By Fred Lucas, The Daily Signal | December 05, 2024
A House task force probing the attempted assassination in July of Donald Trump held a final hearing Thursday that contained some fireworks, promises to improve, and unanswered questions.
Ronald L. Rowe Jr., acting director of the Secret Service, was the only witness to appear before the task force, which includes eight Republicans and six Democrats. Rowe replaced Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned after the first assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The panel, formally called the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, focused primarily on the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania. A second assassination attempt occurred Sept. 15 at the former president’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.
After the hearing, the panel voted unanimously to make its final report available to the full House. It wasn’t expected to be made public immediately, however.
Here are key highlights from the task force’s final hearing.
1. ‘Accountability Is Occurring’
Rowe opened by saying that the July 13 shooting was an “abject failure [that] underscored critical gaps in Secret Service operations.”
“President-elect Trump was wounded,” Rowe said, a month after the Nov. 5 election victory that will send Trump back to the White House. “A cowardly and despicable act killed one person and critically injured two others.”
The 21-year-old shooter killed one man in the crowd at the Trump rally and seriously wounded two other men.
“The recently completed mission assurance inquiry thoroughly investigated the specific actions and inactions that led to the assassination attempt,” Rowe said. “Four areas of deficiencies were identified: communications, protective advance processes, command and control processes, and coordination with external entities.”
The “mission assurance inquiry” is bureaucratese for the Secret Service’s internal investigation of what happened.
“Let me be clear, there will be accountability and that accountability is occurring. It is an extensive review that requires due process and the pace of this process, quite frankly, it does frustrate me,” Rowe added. “But it is essential that we recognize the gravity of our failure. I personally carry the weight of knowing that we almost lost a protectee and that our failure cost a father and husband his life.”
Task force Chairman Mike Kelly, R-Pa., later asked Rowe: “Of all the areas the Secret Service reviewed after July 13, what do you think is most concerning about that day?”
Rowe said it was the failure to recognize the proximity of the AGR building, atop which the shooter took his shots, and the failure of communication among Secret Service agents and local law enforcement. (AGR stands for American Glass Research.)
“That to me is glaring, those are basic tenets, fundamentals of what advance teams are supposed to identify,” Rowe said. “They are supposed to identify hazards [and] risks and then mitigate those risks effectively—either by using law enforcement and coordinating assets, or taking matters and making sure that risk is taken out of play. We did not do that on the 13th. Post-July 13, there was a renewed focus on that.”
2. ‘You’re Out of Line’ … ‘Don’t You Bully Me’
The task force’s hearing was mostly calm until Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, asked Rowe about the observance at the 9/11 memorial in New York City this year, where Rowe stood just behind President Joe Biden.
Rowe reportedly switched places to stand closer to Biden at the 9/11 event. That would go against normal operating procedures, which are to have the Secret Service’s special agent in charge of the president’s regular protective detail stand next to him at major events, since that agent is most familiar with the protectee.
Fallon asked Rowe whether he was the special agent in charge when standing close to Biden. Rowe didn’t directly answer the question.
“That is the day where we remember the more than 3,000 people that have died on 9/11,” Rowe shouted at Fallon. “I actually responded to Ground Zero. I was there going through the ashes of the World Trade Center. I was there, Congressman.”
Fallon followed up, saying: “I’m not asking that. I’m asking if you were the special agent in charge.”
Rowe repeated: “I was there, Congressman, to show respect for a Secret Service member that died on 9/11. Do not invoke 9/11 for political purposes.”
Fallon said, “I’m not.”
Rowe shouted, “You are out of line!”
Fallon shouted back, saying: “Don’t you bully me. I’m an elected member of Congress, and I’m asking you a serious question.”
Rowe again shouted, saying, “I’m a public servant who has served this nation and spent time on our darkest day.”
Fallon said, “You won’t answer the question.”
Kelly jumped in with the gavel and said, “This committee will come to order.”
Fallon said: “I’m asking a serious question for the American people. They are very simple. They are not trick questions. Were you the special agent in charge that day?”
Finally, Rowe replied: “No, I wasn’t. I was there representing the United States Secret Service. It did not affect protective operations.”
3. ‘Why Aren’t People Saying Something?’
Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., the task force’s ranking member, noted that a tree blocked countersnipers’ vision of substantial parts of the rooftop of the AGR building, from where the shooter fired.
When he was in the Army, Crow said, there was a culture of “See something, say something” in case of a suspected life and safety issue. Commercial airline pilots have a similar responsibility, he said.
“I’m struck by the lack of that culture on July 13,” Crow said of the Butler rally, where a bullet grazed Trump’s right ear shortly after he began to speak. “If you’re a countersniper and you’ve been placed in a position that doesn’t allow you to see entire sectors of the position that you are responsible for, why aren’t people saying something? And it happened on numerous occasions.”
Rowe said that “it starts with training, a retraining, a reeducation of folks.”
“I’ve directed the Office of Protective Operations to initiate and stand up an auditing capability to regularly send out folks to evaluate how we are doing and also share findings with our office of training,” Rowe said.
The Secret Service head added: “We have to do after-action reports and we have to retrain our people to see something and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, why don’t we have that hallway covered?”
4. ‘Apathy or Complacency’
House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., also a task force member, appeared indignant as he recalled his own time in the military.
Green asserted: “Going to war, I didn’t give a s— if I died. What I didn’t want to do was fail. Your guys showed up that day [in Butler] and didn’t give a s—.”
What happened July 13 demonstrates apathy in the agency, Green argued.
“It speaks of an apathy or complacency that is really unacceptable in the Secret Service,” Green said, adding: “It speaks of a culture of lack of attention to detail, lack of sense of urgency, complacency. These are leadership issues. These are command climate issues. What is the command climate of the Secret Service?”
Rowe insisted that the agency is addressing leadership issues, including by providing training for the equivalent of a military captain before an agent may rise to a position of higher leadership.
“We are reorganizing and reimagining this organization,” Rowe told Green. “That includes making sure we are developing a leadership development program so that we are touching people at the GS-13 level, which is right before—the equivalent of a captain—touching them before they get promoted to [GS-14]. … We need to hit people and identify leaders early on.”
5. ‘Information That This Committee Does Not Have’
Task force members and staff visited the site of the first assassination attempt against Trump in Butler. Staff interviewed over 45 law enforcement officials, examined thousands of documents and transcripts, met with FBI and Secret Service officials, and subpoenaed other federal agents who were on the ground July 13in Butler, said Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla.
“It is important to note information that this committee does not have from the Department of Justice, including components of the Department of Justice: the FBI, the ATF,” Lee said, referring to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The unexamined evidence includes digital analysis of electronic devices belonging to the rooftop shooter in Pennsylvania, who was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper, and the gunman at Trump’s golf course in Florida, who was stopped in his vehicle and arrested. The task force also didn’t have any financial information about the would-be assassins, Lee said.
Lee said the task force has a thorough analysis of what security procedures could have been improved from the Secret Service, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. But, he said, almost no information came from the Justice Department.
“In a very real sense, we do not have some of the critical intelligence information that might have helped us even better understand the needs of your agency going forward,” she told Rowe.
“Our mission on this task force is to understand what went wrong on the day of the attempted assassination, ensure accountability, and prevent such a failure from ever happening again,” Lee said. “I would assert that preventing such a failure from ever happening again necessitates that this Congress has access to all of the relevant information related to this day, related to the actual threat landscape that affects not only President Trump but other protectees under your care.”
6. Robot Dogs aka ‘Autonomous Canines’
On what would seemingly be a lighter note, Rowe spoke with a serious tone and straight face about the robot dogs—or “autonomous canines”—at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
“Right now at Mar-a-Lago, we’ve started using a sensory array, an autonomous robot, that’s out there walking the seawall right now,” Rowe said. “It has a sensor package. We will use it at sites. We started using it.”
The acting Secret Service chief said the Defense Department has used similar technologies.
“Those are the types of technologies that have been out there, that have been in DOD world for years,” Rowe added. “We need to start leveraging those resources. So, the usage of autonomous canines down there right now is just one example of that.”
7. ‘That Cost Seconds’
Secret Service agents didn’t retrieve radios to communicate with local law enforcement that were set aside for them by the Butler County Emergency Services Unit, noted Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La.
“You had isolated assets on rooftops that had no direct radio communication other than the relay through their command post and their cellphones,” Higgins said. “It would have been very easy for them to have a local radio up on the roof. That didn’t happen. That costs seconds, and impacts the results of the entire day.”
Rowe replied that the Secret Service is working to improve that.
“We’ve implemented a PACE—primary alternate contingency and emergency,” he said. “And also making sure, for example, the snipers—our countersnipers—and local snipers are co-located. That’s to cut down on that, to make sure they are standing next to each other so that there is communication between them. Also, we are exchanging radios and making sure we have their radios and can hear what they say.”
Higgins responded, “So sharing radios was part of your pre-mission plan for Butler on J13. So the failure to execute the pre-mission plan has impacted us here.”
Fred Lucas is chief news correspondent and manager of the Investigative Reporting Project for The Daily Signal.
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