A week after the Secret Service director’s disastrous appearance before a House committee, her interim replacement and a top FBI official offered a Senate hearing a more detailed breakdown of the security failures at a rally where former President Trump was shot — and the first potential clues about the shooter’s thinking.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees that while the agency still could not establish a clear motive for the July 13 shooting, it is poring over a social media account that could possibly belong to the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, looking for clues.
The account includes several hundred messages with antisemitic and anti-immigration messages from 2019 and 2020 that “espoused political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” Abbate said.
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. said before the panel that the shooting “was a failure on multiple levels” for the agency, striking a different tone from his predecessor, Kimberly Cheatle, whose unresponsive and combative answers to a House committee’s questions July 22 sparked bipartisan calls for her ouster. She stepped down as the head of the agency the following day.
Rowe said he and his investigators traveled to the Pennsylvania rally site and lay prone on the same roof where Crooks was when he shot at Trump on July 13.
“What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe said at the hearing about the clear line of sight to the rally stage. “I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.”
Rowe stressed that the Secret Service has been reviewing its actions leading up to the day of the attack. Since the shooting, Rowe said, the agency has identified gaps in the security detail on the day of the rally and implemented corrective actions.
“I do not believe that inadequate time to plan for this event was a factor in the failure,” Rowe said.
According to Abbate, who provided a comprehensive timeline of events leading up to the shooting, the FBI has conducted over 460 interviews as part of their investigation.
Evidence of the security failures included a text message thread among local police countersnipers who said they saw a suspicious person around the rally site but failed to approach him, according to reporting from the New York Times.
Crooks was spotted by law enforcement up to 90 minutes before he climbed onto the roof and fired what investigators believe were eight shots at Trump.
Rowe emphasized that the Secret Service countersniper teams and members of Trump’s security detail did not have any inkling that there was a man on the roof of the American Glass Research building armed with a gun.
“It is my understanding those personnel were not aware the assailant had a firearm until they heard gunshots,” Rowe said.
One of the gunman’s bullets grazed the former president’s ear, and in the barrage of gunfire from Crooks a spectator was killed and two others were wounded. Within seconds of the first shot, Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
