WASHINGTON – When acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. visited the site of the campaign rally where a gunman tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump that day in mid-July, he climbed flat on his stomach onto the roof to gauge the shooter’s line of sight.
“What I saw embarrassed me,” Rowe told U.S. senators on Tuesday. “As a police officer and a 25-year Secret Service veteran, I cannot justify why the roof was not better secured.”
Rowe recounted his trip to Butler, Pennsylvania, after his appointment as acting director on July 23, to testify at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees to investigate the security failures that led to the assassination. Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate also testified.
It was the first Senate hearing on the attempted assassination since a gunman with an AR-15 rifle killed one rally attendee, wounded two others and shot Trump in the ear at a campaign rally in Butler on July 13. The 20-year-old gunman was killed 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 beliefs without fear of violence, and political candidates for our nation’s highest office should be able to trust that their safety will never be compromised for their service,” the Michigan Democrat added.
Peters launched a cross-party investigation into the security deficiencies that led to the attack, in addition to senior Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky. It is one of several congressional investigations examining law enforcement failures that day.
Rowe took up his post after Kimberly Cheatle has resigned as director last week. The day before her resignation, Cheatle said House Committee on Oversight and Accountabilitywhere lawmakers from both parties criticized her for the agency’s failure to prevent the assassination attempt on Trump.
In lithe of the fierce criticism, many lawmakers called on Cheatle to resign. The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer of Kentucky, and the ranking member Jamie Raskin of Maryland called on her to resign in a joint letter shortly after this hearing.
Rowe said the attempted murder was “a failure to realize that we actually live in a very dangerous world where people actually want to harm our charges.”
“I think we have failed to challenge our own assumptions – the assumption that our partners will do everything in their power, and they do that every day,” he added.
Further details about the shooter
The senators wanted to find out what went wrong, what policies apply to real-time information sharing between the Secret Service and local law enforcement during an event, and whether the Secret Service is developing a security plan for the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago that takes into account lessons learned from the July shooting.
Neither the Secret Service sniper teams nor members of Trump’s security staff “had any knowledge that a man with a firearm was on the roof of the … building,” Rowe said.
Rowe said, “Previously, they believed local law enforcement was already working on a suspect prior to the shooting.”
Abbate noted that while there is no conclusive evidence as to how the shooter got the gun onto the roof, the evidence so far suggests he likely had the rifle in a backpack.
Social media account associated with the shooter
The FBI has since discovered a social media account that is believed to be linked to the shooter, Abbate said, but they are still working to confirm that the account belongs to him.
More than 700 comments were posted by the social media account “around 2019, 2020,” when the shooter must have been in his mid-teens, and some of the comments “appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant themes, advocate political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” Abbate said.
Abbate said that while nothing could be ruled out, the FBI’s investigation has not revealed a motive, co-conspirators or people with prior knowledge. The FBI has so far conducted more than 460 interviews, received more than 2,000 tips from the public, executed search warrants and seized electronic storage devices.
Congressional efforts
Tuesday’s hearing came a day after U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries announced 13 legislators It is a cross-party task force to investigate the attempted assassination. The resolution establishing the commission calls for a final report by mid-December.
The task force will be chaired by Representative Mike Kelly, a Republican from Pennsylvania whose district includes Butler.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada introduced a cross-party bill last week This would require Senate confirmation of Secret Service directors and limit their terms to ten years.
