(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In the immediate wake of the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump, pictures circulated online of a bicycle at the scene that was believed to belong to alleged gunman Thomas Crooks.
At the time, records showed that local sniper Greg Nicol photographed the bicycle because he saw Crooks “walking away” from it around 5:42 p.m., about 30 minutes before the shooting. And the New York Post reported that Crooks “rode his bicycle around the former president’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania — and ditched it in full view of cops and a crowd before he climbed on top of a roof and opened fire.”
Since then, questions remained about what happened to Crooks’s bicycle and how it fit into his plot.
However, a Secret Service agent working in the Trump Security Division recently told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the bicycle didn’t, in fact, belong to Crooks.
According to a recently released interview transcript, the agent told the Senate committee that he investigated the bike himself.
“The owner of the bike and backpack actually walked up, and rightfully so—several law enforcement officers were rigging his bike to be destroyed …" — unnamed Secret Service agent
WHY WERE YOU ABOUT TO DESTROY OSTENSIBLE EVIDENCE FROM A PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT https://t.co/oCkoJfY0nW pic.twitter.com/0zqknjY7IJ
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) October 9, 2024
“The owner of the bike and backpack actually walked up, and rightfully so—several law enforcement officers were rigging his bike to be destroyed … And he asked us what we were doing, and we asked him who he was,” said the agent, whose name is redacted
“And we interviewed him for about 30 minutes, specifically the bomb squad sergeant from Allegheny County, and I also held him for our agents to come out and interview him, to make sure he had no connection to the shooter, because at this point we don’t know if there are any secondary people,” the agent said.
“But to be on the safe side they held him, detained him, and he was released.”
The agent didn’t explain why law enforcement was going to destroy an ostensible piece of evidence from a presidential assassination attempt.
When questioned further, the agent said the backpack found near the bike also belonged to the same person.
The agent said he didn’t remember the bicycle owner’s name, and that any report on the matter would have been written by Allegheny County law enforcement.
The agent’s description of the bicycle investigation matches that of another agent captured on local police body camera. That agent said his colleague—likely the agent interviewed by the Senate committee—told him that the bicycle belonged to someone else.
🚨Recently released body cam footage reveals that law enforcement detained multiple people after the Trump assassination attempt🚨
"Those people detained were filming. Maybe they were involved; maybe they weren’t…" pic.twitter.com/pZudrrv5L7— Headline USA (@HeadlineUSA) July 26, 2024
“Our guy who was just up there said there’s a guy detained who’s the owner of the bike. I said, ‘No, [Crooks] owns the bike,’” the Secret Service agent said—it turns out, incorrectly—on the body camera.
The mistaken belief about the bicycle stems from the same law enforcement officers who left their posts inside the AGR building before Crooks opened fire. Those same cops also initially purported to have seen Crooks at 4:26 p.m.—more than 100 minutes before his attack—but it was later revealed that they saw someone else.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
