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(BEAVER COUNTY, Pennsylvania) — The local SWAT team assigned to help protect former President Donald Trump on July 13 had not had any contact with the Secret Service agents in charge of security before a would-be assassin opened fire, those officers told ABC News.

It was a critical part of the planning and communications failures that ended with a gunman killing one man, critically injuring two more and wounding Trump as he delivered a speech just days before accepting the Republican presidential nomination.

“We were supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service members whenever they arrived, and that never happened,” said Jason Woods, lead sharpshooter on the SWAT team in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.

“So I think that was probably a pivotal point, where I started thinking things were wrong because it never happened,” Woods said. “We had no communication.”

In their first public comments since the assassination attempt, the SWAT team on the ground that day and their supervisors spoke exclusively with ABC News Senior Investigative Correspondent Aaron Katersky. It is the first time any key law enforcement personnel on-site July 13 have offered first-hand accounts of what occurred.

They explained that they did what they could to try to thwart the attack but now have to live with the failure.

The episode last week led to the resignation of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. And, in the wake of the assassination attempt, a series of law-enforcement, internal and congressional probes have been announced – with communications and coordination a key focus of investigators’ attention.

The Secret Service, whose on-site team was supplemented as usual by local, county and state law-enforcement agencies, was ultimately responsible for security at the event.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi declined to respond directly to the comments from Woods and his colleagues. He said the agency “is committed to better understanding what happened before, during, and after the assassination attempt of former President Trump to ensure that never happens again. That includes complete cooperation with Congress, the FBI and other relevant investigations.”

Woods told ABC News he would have expected to have seen more coordination with the Secret Service and to have had greater communication between their team on the ground that day and the agents with Trump’s detail. The first communication between their group and the Secret Service agents on the scene that day, he said, was “not until after the shooting. By then, he said, “it was too late.”

Woods and the rest of the Beaver County sniper team were in position by mid-morning July 13, hours before Trump was set to take the stage at the Butler Farm Show grounds, outside Pittsburgh. The site is studded by a complex of warehouses, some clustered just outside the position where metal detectors were set up that day.

Gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, sparked suspicion among the Beaver County SWAT team but was still able to evade law enforcement and take position on the roof of the very building where county snipers had been posted. Though their sniper had taken pictures of Crooks and had called into Command about the suspicious presence — within an hour Crooks opened fire on the former president less than 200 yards from the stage.

Beaver County Chief Detective Patrick Young, who runs the Emergency Services Unit and SWAT team, said collaboration is key when lives are on the line.

“I believe our team did everything humanly possible that day,” Young said. “We talk a lot on SWAT that we as individuals mean nothing until we come together as a team.”

Watch: ABC News’ exclusive first interview with the local SWAT team on the ground during Trump’s assassination attempt, airs in its entirety on “Good Morning America” on Monday, July 29, at 7 a.m. ET.

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(WASHINGTON) — Democrats succeeded in pressuring President Joe Biden to end his presidential campaign. Now, they’re debating how best to utilize him to help Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid for the White House.

Some want to see him out on the stump, both with Harris and by himself, as well as in ads and high-profile White House addresses. Others want to see him focus on governing, arguing that being the best president he can be is the greatest way to help after flubbing the race’s highest-profile moment in last month’s debate led to his electoral downfall.

The decision marks just one of several unprecedented factors for Democrats as they look to reinforce Harris’ budding campaign, balancing establishing her as a candidate in her own right with her role as the No. 2 to an unpopular president who the party still credits with delivering a muscular record and making a “selfless” decision.

“That is a delicate balance, because this administration is far from over, and she’s a part of that administration,” said former Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., an ally of both Biden and Harris.

“She has got to step out and be her own person at this point and do it in a way that’s sensitive to anything ongoing in the administration, but also with an eye toward not just the election, but her own administration,” he added.

Some Democrats told ABC News the best way to do that is to blitz the campaign trail herself and leave Biden in the Oval Office.

Biden has at times shined on the stump, though he has consistently struggled in public, including at June’s debate but also in media interviews and news conferences. Making that gamble again as Harris looks to get her candidacy off the ground with just about 100 days to Election Day isn’t worth it, those Democrats argued.

“I don’t think you need him out there making appearances,” said one informal adviser to the campaign. “The reason he’s not running is because he doesn’t have the gas in the tank to do it.”

Other Democrats weren’t as blunt, but they did say that some physical distance between Biden and Harris during the campaign could offer the vice president a reprieve from poll numbers that had shown most voters trust Biden less than former President Donald Trump on key policy issues.

One source familiar with the Harris campaign’s thinking said Biden would “probably” be better off in situations where he wouldn’t be speaking live.

“I think it’s important that she demonstrate that she has her own unique vision and agenda,” the person said, though they added that, “I do think that there are ways that [Biden] could be used,” including in ads.

One of those ways could be making progress on his own initiatives while in office — and show that Harris is at his side.

“It’s almost not on the campaign trail, but in the White House. What are they doing to showcase her, to give her leadership opportunities, to take full advantage of communicating to the country that she is, in fact, the vice president of the United States?” said Democratic donor and Harris supporter Steve Phillips.

“There’s a power in cultivating and conveying images regarding the transfer of leadership within the Oval Office, within the White House, within this iconic building in our country.”

Other Democrats said Harris’ campaign should be less restrictive with how Biden is used and rejected the idea that there needs to be distance placed between the two of them.

Core administration policies, like raising taxes on the wealthy and protecting abortion rights, remain popular with voters. And several Democrats who spoke to ABC News said that they expect opinions of Biden will improve after dropping out of the race.

“I wonder now that he has passed the torch, does that make people view him more favorably and just recognize how powerful it is what he did,” said one Democratic strategist close to Harris’ team. “It may mean that people actually have better appreciation for what he’s accomplished, what they’ve accomplished. And certainly, I think he is a great validator for the Biden-Harris record.”

Rather than stay off the stump, some Democrats argued, Biden should instead hit the campaign trail as much as he likes.

His stops would likely generate massive media coverage, and he could offer a defense of his record — and Harris’ part in it — while letting his vice president focus on the future of her own administration.

“When the president shows up in a community he dominates the media. So, the president can probably keep as much of a travel schedule as they feel comfortable,” said Jamal Simmons, Harris’ former communications director in the Biden administration. “He can tell the story of the Biden-Harris administration as well as anyone, and she can tell the story of what the Harris administration will do.”

Those rallies could be held by himself or jointly with Harris — “there’s no reason for the vice president to shy away from him,” Simmons said.

Logistically, Biden would likely be deployed in ways that could maximize his strengths and allow Harris to expand her voter base.

Democrats boasted that he could appeal to working-class voters, seniors and independents — all demographics he performed well with in 2020 who would need to be kept in the fold as Harris regains ground with younger voters and voters of color who were drifting away from Biden.

“He can help in the Midwest, some of the blue-collar workers, some of the places where he’s got a unique relationship to those voters with the ‘Scranton Joe’ kind of thing. And older voters love him,” said the strategist with ties to Harris’ team.

Biden also retains goodwill “among a lot of independents and even moderate Republicans who may have questioned his age but not his ability and his sincerity,” Jones argued.

For his part, Biden has indicated he’s ready to campaign for Harris. And while the campaign did not specify how he’ll be deployed, spokesperson Lauren Hitt told ABC News in a statement the president will be “an effective advocate for the Vice President on the campaign trail.”

“My expectation is that he will play whatever role the vice president asks him,” said Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor and Biden administration official.

“Everything and anything, any and all, repeat and rinse,” Landrieu added when asked exactly what that looks like. “The president’s going to be in it to win it for her.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Since getting thrust into the race for president after President Joe Biden announced on Sunday he would step aside, Vice President Kamala Harris and her team have been racing to define her to the American people as their attention turns to the newly energized campaign before Donald Trump could beat her to the punch.

In a shift, the vice president, who has served as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general, is leaning heavily into that part of her resume — which was largely a liability during her 2020 bid for the presidency, a campaign she abandoned before the first voters were cast in that primary.

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris told staffers at her campaign headquarters Monday in what was officially her first campaign event since getting in the race. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”

“So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type,” she added. “And in this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his.”

It’s a framing of prosecutor vs. convict that Harris and her team have pushed aggressively in early days of her nascent campaign

On Thursday, Harris attacked Trump over his legal woes in the first ad of her campaign. In it Harris said her vision of the future includes an America “where no one is above the law” as the former president’s mugshot and newspaper headlines following his conviction on 34 counts in New York flashed on screen.

“Their campaign says, ‘I’m the prosecutor and he is the convicted felon,” Trump said at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, his first since Biden dropped out. “That’s their campaign. I don’t think people are gonna buy it.”

Harris has also worked to define the race as being between someone who is fighting to protect Americans’ freedoms and Donald Trump, who she argues will strip them of their freedom.

“In this election, we each face a question: What kind of country do we want to live in?” Harris asked in that first ad titled “We Choose Freedom” and that features Beyonce’s “Freedom,” which the vice president walks out to at rallies.

“There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos. Of fear. Of hate,” she adds over images of Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. “But us? We choose something different; we choose freedom.”

Speaking at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston Thursday, Harris said, “In this moment, across our nation, we witness a full-on attack on hard-won, hard-fought freedoms.”

Harris, said that those freedoms include the right to an abortion, pointing to the Supreme Court’s overuling of Roe v. Wade, for which she blames Trump, and vowing to fight to restore them.

“When I am president of the United States and when Congress passes a law to restore those freedoms, I will sign it into law. We are not playing around,” she said at the historically Black Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.’s Grand Boulé in Indianapolis on Wednesday.

But the Trump campaign is trying to define Harris in ways they think could hurt her prospects and that they hope the American people will buy.

Sources told ABC News that Trump’s attacks will largely focus on Harris’ role leading the administration’s effort on the migrant crisis and use it to make the case that the administration failed to secure the border.

Prior to Biden stepping down, Trump began ramping up personal attacks against the vice president, going after her laugh by nicknaming her “Laffin’ Kamala” and dubbing her “nuts.”

“You can tell a lot by a laugh,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Saturday. “I call her Laffin’ Kamala. You ever watch her laugh?… She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”

At the North Carolina rally he unleashed a barrage of false claims, referring to her as “Lyin’ Kamala Harris,” as a “radical-left lunatic” and a liar before suggesting that she is okay with the “execution” of a baby.

“She wants abortions in the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy, that’s fine with her right up until birth. And even after birth, the execution of a baby because that’s not abortion. That’s the execution of a baby,” Trump falsely claimed before touting the U.S. Supreme Court decision that sent the issue back to the states.

In the early days of his administration, Biden tasked Harris with leading his administration’s efforts to address the root causes of migration, primarily tackling economic and social issues in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. But in the face of migrant surges at the border, Republicans have placed blame on Harris, who they disparagingly, inaccurately nickname the “border czar.”

“Kamala Harris was appointed border czar, as you know, in March of 2021 and since that time, millions and millions of illegal aliens have invaded our country and countless Americans have been killed by migrant crime because of her,” Trump said during a press call Tuesday.

The Harris campaign responded to these attacks by pointing the finger at Trump for his opposition to a bipartisan deal to secure the border and address immigration.

“The only ‘plan’ Donald Trump has to secure our border is ripping mothers from their children aand a few xenophobic placards at the Republican National Convention. He tanked the bipartisan border security deal because, for Donald Trump, this has never been about solutions just running on a problem,” Harris campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said in a statement.

“Like everything with Donald Trump, it’s never been about helping the country, it’s only about helping himself,” Munoz added. “There’s only one candidate in this race who will fight for bipartisan solutions to strengthen border security, and that’s Vice President Harris.”

Trump allies, in a sign they are struggling to define Harris, have also resorted to describing the presumptive nominee as someone who is unqualified and chosen because of her race and gender, with some calling her a so-called “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) candidate.

Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who is now a supporter of Trump, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday that these attacks are “not helpful.”

Harris has seized being thrust into the spotlight with her newly minted campaign, positioning herself as leader during moments she would otherwise have to wait for Biden’s lead.

After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu–separately from Biden’s own meeting—Harris came before the cameras to outline her view on the war in Gaza, which had become a political headache for the president in recent months. (Biden, himself, did not speak with reporters after his meeting.)

Biden has been plagued domestically over criticism of his response to the war and for not being more forceful against Netanyahu as scores of civilians get killed in Gaza, and for continuing to supply Israel with weapons.

And although her policy stances on the war largely don’t stray far from Biden’s, Harris on Thursday notably signaled a future shift.

“We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering,” Harris said. “And I will not be silent.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance went on the “Megyn Kelly Show” podcast Friday to defend his past remarks where he questioned Democratic leaders, including Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for not having biological children, referring to them as “childless cat ladies.”

Vance made the comments in 2021, but they have recently resurfaced after former first lady Hillary Clinton shared a clip of the comments on X earlier this week — a little more than a week after Trump picked Vance as his running mate. Harris — who was among those Vance attacked — has secured commitments from enough delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee if they all honor their commitment when voting, according to ABC News reporting.

“We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance said in the 2021 Fox News interview.

The main argument Vance made during his Friday interview with Kelly is that the Democratic Party is “anti-family” and that his criticism was not directed at those who don’t have kids.

“The simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way,” Vance told Kelly.

“I explicitly said in my remarks, despite the fact that the media has lied about this, that this is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, didn’t have kids. This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child,” he added.

Vance’s original comments form 2021 mentioned the “choices” those Democrats had made that led them to be “miserable” and “childless cat ladies.”

While Vance claims Democrats are “anti-family and anti-child,” President Joe Biden and Harris have advocated for the child tax credit. The expanded child tax credit put in place during COVID expired in 2021 after pressure from Republicans and independent Joe Manchin. Democrats continue to fight to bring it back — with Biden calling for it to be put back in place in his FY2025 budget.

Vance said in the interview that he hopes parents realize he’s fighting for them.

“I’m proud to stand up for parents, and I hope the parents out there recognize that I’m a guy who wants to fight for you. I want to fight for your interests. I want to fight for your stake in the country. And that is what this is fundamentally about,” Vance said.

But Vance’s past comments have received massive backlash.

Kerstin Emhoff, mother to Cole and Ella Emhoff and the ex-wife of second gentleman Doug Emhoff, called Vance’s “cat lady” comments “baseless attacks.”

“For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it,” Kerstin Emhoff said.

Ella Emhoff, the daughter of second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Harris’ stepdaughter, posted on her story on Instagram, “I love my three parents” while highlighting her mom’s statement. She asked “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I.”

Buttigieg also reacted to Vance’s comments on CNN Tuesday night, telling anchor Kaitlin Collins that Vance shouldn’t comment on other people’s children.

“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg said. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”

ABC News’ Kelsey Walsh and MaryAlice Parks contributed to this report

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(SAN DIEGO) — During a visit to the southern border shared with California and Mexico on Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson ramped up attacks on the Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her a “San Francisco radical” who “bears responsibility for this disaster” as “border czar.”

The visit included a press conference along a border fence called “Whiskey 8” in San Ysidro, California — south of San Diego — with California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa as well as a tour of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities at the San Ysidro Port of Entry and Imperial Beach locations, Johnson’s office told ABC News.

“We’ve had a very interesting tour here at the San Diego sector. This has become in many ways the epicenter of the Biden-Harris border catastrophe. And now we’re very concerned in Congress that this illegal immigrant invasion is threatening even the integrity of our elections,” Johnson said at a press conference held along a border fence.

Johnson claimed the situation in San Diego has worsened.

In recent weeks, San Diego has had the highest number of encounters of any border region in the U.S., according to a senior CBP official. But those numbers have declined by 60 percent since the new asylum restrictions from the Biden administration were put in place earlier this summer.

“[Biden’s] executive order was too weak, too little too late, and it’s not solving the problem,” Johnson said Thursday.

Johnson said human trafficking and illegal narcotics are concerns at the border, specifically in San Diego.

Johnson’s visit came hours after the House approved a resolution to condemn Harris’ border policies. Six Democrats in vulnerable House races — Reps. Mary Peltola, Don Davis, Henry Cuellar, Yadira Caraveo, Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden — voted with Republicans to pass the measure.

Ahead of the vote, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the resolution “fake and fraudulent” during his weekly press conference.

“[Kamala Harris] was never assigned border czar. [Republicans] are making that up,” Jeffries said.

Johnson last visited the border in January 2024 when the speaker led a delegation of 64 Republicans to tour the Eagle Pass, Texas, port of entry.

The House has passed its own border bill called the Secure the Border Act, but rejected the bipartisan Senate border bill after Trump pressured Republicans to kill the deal.

ABC News’ Quinn Owen contributed to this report.

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