A week after the Secret Service director’s disastrous appearance before a House committee, her acting replacement and a senior FBI official offered a more detailed analysis at a Senate hearing of 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 has not yet been able to establish a clear motive for the July 13 shooting, it is investigating a social media account that could possibly belong to the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, for clues.
The account includes several hundred posts with anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant messages from 2019 and 2020 that “advocated political violence and are described as extreme in nature,” Abbate said.
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. told the panel that the shooting “was a failure on multiple levels” for the agency, striking a different tone than his predecessor, Kimberly Cheatle, whose callous and combative responses to questions from a House committee on July 22 prompted bipartisan calls for her ouster. She resigned as agency director the next day.
Rowe said he and his investigators traveled to the rally site in Pennsylvania and lay face down on the same roof where Crooks was when he shot Trump on July 13.
“What I saw embarrassed me,” Rowe told the hearing about the clear line of sight to the rally stage. “I can’t defend why that roof wasn’t better secured.”
Rowe noted 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 failures in security equipment on the day of the rally and has implemented corrective actions.
“I don't think the lack of time to plan this event was a factor in the failure,” Rowe said.
According to Abbate, who provided a complete timeline of events leading up to the shooting, the FBI has conducted more than 460 interviews as part of its investigation.
Evidence of the security lapses included a text message thread between local police snipers who said they saw a suspicious person around the protest site but did not approach him, the New York Times reported.
Police detected Crooks up to 90 minutes before he went up to the roof and fired what investigators believe were eight shots at Trump.
Rowe stressed that Secret Service sniper teams and members of Trump's security detail had no idea there was a man on the roof of the American Glass Research building armed with a gun.
“My understanding is that those officers were not aware that the shooter had a firearm until they heard gunshots,” Rowe said.
One of the gunman's bullets grazed the former president's ear, and amid Crooks' volley of gunfire, one bystander was killed and two others were wounded. Within seconds of the first shot, Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper.
