BUTLER, Pa. – While a gunman climbed onto the roof of a warehouse less than 500 feet from where the former President Donald Trump As he spoke Saturday, three law enforcement snipers were stationed inside the same complex of buildings, looking for anything amiss in the crowd.

The Secret Service director said local forces were in the same building, an account suggesting the gunman was essentially on top of them. A local law enforcement official told The New York Times on Tuesday that was not the case and that local officers were in an adjacent building.

The discrepancy in their accounts is just one unresolved element in the effort to determine how security was breached and allowed a 20-year-old man with a semiautomatic rifle to open fire in a rapid-fire barrage that left Trump wounded, a dead man and two other people. at the demonstration seriously injured.

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That this simple question – whether law enforcement used the same building as the gunman – is still not easily resolved three days after the shooting shows that divisions are emerging between law enforcement agencies after a possible assassin was close to overthrowing the Republican presidential candidate. two days before the party convention.

Secret Service Director Kimberly A. Cheatle went back and forth in an interview with ABC News on Tuesday morning, her first public appearance since the assassination attempt. He said local law enforcement officers were inside the building used by the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, on Saturday evening. If so, that meant the gunman could have scaled a building even when snipers were stationed inside.

“There were local police in that building; there were local police in the area who were responsible for the outside perimeter of the building,” Cheatle said.

Several local law enforcement agencies immediately released statements saying they were not in the same building as the gunman. That prompted the Secret Service to issue a statement on social media saying it valued local law enforcement.

While local law enforcement officers are used for extra security at an event like a campaign rally, it was the Secret Service's job to determine the security plan and keep the protégé, in this case, Trump , for sure.

“The safety and security of a protégé rests on the shoulders of the Secret Service, period,” said John Cohen, a former law enforcement official who has worked with the Secret Service for years at both the state and federal

“You have a former president who was almost assassinated,” Cohen said. “There is nothing more illustrative of the threat we face.”

Cheatle said in the ABC interview, “The buck stops with me. I'm the director of the Secret Service. It was unacceptable and it's something that should never happen again.”

Concerns about violence in the 2024 election have increased as the country has seen an increase in threats of political violence, and in some cases actual attacks, on government officials, lawmakers and poll workers.

On Tuesday, it was reported that US intelligence agencies were tracking what they believed to be a possible Iranian assassination plot against Trump ahead of Saturday's events, which are believed to be unrelated to Crooks. The intelligence had prompted the Secret Service to beef up the former president's security ahead of Saturday's outdoor rally, but not enough to prevent a gunman from shooting him.

At the heart of the dispute between the Secret Service and local agencies is a warehouse adjacent to the site of the rally, the Butler Farm Show grounds, and who was responsible for protecting them.

The group of buildings, owned by manufacturer AGR International, was just north of the stage. The closest to the stage was a one-story building with a few windows and a sloping roof. Immediately behind, and slightly offset, was a two-story building with more windows. More warehouses lined up behind them.

The Secret Service had determined that the entire warehouse complex should be outside its most secure perimeter, and therefore had to delegate to local law enforcement to sweep and protect.

The gunman used the roof of the one-story building closest to the stage from where he fired his AR-15-type weapon.

But the agencies offer differing accounts of which building local law enforcement used as a staging area and perch for the three local officers called counter snipers. Those officers were monitoring the crowd as it gathered in the safe zone, a local law enforcement official, who was not authorized to make public statements, said in an interview with the Times.

It was the two-story building, the one behind the warehouse used by the gunman, where those snipers were positioned through the windows, the official said.

After the gunman reached the roof of the one-story warehouse, another officer carried a local officer up the wall of the building and over the parapet, only to set his eyes on the gunman, Butler County Sheriff Michael T. Slupe and a federal law enforcement official said.

The gunman pointed his weapon at the officer, who immediately retreated, officials said. Shortly thereafter, the gunman began firing into the gathering and was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, said he was frustrated with the local police narrative that responsibility lies in one place and the Secret Service in another.

“This makes no sense,” he said in an interview. Local law enforcement officers are additional resources that are vital to the Secret Service's security mission, he said, comparing the agency to the general contractor for presidential security events.

“It doesn't matter who the subcontractors are,” he said. “Your name is on the truck.”

The Secret Service, in a social media post Tuesday, said it was not criticizing its local law enforcement partners in Butler, calling the officers brave. “Any reports suggesting that the Secret Service is blaming local police for Saturday's incident are simply not true.”

One point of general agreement: No law enforcement was on the roof of any of the AGR warehouses on Saturday.

In his interview with ABC, Cheatle said there were no officers stationed on top of the roof because it would not be safe.

“This particular building has a pitched roof, at its highest point,” he said. “And so there's a safety factor that would be taken into account, that we wouldn't want to put anybody on a sloping roof. So the decision was made to protect the building from the inside.”

Former Secret Service agents said agents occupy positions on roofs steeper than that; in fact, Secret Service snipers set up on a steeper roof behind Trump at the same event. But they said the agency also weighed safety and sometimes chose to block access to sloped ceilings rather than put someone on top of them.

“The bottom line is that the ceiling should have been hung and used as an observation post with police officers,” said Joe Funk, a former officer who protected Presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton.

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