The new head of the Secret Service said he’s “ashamed” his agency and local cops failed to secure the roof of a building in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman shot at and nearly assassinated former President Donald Trump.
Ronald Rowe, the Secret Service’s acting director, told Congress on Tuesday that the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility has launched a disciplinary investigation into the actions and decision-making of its agents involved in securing the July 13 rally.
“If this investigation reveals that Secret Service employees violated agency protocols, those employees will be held accountable to our disciplinary process,” he said.
Mr. Rowe also revealed the Secret Service may have been able to identify the shooter earlier and potentially stopped him if its counter-drone technology had worked as intended. Drone deployment was delayed due to cellular bandwidth issues, he said.
While he acknowledged the Secret Service had been looped in on reports of a suspicious person with a range finder, Mr. Rowe said Secret Service agents were never told the person was later spotted on the roof of a nearby building with a gun until after he fired at Mr. Trump.
Mr. Rowe visited the site of the Butler rally, climbed onto the roof and lay in the spot where 20-year-old Matthew Thomas Crooks was positioned when he shot at least eight rounds from an AR-15, grazing Mr. Trump in the ear, killing one rallygoer and injuring two others.
“What I saw made me ashamed,” Mr. Rowe said. “I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.”
Mr. Rowe’s testimony to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Judiciary committees comes a week after he was appointed to temporarily lead the Secret Service.
Kimberly Cheatle, the former director, resigned last week a day after she testified in the House, dodging questions and drawing bipartisan condemnation and calls for her to resign.
“I regret that information was not passed to Congress and the public sooner with greater frequency,” Mr. Rowe said.
He pledged his “full support” to the various investigations examining the assassination attempt and said he would hold a press conference as soon as this week to provide further updates to the public.
Mr. Rowe said he has begun assessing where the Secret Service failed and has already implemented “corrective actions” for security gaps that occurred on July 13. That includes directing agents to vet event site security plans with multiple experienced supervisors before implementation and expanding the use of drones at protected sites.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate also testified at the hearing, updating the committees on the bureau’s ongoing criminal investigation into Crooks. He said the FBI has conducted more than 460 interviews to date and has received more than 2,000 tips.
While Mr. Abbate revealed little new information, he did tell senators that the FBI recently uncovered a social media account they believe to be associated with Crooks containing more than 700 posts from 2019-2020. The FBI is still working to verify whether the account and posts belong to Crooks, but if they do, they contain some of the first major insights into his state of mind, he said.
“Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appeared to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” Mr. Abbate said.
Senators spent the majority of their time questioning Mr. Rowe. While they welcomed news of the disciplinary investigation, some were surprised no one in the agency had been let go yet.
“Somebody’s got to be fired,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “Nothing is going to change until somebody loses their job.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, got into a testy exchange with Mr. Rowe as he pressed him on why the agent in charge of security planning for the rally or other agents who may have failed in their roles still had their jobs.
“What more do you need to know?” the senator asked.
Mr. Rowe committed to holding people accountable after the disciplinary review, but said he wouldn’t rush to judgment because he doesn’t want agents to be “unfairly persecuted.”
In a separate exchange, Mr. Rowe said the team planning security for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month is a separate set of agents from headquarters in Washington.
“Our Pittsburgh field office staff, they are wearing this harder than anybody right now in the Secret Service,” he said. “They feel completely demoralized.”
Senate Homeland Security Chair Gary Peters, Michigan Democrat, said his panel wants to interview the Secret Service agents responsible for securing the Butler event, asking Mr. Rowe to make them available for depositions within days. Mr. Rowe committed to that.
Some GOP senators said in a press conference after the hearing that Congress does not have the time or staff needed to uncover answers quickly enough and called for an independent commission to investigate the assassination attempt.
“I think that this is something that the president could appoint [or] if the House and Senate leadership got together they could do as well,” said Sen. Roger Marshall, Kansas Republican.
Most importantly, the commission should be apolitical, comprised of “experts in the field” not associated with Republicans or Democrats, he said.
Mr. Marshall also cited “significant cultural breakdowns within the Secret Service” and said he thinks President Biden should appoint a “crisis management team” to overhaul the agency.
“I think he’s fine in his role right now as acting director,” he said of Mr. Rowe. “But I don’t think that he has the skill set or the objective ability to turn this Secret Service around.”
A key revelation in the hearing came during questioning from Sen. Charles E. Grassley. The Iowa Republican said he received documents from local law enforcement showing the Secret Service had planned to have someone operate a counter-drone on July 13.
“According to the Secret Service, the drone system was supposed to be operational at 3 p.m.,” Mr. Grassley said. “That day, however, we’ve been told by Secret Service that because of the cellular bandwidth problems, it wasn’t operational until about 5:20.”
Mr. Rowe confirmed the drone system “had operational difficulties and did not go operational until after 5 o’clock.”
Crooks flew his drone at 3:51 p.m. Had the Secret Service counter drone been operational at that point, it should have recognized Crooks’ system.
“We could have perhaps found him. We could have perhaps stopped him,” Mr. Rowe said, noting that the question “has cost me a lot of sleep.”
Mr. Grassley asked why the Secret Service’s technology is dependent on cellular networks, and why there was no backup plan in place.
Mr. Rowe was reluctant to detail the technology in a public hearing so as not to provide tactical information to potential bad actors. But he admitted the failure to have a counter-drone in the air is something he has struggled to understand.
“Moving forward, we are leveraging resources from the Department of Homeland Security and others to make sure that we have dedicated connectivity so that we’re not reliant on public domain — so that we can ensure that whatever assets we have in place, those assets are operational,” Mr. Rowe said.
Another issue senators honed in on was communication breakdowns that took place in the final few minutes before Mr. Trump was shot.
While local law enforcement working the rally first identified Crooks as a suspicious person at 4:26 p.m., according to Mr. Abbate’s timeline of events, it was not until 6:08 p.m. that they observed him on the roof.
At 6:11 p.m., one local officer hoisted another to get a visual on the roof and Crooks pointed a gun at the officer. That’s the first time local law enforcement spotted Crooks with a weapon, and the officers immediately radioed in that the man on the roof was armed with a “long gun,” Mr. Abbate said.
Mr. Rowe said that radio communication never made it to the Secret Service.
“It appears that information was stuck or siloed in that state or local channel,” he said. “It is troubling to me that we did not get that information as quickly as we should have.”
Before the shots were fired, the Secret Service was only told that local law enforcement was working on an issue in the general direction of the building. Had agents known someone was on the roof with a gun, they would have removed Mr. Trump from the stage, Mr. Rowe said.
“Not having that real-time information is what really hindered us,” he said.
Mr. Rowe said he has directed resources to improving protective site communications, particularly with our state and local partners. But he also said it is not easy to set up direct communications with all law enforcement partners working a big event.
“For a one-day or an eight-hour operation, it requires a lot,” Mr. Rowe said. “It would be months of planning, of knowing that we are going to go to this particular jurisdiction and that we’re going to need your frequencies, the keys, and we’re going to need to load you into our radios.”
Senators said that is something the Homeland Security Committee should look at addressing.
“Not just in an executive protection context, but any complex incident response, any counterterrorism, any natural disaster context, the inability swiftly to link personnel from disparate jurisdictions at the local, state and federal level is a vulnerability for the nation,” said Sen. Jon Ossoff, Georgia Democrat.
• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.
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