The would-be assassin who opened fire at Donald J. Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13 was able to get a clear shot at the former president, as countersniper teams nearby failed to see him in time to thwart the shooting.
The New York Times used drone photography to build a 3-D model and recreate the lines of sight for both the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, and three teams of countersnipers — two federal and one local. The analysis shows that Mr. Crooks, 20, who appears to have flown a drone to survey the site the morning of the rally, exploited one of the few blind spots within a rifle’s range of Mr. Trump, raising questions about serious lapses in security planning for the event.
At a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill on Monday, Kimberly A. Cheatle, the Secret Service director, offered few specifics to lawmakers’ repeated questions about sightlines and security breakdowns.
What Secret Service Countersnipers on the North Barn Saw
This is the line of sight that one of two Secret Service teams most likely had just minutes before Mr. Crooks opened fire.
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The gunman was largely concealed by two trees and the slope of a warehouse building roof, which he used as his perch. The warehouse complex, owned by AGR International, was outside the Secret Service’s designated security perimeter, the agency later said.
Stationed on the northernmost barn behind Mr. Trump, one of the Secret Service teams had been facing the gunman’s direction for 30 minutes before violence erupted, according to videos posted on social media and verified by The Times. At one point, team members can be seen standing up and looking in the gunman’s direction with binoculars.
The Times captured its own drone footage three days after the shooting. This footage provides a glimpse into how much the trees might have impaired the countersnipers’ view of the gunman.
The New York Times
Note: This video was captured about seven feet above the roof where a countersniper team was positioned atop the northern barn. The location of the gunman was identified by a cone that is visible between the tree branches, where it was placed by investigators after the shooting.
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The Times used a spatial technique called viewshed analysis to calculate what areas would have been visible from the northern countersniper team’s position, taking into account obstructions like trees and buildings. The analysis confirmed that Mr. Crooks chose a prime spot that allowed him to stay largely out of sight — even from a countersniper team that had been facing his direction for a length of time — as he prepared for the first shot.
What Secret Service Countersnipers on the South Barn Saw
A second Secret Service countersniper team was positioned on the roof of a barn farther to the south and west. It had been monitoring a different area — initially facing away from the gunman, videos posted to social media show.
Video footage shows the countersnipers later turning toward the gunman’s direction one minute and 35 seconds before the first shot was fired. This is the view they would have had when they turned around.
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But the slope of the warehouse roof that the gunman had chosen would have also made it difficult for the south countersniper team to see him as he crawled upward, a Times analysis shows. Only the very top of Mr. Crooks’s head would have been visible in either Secret Service countersniper team’s line of sight, and only while the gunman was hunkered behind the highest point on the roof.
Note: Diagram represents a conservative size of the gunman’s prone body.
Forty-two seconds after the shooting began, Secret Service agents can be heard saying “Shooter down” in video footage. Mr. Crooks was fatally shot by a Secret Service countersniper, the agency later confirmed. It’s likely the shot came from the countersnipers on the south barn, who would have been one of the best positioned.
What Local Law Enforcement Countersnipers Saw
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A third group of three law enforcement countersnipers was stationed in the same warehouse complex as the gunman, but in an adjacent building, according to a local law enforcement official, who was not authorized to comment.
The building that the countersnipers were in did have windows facing the side of the roof of the building that Mr. Crooks climbed up. But it is not known whether they were assigned to any of those windows that day.
The law enforcement official said the countersnipers, who were tasked with watching over the crowds, were positioned on the other side of the building, at the second-floor windows further from the gunman. Here is what the view of one countersniper — facing those attending the rally — might have looked like.
From this view inside the building, the gunman would have been out of the countersnipers’ lines of sight.
Videos and photos reviewed by The Times show what was most likely a fourth countersniper team from a local law enforcement agency roughly 1,000 feet from Mr. Crooks’s position on the roof. The team was visible several times in the hours and minutes before Mr. Trump began his speech. The Times could not confirm whether the team fired at any point during the shooting.
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What the Gunman Saw
The gunman’s spot on a warehouse roof — less than 500 feet from Mr. Trump — provided him with a clear, elevated line of sight.
As he crawled up toward the peak of the roof, its slight slope would have concealed him from the Secret Service countersnipers for a majority of the time. And, once he reached the top, the two trees would have provided some cover from the north countersniper team.
Investigators said that Mr. Crooks appears to have used a drone to survey the rally site before the shooting. The Secret Service did not seek to use drones to provide agents with aerial views of the rally, Ms. Cheatle testified on Monday.
Mr. Crooks was able to fire multiple shots — unimpeded — in Mr. Trump’s direction, injuring Mr. Trump’s right ear. A rally attendee sitting in the bleachers closest to the gunman was fatally shot in the head. Two others in the top row of bleachers to the south were also struck, though they survived.
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Other Security Missteps
Two rows of chain-link fencing divide the Butler Farm Show property from the warehouse complex. It’s unclear if the Secret Service used the fencing to delineate the security perimeters, but the agency later acknowledged that the AGR warehouses were excluded from the secure zone.
Source: Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA)
The warehouse complex, which sits next to a state highway and a major road, is accessible to the public. In a video taken an hour before the shooting, Mr. Crooks can be seen in front of the warehouse building he would later use as his perch.
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On the ground, dozens of officers from multiple agencies were also present on the Butler Farm Show grounds, where the rally took place. Ms. Cheatle, the Secret Service director, said on Monday that the AGR building complex was being monitored at the time of shooting, but she did not specify by whom.
An F.B.I. investigation had found that a local SWAT team spotted Mr. Crooks on the roof of a warehouse approximately 18 minutes before Mr. Trump took the stage, Ms. Cheatle also said at Monday’s hearing. The Secret Service had been informed of a potential “suspicious” person through radio communication, but it did not stop Mr. Trump from taking the stage.
Methodology
The Times flew a drone on July 16 over the site of the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and used the imagery captured by the drone to create a 3-D model of the scene. The Times also used measurements collected on the ground, satellite imagery and references from photos and videos posted on social media to corroborate the dimensions in the model. The positions of the gunman, countersniper teams and the victims were based on sites The Times located from social media videos.
To determine the lines of sight of each countersniper team in the 3-D model, The Times conducted a viewshed analysis — a spatial technique used to calculate what areas would be visible from a specific location in 3-D, taking into account obstructions. The Times used a 1,000-foot radius from the position of the countersnipers for this analysis, which encompassed both the Butler Farm Show grounds and the AGR warehouse complex. The Times placed cameras in the 3-D model at the approximate locations of the gunman’s and the countersniper teams’ elevations to show what their views might have looked like from those vantage points. The gunman’s exact location in the renderings is based on the position where his body was found after he was shot. The specifics of the scopes used by the gunman or the countersnipers on their rifles are not known, and the 3-D renderings are approximate.
Harvard University, which is clashing with the Trump administration over its academic independence and the withdrawal of billions of dollars in research funding, said on Wednesday that its president had chosen to cut his own pay by 25 percent starting later this year.
The university has not disclosed specifics about its compensation package for the president, Alan M. Garber, who became Harvard’s permanent leader last year. His recent predecessors were paid around $1 million a year.
Whatever it amounts to in dollar terms, though, the pay reduction is a symbolic gesture compared with the scale of the university’s fight with the federal government, which has already moved to block more than $2.6 billion in funding for Harvard.
A university spokesman, Jonathan L. Swain, said Dr. Garber’s salary would be reduced starting July 1, when Harvard’s next fiscal year begins. The university, which has already halted new hiring and suspended merit raises for many employees, said that other Harvard leaders were planning contributions to the school.
The university acknowledged Dr. Garber’s decision the day after it expanded its lawsuit against the Trump administration.
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The government made a range of intrusive demands of Harvard last month, asserting that the university had, among other things, not done enough to combat antisemitism. The university has sharply contested those accusations. Then last week, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said that Harvard would not be eligible for any more federal grants.
Legal experts have cast doubt on the viability of Ms. McMahon’s decree, and many of them believe that Harvard has a strong legal case to reverse the cuts the Trump administration has already made. Even so, Harvard, which has routinely received hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal research funding, is preparing for turmoil as long as President Trump remains in office.
In the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, Harvard has already had to scale back or eliminate some research programs, including efforts to study tuberculosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease and radiation sickness, because of federal funding cuts. The university’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, faced with some of the most significant funding losses, is eliminating desktop phones, limiting catering, reducing security and cutting back on purchases of new computers. The school has also cut back on leased office space, slots for doctoral students and a shuttle that ferries employees between offices.
The Crimson, the Harvard campus newspaper, first reported Dr. Garber’s pay decision.
A sense of campus solidarity in the funding fight extends beyond Harvard’s top ranks. Ninety tenured professors have pledged to take 10 percent pay cuts in order to help Harvard, the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, weather the Trump administration’s onslaught. Ryan D. Enos, a professor of government and a leader of the group, said the university had expressed its gratitude.
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The group came together, Dr. Enos said, in recognition that some Harvard employees could be harder hit than others by the federal cuts.
In a statement, the professors, some of whom have not been named publicly, said their offer to work for less pay signaled “our commitment as faculty members to use means at our disposal to protect the university and, especially, staff and students who do not have the same protections.”
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
Qatar has agreed to buy up to 210 aircraft from Boeing in what US President Donald Trump hailed as the largest order of jets in the history of the American aerospace company as he visited the Gulf state.
The White House announced economic deals worth more than $243bn as Qatar became the latest oil-rich country to earn plaudits from the president for buying into his “America first” investment policy as he toured the Gulf in pursuit of headline-grabbing business deals.
Qatar Airways, the state-owned national carrier, had agreed to a $96bn deal to acquire up to 210 American-made Boeing 787 Dreamliner and 777X aircraft, the White House said, adding that it was Boeing’s “largest-ever wide-body order”.
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“Congratulations to Boeing. Get those planes out there,” Trump said at a signing ceremony with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Qatar’s emir. “I just want to thank you. We’ve been friends for a long time.”
Boeing shares were up 2.3 per cent on Wednesday. Airlines often receive a discount off the list price of the aeroplanes they buy.
Other multibillion dollar deals have also been reached in defence, energy and technology, the White House said.
A demonstrator carrying a sign that says “VOTING RIGHTS NOW” walks across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in 2022 in Washington, D.C.
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A panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down one of the key remaining ways of enforcing the federal Voting Rights Act in seven mainly Midwestern states.
For decades, private individuals and groups have brought the majority of lawsuits for enforcing the landmark law’s Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in the election process.
But in a 2-1 ruling released Wednesday, the three-judge panel found that Section 2 cannot be enforced by lawsuits from private parties under a separate federal statute known as Section 1983.
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That statute gives individuals the right to sue state and local government officials for violating their civil rights. Section 1983 stems from the Ku Klux Klan Act that Congress passed after the Civil War to protect Black people in the South from white supremacist violence, and voting rights advocates have considered it an antidote to a controversial 2023 decision by a different federal appeals panel that made it harder to enforce Section 2 in the 8th Circuit.
That earlier panel found that Section 2 is not privately enforceable because the Voting Rights Act does not explicitly name private individuals and groups. Only the head of the Justice Department can bring these types of lawsuits, that panel concluded.
The majority of the panel that released Wednesday’s opinion came to the same conclusion.
“Because [the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2] does not unambiguously confer an individual right, the plaintiffs do not have a cause of action under [Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code] to enforce [Section 2] of the Act,” wrote Circuit Judge Raymond Gruender, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush and joined in the opinion by Circuit Judge Jonathan Kobes, a nominee of President Trump.
In a dissenting opinion, however, Chief Circuit Judge Steven Colloton, also a Bush nominee, pointed out the long history of private individuals and groups suing to enforce Section 2’s legal protections against any inequalities in the opportunities voters of colors have to elect preferred candidates in districts where voting is racially polarized.
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“Since 1982, private plaintiffs have brought more than 400 actions based on [Section 2] that have resulted in judicial decisions. The majority concludes that all of those cases should have been dismissed because [Section 2] of the Voting Rights Act does not confer a voting right,” Colloton wrote.
Under the current Trump administration, the Justice Department has stepped away from Section 2 cases that had begun during the Biden administration.
The 8th Circuit includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. The latest ruling comes out of a North Dakota redistricting lawsuit by the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe. Citing Section 1983 as a basis for bringing the case as private groups, the tribal nations challenged a map of state legislative voting districts, which was approved by North Dakota’s Republican-controlled legislature after the 2020 census.
In a part of the state where voting is racially polarized, the tribal nations argued, the redistricting lines drawn by the state lawmakers reduce the opportunity for Native American voters to elect candidates of their choice.
“For the first time in over 30 years, there are zero Native Americans serving in the North Dakota state Senate today because of the way the 2020 redistricting lines were configured,” Mark Gaber, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, which is representing the tribal nations, said during a court hearing in October 2024.
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A lower court struck down the redistricting plan for violating Section 2 by diluting the collective power of Native American voters in northeastern North Dakota.
But the state’s Republican secretary of state, Michael Howe, appealed the lower court’s ruling to the 8th Circuit, arguing that, contrary to decades of precedent, Section 1983 does not allow private individuals and groups to bring this kind of lawsuit.
Since 2021, Republican officials in Arkansas and Louisiana have made similar novel arguments in redistricting lawsuits after Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, issued a single-paragraph opinion that said lower courts have considered whether private individuals can sue an “open question.” For this North Dakota lawsuit, 14 GOP state attorneys general signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that private parties don’t have a right to sue with Section 2 claims.
In a separate Arkansas-based case before the 8th Circuit, GOP state officials have also questioned whether there is a private right of action under another part of the Voting Rights Acts — Section 208, which states that voters who need assistance to vote because of a disability or inability to read or write can generally receive help from a person of their choice.
Many legal experts consider this questioning of a private right of action as the prelude to the next potential showdown over the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court, where multiple rulings by the court’s conservative majority have eroded the law’s protections over the past decade.
