Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said he “cannot defend why that roof was not better secured” at the rally where a gunman opened fire at Donald Trump from 500 feet away.
Rowe testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee on Tuesday and said he had visited the rally site in Butler, Pennsylvania — something his predecessor had not done.
“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,” Rowe said in his opening statement to the joint Senate panel.
The shooting was a “failure on multiple levels.”
Rowe is testifying days after he was tapped to serve in the top Secret Service role. His predecessor tendered her resignation one day after she testified on June 22 before the House Oversight Committee, prompting lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to call for her to step down.
He acknowledged the ongoing investigations into the shooting. “I pledge my full support to those inquiries…so that the American people have a full understanding of what happened, leading up to and during” the events of the July 13,” Rowe continued.
“This is a failure of the Secret Service,” Rowe later said plainly.
“That roof should’ve had better coverage and we will get to the bottom of whether there were any policy violations,” Rowe later said. “I could not, I will not, and I cannot understand why there was not better coverage or at least somebody looking at that roof line.”
That Pittsburgh Secret Service team feels “completely demoralized,” Rowe said.
Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar asked Rowe to explain “what went wrong” to dispel conspiracy theories around the shooting.
“This was a failure of imagination. The failure to imagine that we actually do live in a dangerous world where people actually do want to do harm to our protectees…We didn’t challenge our own assumptions. We assumed that someone was going to cover that,” Rowe testified.
Rowe became the acting director after Kimberly Cheatle stepped down last week. Lawmakers called for her resignation after she called the tragedy the “most significant operational failure” in decades in her testimony to the House.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, opened fire from a nearby rooftop into the Butler, Pennsylvania rally venue, killing one, striking Trump, and injuring two others. A Secret Service agent killed Crooks at the scene.
Cheatle acknowledged that the Secret Service was informed of a suspicious person two to five times before the shooting — and that the roof where Crooks fired his AR-15-style rifle was considered a security vulnerability.
Trump confirmed that he would be participating in an interview with the FBI about the assassination attempt.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate also testified. He said “no motive” has been identified.
Senator Laphonza Butler asked how Crooks was able to get a rifle on the rooftop.
“We don’t have definitive evidence,” Abbate said, adding that he “likely had it in the backpack.” He said part of the rifle would have stuck out of the bag, since it would not have fully fit inside the backpack, yet no video footage or eye witness noted seeing anything popping out of it.
“It’s possible that he broke the rifle down” and put it in the backpack, Abbate suggested. But, he said, no evidence has concluded that is what happened.
“If this happened in the military, a lot of people would be fired,” said South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Somebody’s gotta be fired. Nothing’s going to change until somebody loses their job.”