Not long after I came to New Hampshire, decades back, a chap in Littleton decided to hold up the local bank. Unfortunately, he made the elementary mistake of rolling the ski-mask down over his face not just for the robbery but also to case the joint. A teller at the bank, strolling back from lunch, noticed the ski-masked bloke standing on Main Street peering through the windows for some length of time, and she thought it rather odd. So, when he entered the lobby to hold up the joint, they were ready for him.

That’s pretty much what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania – except, instead of a perspicacious bank clerk acting swiftly to prevent the crime, there were vast numbers of Secret Service agents who instead let the guy go ahead and commit it.

In the last seventy-two hours, we have learned there were at least three government snipers in the very building whose rooftop the assassin was trying to access. They sat inside and watched him through the windows, as he arrived and peered up at the roof, and then wandered away.

They watched him when he came back and took out a laser range-finder to calculate the distance between the building and Trump’s head, and then left again.

They watched him a third time when he returned with a bulky backpack.

They watched him for the best part of half-an-hour …and then they let him go ahead and shoot the Republican presidential candidate.

When seconds count, the police are half-an-hour away from getting off their butts. The Federalist‘s Sean Davis asks the relevant question:

Who gave the order to do nothing until after the assassin shot Trump, killed an innocent man on that stage, and fired round after round after round after round?

That’s a good way to put it: the Secret Service agents on-site did nothing for half-an-hour because that’s what they were ordered to do, by some fellow somewhere in the bureaucracy in a position to give such an order. Who is he?

There were consequences to his decision: A genuine public servant – volunteer fireman Corey Comperatore – died shielding his wife and daughters because the ersatz “public servants” of the Secret Service allowed his killer to open fire.

They sat back and watched as his killer cased the roof, made his range-finder calculations, returned with the backpack, and then ascended to his position. The Secret Service provided no service whatsoever; they were the Secret Spectators: they did nothing until after Mr Comperatore, Trump and the others had been shot.

Why?

Mark Steyn