that in the '84 Olympic Games. The one incident that occurred there was an LAPD cop who put a simulated pipe bomb on a bus that was transporting one of these high-level teams. But it can work, by the way. It does work.
I've been blessed to have that experience. I believe police chiefs across the United States today would say, yes, when we had this, we all worked together. You just don't know about it. You only hear about the bad stuff. But I can honestly say, I believe that at that level, when you come together and work together to solve a problem and you're over it, let's give everybody the pat on the back. Let's not say, "Oh, I got this, and I got this." You don't need that fragmentation. This is a joint project. You all win or you all lose.
In this particular place, the Secret Service lost big time.
LEE STITZEL: So if you're looking at it, the different things that you mentioned, it seems like the coordinated command center was probably the biggest mistake. Because then this information, the version of this that you've told after having researched it, compared to my fragmented media intake, it's kind of different.
It seems like there are multiple junctures where they had a picture of him. If they'd had a drone up, maybe they could have found him. If they'd had a larger perimeter, maybe he doesn't have access to that roof. If the sniper teams are coordinated differently, maybe they get to him before the officer gets on the roof. Those are just the ones that come back to my mind right off the top, let alone probably several other things that you've mentioned along the way.
It's kind of astounding that there could be that many places where this could have been prevented. It makes the event seem almost even worse in my mind than it seemed before we'd had this conversation.
HARRY HUESTON: Yeah. Wow. Again, what I knew about this event and then after doing this research, we're looking at an event that has been scrutinized multiple times by multiple agencies and multiple federal inquiries. So you learn.
To me, when I use that term, this is a benchmarking event for the Secret Service. I don't think we're done with the changes there yet.
LEE STITZEL: We're over an hour now, so I'd like to bring it in for a landing. To me, the most interesting question remaining is, we talked about that outdoor venue and the desire for public officials to be in close contact with people. In the wake of this event, how would you like to see law-enforcement agencies balance that need for public accessibility during political events with the imperative of safety, given that, maybe it's just recency bias, we've seen three assassination attempts and one of them was successful just at the end of 2024?
HARRY HUESTON: One of the things that literally drives any kind of protective agency nuts is the need to get out into the crowd. That is going to remain a fact of life in an American democracy. That hasn't changed in many years, and I do not anticipate that it will change.
So you have to understand that is the mindset. Your job is to protect that mindset and that individual from a variety of attacks. The close-quarter attack, like you saw with Ford, always present. The idea of a sniper, always present. We're going to look at drones as this new technology evolves. That's now an issue.
Are there other issues? There's bombs. I'm doing research now looking at how Russia has introduced the use of poisons, which now has become yet another threat.
The other thing is, many of these individuals are lone wolves. They are not coordinating groups, even though there are indications of groups out there. There seems to be one thing that was missing with Crooks that, in the research I mentioned before that was done on prior assassinations, and it's similar to research that I've done on school shootings, and that is the person involved communicates the threat well in advance to somebody.
There's no indication here that Crooks did that. Yet in other cases, like the school shootings, somebody knew about it ahead of time and they could have told somebody, and it could have been prevented.
I feel that's a critical point that is going to exist still today. It's imperative that if you have heard somebody say that, that gets reported as quickly as possible so law enforcement can act upon that. The same thing is true with assassination. Somebody's going to assassinate somebody, they can't keep their mouth shut. They've got to tell somebody. The key to this is that person getting that information to law enforcement to prevent the attack.
We don't hear about the number of attacks and assassinations that were prevented. We only see the results of those that were successful.
LEE STITZEL: My guest today has been Dr. Harry Hueston. Harry, thanks for joining us on the EconBuff.
HARRY HUESTON: Thank you for this opportunity. I look forward to doing more.
LEE STITZEL: Thank you for listening to this episode of the EconBuff. You can find all previous episodes on YouTube at EconBuff Podcast. You can check out our website at econbuffpodcast.wixsite.com. That's wixsite.com. You can contact us at econbuffpodcast@yahoo.com.
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