# Trump Assassination Attempt (2024)

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "Trump Assassination Attempt (2024)," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/trump-assassination-attempt-2024/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*The July 13, 2024 shooting at Donald Trump's campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, in which a 20-year-old gunman fired eight rounds from an unsecured rooftop, wounding Trump's ear, killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore, and wounding two others. John Kiriakou, speaking as a Danny Jones co-guest the following Tuesday and later relayed by Skype on the same episode, calls it a colossal Secret Service failure rather than a deep-state plot, arguing a real conspiracy would never have been entrusted to a radicalized local twenty-year-old.*

- **Date:** July 13, 2024
- **Location:** Butler Farm Show grounds, Butler County, Pennsylvania
- **Target:** Donald Trump, former president and 2024 Republican nominee
- **Shooter:** 20-year-old local gunman, killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper
- **Kiriakou's assessment:** A colossal Secret Service failure, not a staged or deep-state operation

The **2024 Trump assassination attempt** took place on July 13, 2024, when a 20-year-old gunman opened fire from an unsecured rooftop at a [Donald Trump](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/donald-trump) campaign rally on the Butler Farm Show grounds in Butler County, Pennsylvania, grazing Trump's ear, killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore, and wounding two others before a [Secret Service](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/secret-service) counter-sniper killed the shooter. Appearing three days later as a co-guest on Danny Jones' podcast, [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou) said the simplest explanation was probably the correct one at that early stage: *"a colossal historic screw-up on the part of the U.S. Secret Service."*[1]

## 'A colossal historic screw-up'

Kiriakou, who grew up walking distance from the Butler County fairgrounds and never missed a year of the farm show as a kid, noted the venue regularly hosted visiting politicians and should have been entirely familiar to security planners — this was hardly the first time a candidate had come to Butler County.[2] What genuinely stunned him was the disclosure that the Secret Service had outsourced coverage of the rally's external buildings to the Butler County Sheriff's Department — something, he said, the Secret Service would never normally do.[3] He placed the failure against a pattern: after each major attack on a presidential candidate — the assassinations of 1968, the 1972 shooting of George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, and the 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan — the Secret Service had conducted a top-to-bottom review of its procedures, yet the agency had gone from 1981 until the Butler rally with no credible attempt on a candidate's life to test those procedures against.[4][5] He also flagged a second missed opportunity after the shots were fired: once agents dogpiled Trump, they let him stand up with his head and shoulders fully exposed as he barged through the scrum to pump his fist for the crowd — an easy follow-up shot, Kiriakou said, for a second shooter in anything resembling a JFK-style triangular hit team.[6]

Asked how protective perimeters are properly run, Kiriakou described the standard: sweep and continuously watch every building with line of sight to the candidate, and when multiple buildings are in play, post someone on literally every roof.[7] He said security operations had been supplementing human surveillance with drones for roughly ten years by the time of the 2024 interview, comparing it to a military base layout — a prison ringed by concentric perimeters for living and working areas, guards patrolling the outer fence, and two to four drones monitored overhead — yet there was no drone coverage at all protecting a former U.S. president at Butler.[7][8] He dismissed the idea that it was ever realistic to expect the Butler County Sheriff's Department alone to secure a site for a former president — *"that's just not real life,"* he said.[9]

## A system 'not efficient enough to save a candidate under fire'

Kiriakou traced much of the delay to a basic infrastructure gap: local police and the Secret Service do not share a radio frequency, so a local officer's report has to relay through his own dispatch to a Secret Service dispatcher before it ever reaches Secret Service agents on the ground.[10] He estimated that chain could cost roughly 15 seconds — plenty of time, he said, for someone to be killed — and speculated that personnel on the ground had simply assumed nothing would happen in Butler, since no candidate had been shot at since 1981, and were focused on getting through the rally before moving on to Milwaukee.[11]

He also walked through the rooftop counter-sniper's hesitation. A Secret Service sniper, he noted, could go through an entire 30-year career and never once fire his weapon[12] — so when the sniper spotted a man on the roof, he had no way of knowing whether it was a police officer, a state trooper, or a building maintenance worker who had simply wandered up for a better look.[13] Once shots were actually fired at Trump, the sniper bypassed the normal dispatch-and-permission chain and simply fired — fortunate, in Kiriakou's view, but symptomatic of a system too slow to protect a candidate under fire.[13]

## Not a deep-state operation

Asked directly whether he thought the shooting was staged, Kiriakou's gut response was no — an intentional operation of that kind would have so many moving parts that it would be virtually impossible to carry out.[14] He said a friend who is a former FBI agent agreed: if agencies had staged the shooting, they would not have outsourced it to a 20-year-old local from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.[14] Had it truly been a U.S. military or government-organized operation, he argued, Trump would not be alive today.[15] And if the shooter had been a patsy in a real conspiracy, Kiriakou said, there would have needed to be secondary and tertiary shooters ready in case he missed — comparing the scenario to Lee Harvey Oswald's *"I'm just a patsy"* protest before he was killed, a case Kiriakou has separately linked to the [JFK assassination](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/jfk-assassination).[16]

Kiriakou acknowledged that even people he respects and considers rational were claiming on social media that the shooting was a Deep State operation.[17] His answer was that the logic cuts the other way: if the Deep State had truly wanted Trump dead, it would have gotten him long ago, rather than pursuing what he called trumped-up federal and state charges or relying on a 20-year-old to climb onto a roof.[18] He was similarly skeptical of a foreign hand, calling it unlikely that an adversary such as China, Russia, or Iran was behind the attack[19] — a foreign power assassinating a U.S. presidential candidate risks triggering a world war, he said, so the blowback would far outweigh any benefit, and no state actor would entrust that kind of operation to a 20-year-old either.[20] He pointed to the tradecraft mismatch as further evidence: a professional operation would fire from roughly 500 to 800 yards rather than the roughly 145 yards the actual shooter used, and would use a dedicated sniper rifle rather than the AR-15 in .223/5.56 the shooter carried — a professional, Kiriakou said, would not have missed.[20][21]

## 'A systemic problem'

Kiriakou illustrated what he called a systemic Secret Service problem with an anecdote from a friend, a retired Army colonel and prominent Republican fundraiser, who had been turned away at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser gate about six months before the Butler rally after telling agents he had two secured firearms in his trunk.[22] The friend told Kiriakou that nobody actually searched his car — meaning that had he simply lied and said he had no weapons, he could have walked into the ballroom fully armed.[23]

## Compared to 1981

Kiriakou drew a pointed contrast with the country's reaction to the shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981: after that attack, the whole country pulled together and Reagan's approval ratings rose into the 90s, a unity nowhere to be found in the divided reaction to the Trump shooting.[24] Later in the same episode, relayed via a separate Skype appearance, Kiriakou reiterated that he did not believe the shooting was a deep-state operation but the act of a lone, radicalized 20-year-old — and added that had it genuinely been a deep-state operation, a failed first attempt would not be repeated: *"they'll take their ball and go home, just like the Bay of Pigs."*[25]

## See also

- [Donald Trump](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/donald-trump)
- [Secret Service](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/secret-service)
- [JFK assassination](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/jfk-assassination)

## Sources

1. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:17:45. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=4665s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
2. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:18:15. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=4695s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
3. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:18:48. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=4728s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
4. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:19:19. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=4759s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
5. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:19:49. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=4789s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
6. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:20:20. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=4820s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
7. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:22:58. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=4978s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
8. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:23:29. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5009s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
9. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:24:01. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5041s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
10. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:24:31. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5071s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
11. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:25:02. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5102s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
12. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:26:03. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5163s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
13. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:26:35. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5195s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
14. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:27:41. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5261s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
15. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:28:13. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5293s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
16. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:28:45. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5325s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
17. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:30:50. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5450s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
18. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:31:21. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5481s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
19. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:32:56. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5576s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
20. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:34:00. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5640s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
21. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:34:31. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5671s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
22. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:31:53. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5513s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
23. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:32:25. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5545s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
24. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:30:19. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=5419s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/
25. #249 — Trump Assassination Attempt (John is co-guest w/ Matt Cox ✓) (2024-07-16), at 1:48:27. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcgJXirykZE&t=6507s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2024-07-16-danny-jones-trump-assassination-attempt-john-is-co-guest/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/trump-assassination-attempt-2024/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt