Acting Secret Service Chief Admits Security Failures Before Trump Shooting

"Ronald Rowe Jr. said communications problems between the Secret Service and local law enforcement led to a failure to protect former President Donald Trump during a shooting on July 13.

On the day that a 20-year-old man tried to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump in rural Pennsylvania, the Secret Service expected that local countersnipers would protect the warehouse roof where the gunman was able to take aim. They did not.

“They should have been on the roof,” the acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald L. Rowe Jr., told senators on Tuesday.

But Mr. Rowe also acknowledged to lawmakers that it was the Secret Service’s responsibility to make that expectation clear to the local countersnipers there that day and that his agency might have failed to do so.

It was the most straightforward explanation yet of what led to the glaring security failure that allowed a would-be assassin to fire eight shots at Mr. Trump, injuring him and others and killing a rally attendee, at the Butler Farm Show grounds on July 13. Yet Mr. Rowe often acknowledged to lawmakers that he was baffled by some of the decisions made before and on the day of the shooting, including some by his own agency.

His testimony about the delineation of responsibility for protecting a roof that was within a rifle bullet’s range of Mr. Trump highlighted a weak link in the protection of the country’s leaders. While the Secret Service relies on local law enforcement agencies for assistance, these officers are typically not experienced in the requirements of protective operations and therefore need detailed instructions from the federal agency.

“We need to be very direct to our local law enforcement counterparts that they understand exactly what their expectation is,” he said.

Ultimately, Mr. 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.”

His comments were sure to rankle some of the officers who assisted at the rally. Details about what happened have been inconsistent and confusing, as the multiple federal, state and local law enforcement agencies involved have offered their own accounts, leading to a dizzying array of finger-pointing.

In Butler, Mr. Rowe said, two local countersnipers were in one of the warehouses, watching the crowd from windows at the time the shooter, later identified as Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., ascended to the roof of the adjacent warehouse. He said that, in his view, the countersnipers would have been able to see Mr. Crooks on the roof if they had looked left out the window.

“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.” Mr. Rowe said, adding that in the future, the Secret Service would ensure that local and state law enforcement are on roofs.

Local law enforcement officials have previously said the countersnipers were given permission from the Secret Service to surveil the fenced-in grounds from the warehouse windows because of the heat that day.

Richard Goldinger, the Butler County district attorney who oversees the local countersnipers who were at the rally, issued a statement previously saying that the Secret Service never told his agents to cover the roof that Mr. Crooks used. “I stand by my prior statement that that was not part of their duties that day,” Mr. Goldinger said Tuesday.

During the three-hour joint hearing before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Judiciary committees, Mr. Rowe offered more details about the sequence of events on July 13 than his predecessor, Kimberly A. Cheatle, did a week ago, drawing bipartisan outrage from House lawmakers. Ms. Cheatle resigned the following day.

Mr. Rowe described problems with communications among law enforcement agencies that delayed critical information from being relayed to the Secret Service. There was a 30-second window between when local law enforcement saw Mr. Crooks with a firearm and when Mr. Crooks started shooting. It would have been enough time for a Secret Service countersniper to react, Mr. Rowe said, but only if the countersniper had received that information contemporaneously.

“It appears that that information was stuck or siloed in that state and local channel,” Mr. Rowe said, drawing questions from lawmakers about why the various law enforcement agencies could not communicate with one another better.

All the Secret Service knew, he said, was that local law enforcement was working on an issue regarding a suspicious person. While the Secret Service received a photograph of Mr. Crooks about 30 minutes before the shooting, he was one of several who had drawn the eye of local law enforcement that day.

The agency also had plans to use equipment that would have detected the gunman’s use of a drone hours before the shooting. But problems with the local cellular service delayed that from happening. Mr. Rowe said this is one issue that he has lost sleep over.

“I have no explanation for it,” Mr. Rowe said. “We could have maybe stopped him.”

Multiple investigations are underway into what happened on July 13 and what led Mr. Crooks to try to kill Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has complimented his Secret Service detail for its bravery. But overall, he said, there were holes.

“Nobody on that roof and, and no coordination with the police, it seems to be coming out that there was absolutely no coordination,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday during an interview with a New York radio station. “And that’s, that’s a pretty bad thing, when you think of it.”

In some instances on Tuesday, Mr. Rowe had the same questions as lawmakers.

Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, asked why the Secret Service did not use a surveillance drone.

Mr. Rowe replied, “It appears there was an offer by a state or local agency to fly a drone on our behalf, and I’m getting to the bottom as to why we turned that down.”

Senator Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, asked why the building Mr. Crooks was on, about 450 feet from Mr. Trump’s podium, was not included in the Secret Service security zone in the first place.

“That’s a question that I’ve asked, senator,” Mr. Rowe said. “I’ve been there and walked it. I had a hard time understanding why.”

In one of his first actions as acting director, Mr. Rowe said, he went to the site of the shooting and specifically to the warehouse roof that the gunman used. Mr. Rowe climbed onto the building and lay on the roof so he could see the direct line that the shooter had to Mr. Trump.

“What I saw made me ashamed,” Mr. Rowe said. “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.”" [1]

1. Acting Secret Service Chief Admits Security Failures Before Trump Shooting. Sullivan, Eileen; Broadwater, Luke.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 30, 2024.