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.
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“What I Saw Made Me Ashamed,” Says Secret Service Acting Director
Ronald L. Rowe Jr., acting director of the U.S. Secret Service, pointed to problems with communications between law enforcement agencies and the Secret Service as the root cause of the failure to protect former President Donald Trump during the shooting on July 13.
One of my first actions as acting director was traveling to the Butler farm show site to better understand how our protection failed. I went to the roof of the AGR building where the assailant fired shots and 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. Neither the Secret Service countersniper teams nor members of the former president’s security detail had any knowledge that there was a man on the roof of the AGR building with a firearm. It is my understanding those personnel were not aware the assailant had a firearm until they heard gunshots. Prior to that, they were operating with the knowledge that local law enforcement was working an issue of a suspicious individual prior to the shots being fired. I think this was a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine that we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually want to do harm to our protectees. I think it was a failure to challenge our own assumptions, the assumptions that we know our partners are going to do everything they can. And they do this every day. But we didn’t challenge our own assumptions of we assume that someone’s going to cover that. We assume that there’s going to be uniform presence. We didn’t challenge that internally during that advance.
Ronald L. Rowe Jr., acting director of the U.S. Secret Service, pointed to problems with communications between law enforcement agencies and the Secret Service as the root cause of the failure to protect former President Donald Trump during the shooting on July 13.Credit
The acting Secret Service director told senators on 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 J. 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 critical question about that day: Who was supposed to be watching that roof?
In one of his first actions as acting director, Mr. Rowe said he went to the site of the shooting in Butler, Pa., and specifically to the warehouse roof that the gunman used, which had been unmanned and apparently unwatched.
Mr. Rowe said he had climbed onto the building and lain on the roof so he could see the direct line that the shooter, later identified as Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa., had to Mr. Trump.
“What I saw made me ashamed,” Mr. 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 that 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. Rowe said.
The Butler County district attorney, who oversees the local countersnipers who were at the rally, has previously said that the Secret Service never told his agents to cover the roof Mr. Crooks used.
Mr. Rowe described problems with communications among law enforcement agencies that ultimately delayed critical 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, 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.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Eileen Sullivan covers breaking news, the Justice Department, the trials against Donald J. Trump and the Biden administration. More about Eileen Sullivan
Luke Broadwater covers Congress with a focus on congressional investigations. More about Luke Broadwater
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Source: nytimes.com
