Trump’s team wasn’t told about reports of suspicious person before rally shooting, sources say

CNN —

When former President Donald Trump ascended the stage at last weekend’s Pennsylvania rally to thunderous cheers, the campaign staffers present expected to hear a typical stump speech.

What they didn’t know: Law enforcement had spotted a suspicious person at the rally nearly an hour earlier and had been trying to find him.

Just minutes after Trump started speaking, that same suspicious person – 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks – opened fire at the former president, coming inches away from assassinating him.

Members of Trump’s team weren’t told that law enforcement was trying to locate Crooks in the minutes before he took the stage, and there was no conversation over whether Trump should have delayed his entrance, sources who were at the rally with the former president told CNN.

That’s despite the fact that local police had spotted Crooks multiple times with a rangefinder, a hunting device similar to a pair of binoculars that calculates distance, and had circulated a photo of him they had taken.

“We would have never let him go out there if we thought there was a threat to him,” one source present with Trump told CNN.

Beyond the looming question of why Crooks tried to kill Trump, the Secret Service is facing growing scrutiny over its security preparations and response at the rally – including why Trump was allowed to go onstage in the first place, and whether it was communicated to agents around him that people in the crowd had spotted the gunman on a nearby roof at least two minutes before the shooting.

Secret Service and FBI briefers told members of Congress on Wednesday that law enforcement was trying to locate Crooks for at least 19 minutes before he fired but did not find him again until he was