Acting U.S Secret Service Director, Ronald Rowe has told lawmakers that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was a “failure on multiple levels.”
Appearing before a meeting of the Senate judiciary committee and homeland security and governmental affairs committee, Rowe said that he considered it indefensible that the roof used by the gunman was unsecured.
Investigators believe 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight shots in Trump’s direction from an AR-style rifle after scaling the roof of a building of some 135 meters (147 yards) from where Trump was speaking.
Rowe said that he had recently visited the site of the rally where Trump was shot.
He told lawmakers, “I laid in a prone position to evaluate his line of sight. What I saw made me ashamed.”
“As a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year veteran with the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured to prevent similar lapses from occurring in the future.”
Ronald Rowe
Rowe accepted blame for the Secret Service’s mistakes while also criticizing local law enforcement for not sharing information that a gunman had been spotted on a roof near the rally site in the minutes before the shooting, AP reported.
That information, Rowe said, had been kept “siloed” among the local officers on the scene.
“It is troubling to me that we did not get that information as quickly as we should have,” Rowe said.
He added, “We didn’t know that there was this incident going on.”
The FBI’s Deputy Director, Paul Abbate, testified at the same hearing that investigators still have not nailed down Crooks’ definitive motive.
He said that a social media account believed to be associated with the gunman suspected in the assassination attempt espoused political violence and included antisemitic and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The posts were from the 2019 and 2020 timeframe, when Crooks would have been in high school.
Moreover, Rowe told the lawmakers that he has implemented “corrective actions” to the Secret Service since stepping into the leadership role, including visiting the Butler rally site.
Cheatle never visited the site, a fact for which House Oversight members blasted her.
Rowe took over as acting Director after Kimberly Cheatle resigned from the position following her lackluster testimony before the House Oversight Committee.
Cheatle angered both Democrats and Republicans with her inability to share details of the shooting due to it being an “ongoing investigation.”
Graham Calls For “Someone” To Be Fired
Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member, Lindsey Graham expressed frustration with the fact that no one had been disciplined or removed from their position in the weeks after the shooting.
Graham said that if something like this happened in the military, “a lot of people would be fired. And if a lot of people are not fired, the system failed yet again.”
He asserted, “Somebody’s got to be fired. Nothing’s going to change until someone loses their job.”
Also, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, stated, “Isn’t it the fact that the former President was shot, that a good American is dead, that other Americans were critically wounded — isn’t that enough mission failure for you to say to the person who decided that that building should not be the security perimeter, probably ought to be stepped down?”
Rowe responded that he has “lost sleep over this for the last 17 days” and that he would not be rushed “to judgment” by Congress.
Nonetheless, he assured lawmakers that “people will be held accountable.”
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