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Ronald Rowe Jr. said poor communications between the Secret Service and local law enforcement resulted in former President Donald Trump not being protected in a July 3 shooting.
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One of my first moves as interim director was to travel to the Butler Agriculture Expo site to better understand how our policy failed. I went to the roof of the AGR building where the attacker fired and lay face down to assess his line of sight. What I saw made me ashamed. As a career law enforcement officer and 25-year veteran of the Secret Service, I don’t understand why this roof wasn’t better secured. Neither the anti-sniper groups of the Secret Service nor the members of the former president’s security team knew that there was an armed man on the roof of the AGR building. As I understand it, those staff members did not know the shooter had a firearm until they heard gunshots. Prior to this, they operated with the wisdom that local authorities were dealing with a suspicious individual before shots were fired. I think it’s a lack of imagination, a lack of belief that we really live in a very harmful world where other people really need to harm our burdens. I think we have failed to challenge our own assumptions, the assumption that we know our partners will do everything they can. And they do it every day. But we haven’t questioned our own assumptions that someone is going to cover this up. We assume that there will be a uniform presence. We did not discuss it internally during this progress.
By Eileen Sullivan and Luke Broadwater
Reporting from Washington
The day a 20-year-old tried to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump in rural Pennsylvania, the Secret Service expected local snipers to climb onto the roof of the warehouse, where the shooter could aim. They didn’t.
“They’ve been on the roof,” Acting Secret Service Director Ronald L. Rowe Jr. told senators on Tuesday.
But Rowe also told lawmakers that it’s the Secret Service’s duty to make that expectation transparent to local snipers that day and that his company likely wouldn’t have been able to do so.
It was the simplest explanation yet for what led to the blatant security breach that allowed a would-be assassin to fire eight shots at Trump, wounding him and others and killing a rally attendee on the grounds of Butler Farm. Show on July 13. However, Rowe has told lawmakers that he was baffled by some of the decisions made before and on the day of the shooting, and added some through his own agency.
His testimony about lining up day-to-day jobs for coverage of a roof that was within range of a rifle bullet from Mr. Trump has highlighted a weak link in the coverage of the country’s leaders. Although the Secret Service relies on assistance from local law enforcement, those agents are not experienced in the needs of cover operations and therefore need detailed orders from the federal agency.
“We have to be very direct with our local law enforcement counterparts so that they accurately perceive what their expectations are,” he said.
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