Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe in his first appearance before Congress on Tuesday struck a more candid tone than his predecessor, saying he was “ashamed” of the way his agency handled planning for the event where an assassin tried to kill former President Trump.
Rowe, in a booming voice that at times rose with emotion, also clashed with Republicans on the panel while resisting calls from both sides of the aisle to swiftly fire employees found at fault in the planning or response to the July 13 rally at Butler, Pa., saying he would not take such action until the completion of a thorough review.
“I laid in a prone position to evaluate his line of sight. What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe told a joint meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“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 to prevent similar lapses from occurring in the future,” said Rowe, who took his position after Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned last week.
At another turn, he called the lack of preparedness “a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine that we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually harm to our protectees. … I think it was a failure to challenge our own assumptions.”
It was a marked difference from Cheatle, who resigned a day after a disastrous appearance before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in which she was largely on the defensive, declining to answer numerous questions about the shooting.
Rowe, in comparison, appeared well-prepared for the more than three-hour hearing, spending ample time walking through the details of the attack and the numerous turns at which the agency failed to respond to shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed at the scene.
In one exchange, he revealed the Secret Service never received a warning from local police that the shooter was armed 30 seconds before Trump was shot due to local police not being linked to the agency’s radio network.
He later expressed regret over the agency’s failure to launch its drones to survey the site at 3 p.m. EDT as planned. The drones were delayed until 5 p.m. due to cell network issues. Federal officials have said Crooks used a drone to survey the site hours before the rally.
“I have no explanation for it. It is something that I feel as though we could have perhaps found him. We could have maybe stopped him. 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,” Rowe told lawmakers during the hearing.
“People fly drones all the time on the peripheries of our sites, and we go out and we talk to them, and we ascertain what their intentions are.”
Rowe also revealed communication gaps between Secret Service agents and local law enforcement personnel helped lead to the security lapse because agents did not hear radio warnings about the shooter being armed until it was too late.
Local police had radioed that Crooks was on the roof with a rifle 30 seconds before shots were fired at Trump, but “none of that information ever made it over our [network],” Rowe said.
“If we’d had that information, [agents] would have been able to address it more quickly,” he said. “That information was stuck or siloed in that state and local channel.”
He said he has already ordered changes in how the agency prepares for future events, including an expanded use of drones to help protect from threats on roofs and elsewhere and better communications between the Secret Service and state and local partners.
“To prevent similar lapses from occurring in the future, I directed our personnel to ensure every event site security plan is thoroughly vetted by multiple experienced supervisors before it is implemented,” he noted. “It is clear to me that other protective enhancements could have strengthened our security at the Butler event site.”
In addition, range finders will be barred at future events, given that Crooks was spotted with such a device ahead of Trump’s speech, arousing suspicion with local police.
“Currently it is not on the list of prohibited items, but we’re going to make that change,” Rowe said.
At another point in the hearing, it was announced that the FBI uncovered a social media account believed to be associated with Crooks that contained antisemitic and anti-immigration ideas.
“Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, who testified alongside Rowe.
While the hearing represented a turnaround for the Secret Service in many ways, it was not fireworks free, particularly in two back-to-back heated exchanges with GOP Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Texas).
Although numerous lawmakers questioned why the service has yet to fire any agents, Hawley appeared to agitate Rowe.
“Isn’t the fact that a former president was shot, that a good American is dead, that other Americans were critically wounded — isn’t that enough mission failure for you to say that the person who decided that building should not be in the security perimeter probably ought to be stepped down?” Hawley said, referencing the AGR building Crooks fired from.
But Rowe resisted the calls to immediately fire personnel in the midst of an investigation, saying “we need to allow the investigation to play out.”
“I want to be neutral and make sure that we get to the bottom of it and interview everybody in order to determine if there was more than one person who perhaps exercised bad judgment,” Rowe said, adding he did not want to “zero in on one or two individuals.”
Hawley shot back, “You’ve been on the job a few days so far. You’ve fired nobody.”
At one point in the exchange, Rowe became emotional.
“I have lost sleep over that for the last 17 days, just like you have, and I will tell you, senator, that I will not rush to judgment, that people will be held accountable, and I will do so with integrity and not rush to judgment and put people [out there to be] unfairly persecuted,” Rowe said.
GOP lawmakers, however, are unlikely to let up on the agency before any punishments are enacted, with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) at the top of the hearing summing up the mindset best: “Somebody’s got to be fired. Nothing’s going to change until somebody loses their job.”