The assassination attempt on Donald Trump will be investigated by the FBI, Congress and possibly an independent commission, so we will eventually have a full record and timeline. How satisfactory that record will be is another question. Hopefully we won’t be left with sketchy autopsies and dubious ballistics and grassy knolls. But there’s already plenty of fodder for conspiracy theorists. This is mainly because of the staggering fact that the shooter was able to get on the roof of that building at all. The latest jaw-dropping fact comes from a CNN report.

Snipers were stationed inside the building where a gunman climbed the roof and attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, a source familiar with the investigation tells CNN.

The source said the local sniper team hailed from the Butler County Emergency Services Unit.

The team, according to the source, was located on the second floor providing overwatch of the crowd at the rally.

This is almost comical. Let’s take an aerial  look at the scene. This picture is taken after the fact so all the people and cars are gone. But note the location of the parking lot. At the time of the shooting, it was chock full of cop cars and emergency vehicles. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi has acknowledged that the parking lot and even the warehouse itself was a staging area for local law enforcement. He didn’t mention that a local sniper team was on the second floor.

Screenshot

Now, let’s look at a report from the Associated Press. This report raises more questions than it answers about the timeline, but it looks like the shooter was milling around the entrance to the event and arousing suspicion prior to moving over to the warehouse.

Several rallygoers reported to local officers that [would-be assassin Thomas] Crooks was acting suspiciously and pacing near the magnetometers, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the investigation.

There’s no mention of him having a long gun at that point. But elsewhere I have seen it noted that because it’s legal to openly carry an AR-15 in Pennsylvania, the Secret Service couldn’t preemptively fire on Crooks so long as he remained on the perimeter. I’ve also watched video taken of Crooks when he was on the roof, and you can see a police officer patrolling on foot.

I think Crooks succeeded in getting shots off because he was so brazen that it defied belief. At some point, he grabbed his rifle and walked right through a phalanx of cops  and up onto a building that was serving as their staging area. He crawled right on top of a sniper team and got in position. And this did not go unnoticed at all. Witnesses alerted the cops and a local cop actually scaled the roof and came under fire and had to retreat.

It’s astonishing that no one stopped him on the ground, but who would suspect someone would risk detection in the staging area and choose to shoot from on top of the sniper team? It must have seemed like the most secured area of the fairgrounds and its environs.

It never would have worked if Crooks had the slightest concern for being arrested or killed. So, all I can really say in defense of the security for the event is that it’s hard to stop suicide attacks because deterrence has no impact.

Still, his success in getting on that roof and getting shots off is so against the odds, that it’s inevitable that people will wonder if he had help. Did someone usher him through the parking lot? Was the gun hidden ahead of time?

I suspect that these questions won’t have the same lasting power as the grassy knoll of JFK fame, simply because Trump survived. If he had died, I have no doubt that this story, no matter how true it may be, is so implausible that it would never be accepted by a large swath of the public.

I do think one thing we should take from this is that it should not be legal to openly carry semiautomatic rifles in public. I also think that if we can have drug-free school zones, we can have AR-15-free zones around the perimeters of political rallies.