Analysis of the New Trump Assassination Bodycam Footage

It raises even more questions

OK, I SWEAR I’m working on this Full Court Press article, but today we got new bodycam footage from the Butler rally where Donald Trump was shot — so obviously I spent some time watching and putting the video into the puzzle of what we know. I figured since I put in the legwork I might as well share what I found!

Despite the headline, NBC News does not provide the source video.

First, we need to determine the location of the officer during the clip — I circled it below. The officer gets a boost up onto the roof looking south and sees the shooter off to his left. He then heads for the other side of the building (into the field) looking at the roof (presumably for Crooks, who is hidden from this angle — DAMN YOU SLOPED ROOFS!) until shots are fired, then goes back to the parking lot to get his rifle.

The full 6:36 video is here in its original form. There is no audio until 1:37 of the video, after all the shots have been fired and Crooks is dead (unbeknownst to the officer).

The critical time of this video is when the officer gets up onto the roof and is forced to retreat when Crooks threatens him. I slowed down that part of the video to .3 speed:

This was the best view I could get of the rooftop before the officer was forced back down. Crooks is not visible here (remember, bodycams are chest level), but he’s up on the roof to the left.

You can see by the timestamp, this occurs at 6:10:55 — 38 seconds before Crooks opens fire. The cop at this point knows FOR SURE somebody is up on the roof with a gun behaving in a threatening manner. Yet Trump remained on the stage, oblivious to the danger the police already knew of.

Because there’s no audio for the first 1:37 of the new footage (therefore we don’t actually hear the shots), we don’t know what the officer was communicating over the radio during this crucial time between the confirmation of a threat and the actual shots. We DO know that there is NO EXCUSE for Trump still being on that stage

For the final piece of analysis, I took my original PBS footage and synced it up with the new bodycam footage:

Additional bodycam footage released today shows an officer upset because he warned Secret Service about the building days before the rally:

The more we learn about the events of July 13th, the worse things look for the Secret Service.

Afraid of commitment? Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi — no subscription required!

---

Edit: The missing audio of the first part of the video seems to be a function of the way his bodycam works — as is fairly typical, the device records video constantly but only records audio when triggered. It’s not clear if the officer turned on the bodycam after falling off the roof (30 seconds is typical for previous video playback) or if he turned it on when the audio actually started at 1:37.