WASHINGTON — When acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe Jr. visited the site of a campaign rally where an attacker tried to kill former President Donald Trump in mid-July, he went onto a roof and lay flat on his stomach to assess the shooter’s range of vision.
“What I saw embarrassed me,” Rowe told U.S. senators Tuesday. “As a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year veteran of the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.”
Rowe recounted his trip to Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said took place after he was named acting director on July 23, during a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees examining the security failures that led to the attempted bombing. FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate also testified.
It was the first Senate hearing on the attempted assassination since a gunman killed one rallygoer, wounded two others and shot Trump in the ear with an AR-15-style rifle during a campaign event in Butler on July 13. The 20-year-old attacker died at the scene.
“Let me be clear: This was an attack on our democracy,” said Senator Gary Peters, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Americans should be able to attend political rallies and express their political views without fear of violence, and political candidates for the highest office in our country should be assured that their safety will never be endangered because of their service,” the Michigan Democrat added.
Peter a bipartisan investigation has been launched to the security lapses that led to the attempted assassination Republican Ranking Rand Paul Kentucky. It is one of several congressional inquiries examining the failures of law enforcement that day.
Rowe took up his position after Kimberly Cheatle has resigned from her position as director last week. The day before her resignation, Cheatle testified before House Committee on Oversight and Accountabilitywhere lawmakers from both sides of the political spectrum have sharply criticized her for the agency’s failure to prevent an assassination attempt on Trump.
In the face of weighty criticism, many lawmakers have called on Cheatle to resign. House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and Ranking Member Jamie Raskin of Maryland have also he urged her to resign in a joint letter sent shortly after the hearing.
Rowe said the attempted attack was “a mistaken notion that we actually live in a very dangerous world where people really want to do harm to those in our care.”
“I think we failed to challenge our own assumptions — the assumptions that we know our partners will do their best, and that they do it every day,” he added.
More details about the shooter
The senators wanted to determine what went wrong, what policies were put in place to facilitate real-time information sharing between the Secret Service and local law enforcement during the event, and whether the Secret Service was developing a security plan for the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago that took into account lessons learned from the July shooting.
According to Rowe, neither the Secret Service anti-sniper teams nor members of Trump’s security detail “were aware that there was a man on the roof of the … building with a firearm.”
Rowe said they “operated with the knowledge that local law enforcement was working on a suspicious individual prior to the shots being fired.”
Abbate noted that while there is no clear evidence of how the attacker got the gun onto the roof, based on what they have learned so far, police believe he likely had the rifle in a backpack.
Social media account linked to shooter
Meanwhile, Abbate said the FBI has discovered a social media account that is believed to be linked to the shooter, though they are still working to confirm that the account belonged to him.
More than 700 comments were posted on the social media account “between 2019 and 2020,” when the shooter was about 15 years ancient, and some of the comments “appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant themes, incitement to political violence, and are described as extreme in nature,” Abbate said.
Abbate said that while nothing has been ruled out, the FBI investigation has not identified any motive, co-conspirators or people with advanced knowledge. The FBI has conducted more than 460 interviews, received more than 2,000 tips from the public, executed search warrants and seized electronic media.
Congressional Efforts
Tuesday’s hearing came a day after U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries announced 13 legislators consisting of a bipartisan task force to investigate the attempted coup. The resolution establishing the commission requires a final report by mid-December.
Representative Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican whose district includes Butler, will chair the task force.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada bipartisan legislation was introduced last week This would require Senate confirmation of Secret Service director nominees and limit their terms to one, ten-year terms.
