Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe, in his first appearance before Congress on Tuesday, struck a more candid tone than his predecessor, saying he was “embarrassed” by the way his agency handled planning the event in that an assassin tried to kill former President Trump.
Rowe, with a booming voice that at times rose with emotion, also clashed with Republicans on the panel while resisting calls from both sides of the aisle to quickly fire officials found culpable in planning or responding to the July 13 rally. in Butler, Pennsylvania. ., saying he would not take such action until the completion of a full review.
“I lay down on my stomach to assess his line of sight. What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe said at a joint meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“As a career law enforcement officer and 25-year veteran of the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that ceiling was not better protected to prevent similar failures from occurring in the future,” said Rowe, who took the role after Director of the Secret Service. Kimberly Cheatle resigned last week.
On the other hand, he called the lack of preparation “a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine that we actually live in a very dangerous world where people actually harm our wards. … I think it was a failure to challenge our own assumptions.”
It was a marked difference from Cheatle, who resigned the day after a disastrous appearance before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in which she was largely on the defensive, refusing to answer numerous questions about the shooting.
Rowe, by comparison, seemed well-prepared for the more than three-hour hearing, spending plenty of time going through the details of the attack and the numerous twists and turns in which the agency failed to respond to gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed at the scene.
In a conversation, he revealed that the Secret Service never received a warning from local police that the shooter was armed 30 seconds before Trump was shot, due to the fact that local police were not connected to the agency’s radio network.
He later lamented the agency’s failure to launch its drones to inspect the site at 3 pm (Brasília time) as planned. The drones were delayed until 5pm due to cellular network issues. Federal authorities said Crooks used a drone to survey the site hours before the rally.
“I have no explanation for this. It’s something that I feel like maybe we could have found it. We could have maybe stopped him. Maybe on that particular day he decided that this was not the day to do this because authorities had just found me flying my drone,” Rowe told lawmakers during the hearing.
“People fly drones all the time on the outskirts of our facilities, and we go out and talk to them, and see what their intentions are.”
Rowe also revealed that miscommunications between Secret Service agents and local law enforcement helped lead to the security lapse because agents did not listen to radio warnings about the shooter being armed until it was too late.
Local police radioed that Crooks was on the roof with a rifle 30 seconds before shots were fired at Trump, but “none of this information reached our country.” [network],” Rowe said.
“If we had this information, [agents] I would have been able to resolve this more quickly,” he said. “That information got stuck or isolated on that state and local channel.”
He said he has already ordered changes to how the agency prepares for future events, including an expanded use of drones to help protect against threats on rooftops and elsewhere and better communications between the Secret Service and state and local partners.
“To prevent similar lapses from occurring in the future, I have directed our staff to ensure that each venue security plan is thoroughly vetted by multiple experienced supervisors before it is implemented,” he noted. “It is clear to me that other security improvements could have strengthened our security at the Butler event site.”
Furthermore, rangefinders will be banned from future events, as Crooks was caught with such a device before Trump’s speech, raising suspicion among local police.
“It’s not currently on the list of prohibited items, but we’re going to make that change,” Rowe said.
At another point in the hearing, it was announced that the FBI discovered a social media account believed to be associated with criminals that contained anti-Semitic and anti-immigration ideas.
“Some of these comments, if attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant themes, advocate political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, who testified alongside by Rowe.
While the hearing represented a turning point for the Secret Service in many respects, it was not without fireworks, especially in two back-to-back heated exchanges with Republican Senators Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Texas).
Although several lawmakers have questioned why the service has yet to fire any agents, Hawley appeared to shake Rowe.
“The fact that a former president was shot, that a good American was dead, that other Americans were seriously injured is not enough of a mission failure for you to say that the person who decided that building should not be on the perimeter security should probably be reduced? Hawley said, referring to the AGR building from which Crooks fired.
But Rowe resisted calls to immediately fire staff in the middle of an investigation, saying “we need to allow the investigation to develop”.
“I want to be neutral and make sure we get to the bottom of it and interview everyone in order to determine if there was more than one person who perhaps exercised poor judgment,” Rowe said, adding that he didn’t want to “zero in on one or two individuals.” ”
Hawley responded, “You’ve been at work for a few days. You didn’t fire anyone.
At one point during the exchange, Rowe became emotional.
“I have lost sleep over this for the last 17 days, just like you, and I will tell you, Senator, that I will not rush to judgment, that people will be held accountable, and I will do it with integrity and not rush to judgment and put the people [out there to be] unfairly persecuted,” Rowe said.
GOP lawmakers, however, are unlikely to give up on the agency before any punishments are enacted, with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) at the top of the hearing summing up the mindset best: “Someone has to be fired. Nothing will change until someone loses their job.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
