Local SWAT Covering Trump Rally Drops Secret Service Bomb Live on ABC [VIDEOS]

A local SWAT team officer assigned to former President Donald Trump's July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, revealed a critical lapse in communication with the US Secret Service before the shooting incident.

Jason Woods, lead shooter for the Beaver County SWAT team, said ABC News“We were supposed to have a face-to-face briefing with Secret Service members whenever they arrived. That never happened.”

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Woods said this lack of coordination likely contributed to the critical failure in planning, which resulted in 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks wounding Trump, killing bystander Corey Compatore and wounding two others before being shot down by a Secret Service sniper.

“I think that was probably a turning point, where I started to think things were wrong because it never happened,” Woods said. “We had no communication.”

In the wake of the assassination attempt, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has resigned, and law enforcement and congressional investigations have been announced.

Woods mentioned that his team was in position hours before Trump took the stage at the Butler Farm Show grounds, but his first communication with the Secret Service came only after the shooting. “By then, it was too late,” he noted.

Although a Beaver County sniper took pictures of Crooks and called command about his suspicious presence, the gunman still managed to get onto the roof of a building. This critical lapse has left members of Trump's Secret Service and his top advisers wondering why they were not told about the observations by local police.

Trump advisers, who initially thought the gunshots were fireworks, expressed confusion about why they were not alerted to the potential threat, which could have allowed them to consider delaying Trump's speech. “Nobody mentioned it. Nobody said there was a problem,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News' Jesse Watters. “They could have said, 'Let's wait 15 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes,' something. Nobody said, I think that was a mistake.”

Beaver County Chief Detective Patrick Young, who oversees the Emergency Services Unit and SWAT team, defended his group's actions, saying, “We did everything humanly possible that day.”