Not long after becoming the new leader of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe traveled to Butler, Pa., to visit the rally site where a 20-year-old gunman tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump. On the same roof where the gunman took aim, Rowe lay in a prone position to see the line of sight for himself.
“What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe told lawmakers Tuesday, recalling his visceral reaction to realizing how easy it was for the gunman to lob shots at the former president. “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.”
The assassination attempt, which left a spectator dead and two others critically hurt, marked the most stunning failure since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. Trump was whisked off the stage with a bloody bullet wound to the ear.
Appearing before two Senate committees, Rowe said the Secret Service has taken steps to enhance security for its protectees, including by expanding the use of drones to help detect threats on roofs and other elevated areas. Rowe said he has also ordered the maximum use of Secret Service special agents to “address this heightened security environment” and has taken steps to improve communication between agents and local law enforcement.
His testimony came a week after his predecessor, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned under pressure from lawmakers frustrated with her lack of answers during a blistering appearance before the House Oversight Committee. Rowe was named acting director after her resignation.
In contrast with Cheatle, Rowe appeared forceful and more forthcoming, even as some exchanges with lawmakers grew heated.
On Tuesday, Rowe said he would hold Secret Service personnel accountable if they were found to have violated protocols, but he didn’t say what, if any, disciplinary action had already been taken.
Several investigations are under way into how Thomas Matthew Crooks, armed with an AR-15 rifle, was able to open fire from the roof of a building roughly 400 feet away from where Trump spoke. A Secret Service sniper team shot back, killing him.
No clear motive has emerged, officials have said. FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate revealed during the same hearing Tuesday that investigators are studying a social-media account associated with Crooks in 2019 or 2020 that espouses political violence, antisemitism and anti-immigrant themes. Crooks otherwise left a very small social-media footprint and no writings that clearly establish his mindset ahead of the attack on Trump.
In the weeks since the shooting, the Secret Service has confronted questions about why Trump was allowed to take the stage even though Crooks had been identified as suspicious more than an hour earlier—with a range finder and backpack.
Rowe said Tuesday that neither the Secret Service counter sniper teams nor members of Trump’s security detail had any knowledge that there was a man with a firearm on the roof of the nearby American Glass Research building—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,” Rowe said.
Abbate said local law enforcement saw that Crooks was armed about a half a minute before shots rang out. But, in his own testimony Tuesday, Rowe said that notification didn’t reach the Secret Service until it was too late.
“I think that they were in the midst of dealing with a very critical situation, and they articulated that over the radio, as I understand it,” Rowe said. “However, it was never relayed over to us.”
In testimony last week, the head of the Pennsylvania state police said two officers from the Butler County Emergency Services Unit—stationed in the same building where Crooks later fired from a rooftop—had identified him as suspicious and left their posts to help search for him.
If they hadn’t left their posts to join in the search, the officers likely would have been able to see Crooks take his rooftop firing position, Rowe said Tuesday.
“I’m not saying that they should have neutralized him, but if they’d have just held their post and looked left, maybe … There’s a lot of maybes there,” he said.
Among other security lapses: More than two hours before Trump spoke, Crooks was able to fly a drone in the vicinity of the rally site for about 11 minutes. The Secret Service was supposed to use a counterdrone system at 3 p.m. that day, but it wasn’t operational until after 5 p.m. because of cellular bandwidth problems.
The system could have helped law enforcement locate Crooks and ask him about his drone use hours before the shooting, Rowe said, adding that the Secret Service is looking for ways to avoid similar connectivity problems in the future.
“We could have maybe stopped him,” he said. “Maybe on that particular day he would have decided this isn’t the day to do it, because law enforcement just found me flying my drone.”
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