Acting U.S. Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. testifies before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees on July 30, 2024. Senators grilled Rowe and Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate about the events leading to the July 13 attempted assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — When acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. visited the site of the campaign rally where a gunman attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, he went up to the roof, lying flat on his stomach, to evaluate the shooter’s line of sight that mid-July day.
“What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe told U.S. senators Tuesday. “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.”
Rowe recounted his trip to Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said took place after being named acting director July 23, at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees examining the security failures that led to the assassination attempt. Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate also testified.
It was the first Senate hearing on the attempted assassination since a shooter killed one rallygoer, injured two others and shot Trump’s ear using an AR-15-style rifle during a campaign event 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 Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“Americans should be able to attend a political rally and express their political beliefs without fear of violence, and political candidates for our nation’s highest office should be confident that their safety will never be compromised for their service,” the Michigan Democrat added.
Peters launched a bipartisan investigation into the security failures leading to the assassination attempt alongside ranking Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky. It’s one of several congressional inquiries examining the failures of law enforcement that day.
Rowe stepped into his post after Kimberly Cheatle resigned as director last week. The day before her resignation, Cheatle testified in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle berated her over the agency’s failures to prevent the attempted assassination of Trump.
Facing heavy criticism, many lawmakers called on Cheatle to resign. House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and ranking member Jamie Raskin of Maryland also urged her to step down in a joint letter shortly after that hearing.
Rowe said the attempted assassination was “a failure to imagine that we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually want to do harm to our protectees.”
“I think it was a failure to challenge our own assumptions — the assumptions that we know our partners are going to do everything they can, and they do this every day,” he added.
Senators sought to uncover what went wrong, what policies are in place to facilitate 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 what they learned from the July shooting.
Neither the Secret Service counter sniper teams nor members of Trump’s security detail “had any knowledge that there was a man on the roof of the … building with a firearm,” according to Rowe.
Rowe said “prior to that, they were operating with the knowledge that local law enforcement was working an issue of a suspicious individual prior to the shots being fired.”
Abbate noted that despite not having any definitive evidence as to how the gunman got the weapon onto the roof, they believe based on what they have gathered thus far that he likely had the rifle in a backpack.
Meanwhile, Abbate said the FBI uncovered a social media account believed to be associated with the shooter, though they are still working to verify that the account belonged to him.
More than 700 comments were posted from the social media account “in about the 2019, 2020 timeframe,” when the shooter would have been in his mid-teens, and some of the comments “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” Abbate said.
Abbate said though nothing has been ruled out, the FBI’s investigation has not identified any motive, co-conspirators or people with advanced knowledge. The FBI has so far held more than 460 interviews, received over 2,000 tips from the public, executed search warrants and seized electronic media.
Tuesday’s hearing came the day after U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced 13 lawmakers comprising a bipartisan task force to investigate the attempted assassination. The resolution creating the panel requires a final report by mid-December.
Rep. Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican whose district includes Butler, will chair the task force.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada introduced bipartisan legislation last week that would require Senate confirmation of Secret Service directors and limit them to one term of 10 years.
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