(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Interview transcripts from the Senate Homeland Security Committee indicate that a “suspicious package” was found outside of the AGR building that Thomas Crooks used as a perch to shoot at Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
However, the interview transcripts—which the Homeland Security Committee released last month along with its interim report on the Butler Trump shooting—don’t clearly indicate what the package was, who found it, or where.
Information about the suspicious package was apparently included in records obtained by the committee. Senate investigators questioned multiple Secret Service agents who were at Butler about the matter, but those agents professed ignorance.
According to the transcripts, the Senate committee was asking about a screenshot from an app apparently used by law enforcement.
A suspicious package was seemingly found near the AGR building more than an hour after the July 13 Trump shooting. But no one in the Secret Service knows about it.
Add this to the list of unanswered questions pic.twitter.com/LBmiJYTeZE— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) October 16, 2024
“In the center of the actual picture it looks like it’s the AGR building—you’re right, it looks like a Google Map—and then there’s a square that says, ‘suspicious package.’ So it looks like there’s kind of an overlay,” a Senate investigator said in an interview with an unnamed Secret Service counter assault team advance agent.
The agent told the Senate committee that he never saw the photo that was presented to him, which he said looked like either Google Maps or Apple Maps.
“This could be some type of system maybe the locals were running or maybe a state agency was running, just to maybe to identify things. I have no idea,” the CAT advance agent said.
The rest of the questioning is heavily redacted, making it unclear what was said about the suspicious package.
In a separate interview with a Secret Service counter sniper, lawmakers again asked about the suspicious package.
“Are you aware of a suspicious package located near the AGR building at 7:31 p.m.?” a Senate investigator asked, to which the sniper responded, “No.”
“Are you aware of any suspicious package on July 13th, located near the AGR building?” the Senate investigator asked again. And again, the sniper said he didn’t know.
The sniper further said he never received a message about the suspicious package. He said he recognized the application used to convey the warning—the app that apparently looks like Google Maps—but that he used a slightly different software that was compatible with his iPhone.
“I’m not sure if the Secret Service exclusively uses iPhones, but I did not receive this image,” he said.
The Senate committee conducted one other interview that touched on the suspicious package—this one with the advance agent for the Secret Service’s Trump security division—but that interview didn’t yield answers, either.
That agent—who was responsible for mitigating explosives and chemical weapons threats—told the committee that he was part of a law enforcement sweep of the AGR building once a remote detonator was found on Crooks’s body. But the agent didn’t indicate that a suspicious package was found at the time of that search, which was immediately after Crooks’s shooting at 6:11 p.m.
“No devices were found inside the building, and we worked with Allegheny County to implement a further plan to find said device, because of the remote, and the best way of going about doing it,” the agent said, adding that they then began sweeping a 100-yard radius around the building.
The same agent said the explosives in Crooks’s car were found around midnight.
The Senate committee interviewed at least nine other agents, but the transcripts don’t show any discussions of the suspicious package.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
