Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe is testifying on Capitol Hill Tuesday as Congressional lawmakers grill him over alleged security failures in the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally earlier this month in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Rowe said that he traveled to the site of the rally and went up on the rooftop where the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was able to fire off that shots that struck Trump in the ear, killed one rally attendee and left two others wounded before Crooks was killed by Secret Service agents.
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Rowe said he was "ashamed" that the rooftop was not secured and that the incident was a result of "failure on multiple levels."
"We made an assumption that there was going to be uniformed presence out there, that there would be sufficient eyes to cover that, that there was going to be counter-sniper teams in the AGR building," Rowe said in reference to the building where Crooks fired from. "And I can assure you that we're not going to make that mistake again."
He added that the Secret Service received "no information regarding a weapon on the roof" prior to gunfire erupting.
Rowe took over as acting director of the Secret Service last week when former Director Kimberly Cheatle announced she was stepping down. Her resignation came a day after she faced similar intense questioning from a congressional panel about the assassination attempt, which she called the Secret Service's "most significant operational failure" in decades.
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Kevin Rojek, FBI special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office, said investigators are still looking into Thomas Matthew Crooks’ motive after conducting more than 450 interviews and examining more than 2,100 tips, including images, videos, documents and audio recordings.
In a review of Crooks’ gaming sites, messaging apps, social media and online search history, the FBI said the shooter searched power plants, mass shooting events, information on IEDs and the attempted assassination of the Slovakian prime minister earlier this year.
According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, the agency has dedicated half of its field offices to the case. That investigation is just one of numerous current probes into the assassination attempt.
