Acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe shared new information on Friday about the agency’s behind-the-scenes shortcomings that led to its failure to prevent an assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania last month.
Among the problems were missed radio traffic and a decision to reject a request from local law enforcement for drone coverage of the rally in Butler, Pa.
Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire from a rooftop minutes into Trump’s speech on July 13, striking the former president’s ear. The shooting left one rally attendee dead and two others injured.
The agency has faced questions about the security failure that allowed a gunman to climb onto a roof with a direct line to Trump. Backlash over the attempted assassination forced Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle to resign her position last week.
Rowe told reporters on Friday that the agency should have had better coverage of the roof where the gunman was.
“That building was very close to that outer perimeter, and we should have had more of a presence,” he said.
Senators previously received a briefing from Secret Service and FBI officials, who reportedly revealed that Crooks had been reported as a suspicious person one hour before the shooting.
Also, seven minutes after Trump went on, members of the crowd notified police that a suspicious person was on the rooftop. Two minutes later, Crooks opened fire from the roof. The Secret Service then fatally shot Crooks.
Rowe said Friday that while a local police officer said over the radio that he saw a man with a gun 30 seconds before Trump was shot, the Secret Service never received that information because agents did not have access to the same radio traffic as their local partners.
“It is plainly obvious to me that we didn’t have access to certain information,” Rowe said. “Not by anybody’s fault. It just so happened that there was a sense of urgency [on the radio, and] that there might have been radio traffic that we missed. We have to do a better job of that.”
“That was unique,” Rowe said of the situation. “We have to rethink where we put our security rooms, and we are in fact doing that now moving forward,” he added, explaining that agents in Butler were stationed in a different command post from local law enforcement.
Rowe also told reporters that the Secret Service did not fly a drone during the rally, despite requests from local law enforcement.
“We are putting those assets out,” he said. “We should have had better line of sight on some of those high ground concerns; we thought we might have had it covered with the human eye, but clearly we are going to change our approach now.”
Representative Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) told Fox News that he has heard from Secret Service sources that Trump was receiving a normal level of security for a former president but that the agency was hesitant to grant requests for added security for his election rallies as a presidential candidate.
“The leadership wouldn’t say it explicitly, but the tone and the tenor they got was, ‘We’re not going to burn through our budget, all the extra overtime, all the extra travel, all these extra agents and resources so that Trump can have all of these rallies every week.’ That was really the kind of message they were getting back,” said Waltz, who is on a task force on the Trump shooting.