WASHINGTON — The acting Secret Service director told senators Tuesday that the agency failed on July 13 by not having a countersniper focused on the roof where a would-be assassin fired eight shots at former President Donald Trump, injuring him and others and killing a rally attendee.
While Ronald L. Rowe Jr., the acting director, provided a more complete account of what happened that day than his predecessor did a week ago, he failed to answer a crucial question about that day: Who was supposed to be watching that roof?
In one of his first actions as acting director, Rowe said he went to the site of the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and specifically to the warehouse roof that the gunman used, which had been unmanned and apparently unwatched.
Rowe said he climbed onto the building and laid on the roof so he could see the direct line that the shooter, later identified as Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, had to Trump.
“What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe told a joint hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary committees. “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.”
He said the Secret Service would ensure that local and or state law enforcement are on roofs in the future. In Butler, there were two local countersnipers in one of the warehouse buildings, watching the crowd from windows, at the time Crooks ascended to the roof of the adjacent warehouse.
“We are looking at this, and they should have been on the roof, and the fact they were in the building is something I’m still trying to understand,” Rowe said.
The Butler County district attorney, who oversees local countersnipers who were at the rally, has previously said that the Secret Service never told his agents to cover the roof Crooks used.
Rowe described problems with communications among law enforcement agencies that ultimately delayed crucial information from being relayed to the Secret Service. He said that the agency’s plans to use equipment that would have detected the gunman’s use of a drone hours earlier was stymied by the local cellular service.
Ultimately, Rowe said, the events of July 13 were a result of “a failure of imagination” to see that “we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually want to do harm to our protectee.”
“But we didn’t challenge our own assumptions,” he said. “We assumed that someone is going to cover that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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