Acting Secret Service Director 'Ashamed' by What He Saw

The acting director of the Secret Service said Tuesday he "cannot defend" why the roof used by the gunman in the assassination attempt of former President Trump was not secured. Ronald Rowe, testifying before two Senate committees, said he recently traveled to the Pennsylvania shooting site and "What I saw made me ashamed." The FBI's No. 2 official, Paul Abbate, said a social media account associated with the gunman espoused political violence and included antisemitic and anti-immigrant sentiment, reports the AP. The posts were from the 2019 and 2020 timeframe, when Thomas Matthew Crooks would have been in high school.

Senate lawmakers are grilling the officials about law enforcement lapses in the hours before the attempted assassination of Trump in the latest in a series of congressional hearings. Rowe became acting director last week after Kimberly Cheatle resigned in the aftermath of a House hearing in which she was berated by lawmakers and failed to answer specific questions about the July 13 shooting. Rowe is being joined by Abbate at a joint hearing of the Senate committees on the Judiciary and Homeland Security. "If this happened in the military, a lot of people would be fired," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "And if a lot of people are not fired, the system failed yet again. Nothing's going to change until somebody loses their job."

But most of the questions Tuesday are expected to be directed at Rowe as lawmakers demand answers about how Crooks was able to get so close to Trump. In a Monday interview on Fox News, Trump defended the Secret Service agents who protected him from the shooting but said that someone should have been on the roof with Crooks. "They didn't speak to each other," he said. He praised the sniper who killed Crooks with what he said was an amazing shot but noted: "It would have been good if it was nine seconds sooner." (More Trump rally shooting stories.)