WASHINGTON – Members of a bipartisan House task force investigating the Trump assassination attempts emphasized during their first hearing Thursday that the Secret Service, not local authorities, was responsible for the failures in planning and communications that led to a gunman being able to open fire on former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
Lawmakers repeatedly questioned why the agency tasked with protecting the country's top leaders didn't do a better job communicating with local authorities during the July 13 rally, particularly when it came to securing the building that was widely agreed to be a security threat but that ultimately was left so unprotected that gunman Thomas Michael Crooks was able to climb up and open fire on Trump.
“In the days leading up to the rally, it was not a single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our country’s most elite group of security professionals. There were security failures on multiple fronts,” said the Republican co-chair of the committee, Rep. Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania.
“The communication between the Secret Service and local and state partners was disjointed and unclear,” said Rep. Jason Crow, the ranking Democrat on the panel, who also praised the local law enforcement.
Trump was wounded and a man attending the rally with his family was killed.
The panel — comprised of seven Republicans and six Democrats — has spent the last two months analyzing the security failures at the rally, conducting nearly two dozen interviews with law enforcement and receiving more than 2,800 pages of documents from the Secret Service.
The lawmakers are also investigating a second assassination attempt on Trump that happened earlier this month where a man with a rifle sought to assassinate the GOP presidential nominee while he was golfing at one of his courses in southern Florida.
But the hearing Thursday focused on the rally shooting with testimony from Pennsylvania and Butler County police officials.
The Secret Service often relies on local authorities to secure bigger events where protectees like Trump appear around the country. But after the Butler rally, the agency was heavily criticized for failing to clearly communicate what it needed from those local agencies that day.
One key question has been why there were no law enforcement personnel on top of the AGR building where Crooks eventually climbed up and took his shots, considering that it was so close to the rally stage and afforded a clear line of sight to Trump.
"A 10-year old looking at that satellite image could have seen that the greatest threat posed to the president that day” was the building near the stage, said Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas.
Edward Lenz, commander for the Butler County Emergency Services Unit who was in charge of the local tactical units operating at the Butler rally, said his agency was never asked to put a sniper team on top of the roof and never said that they would. Lenz said the Secret Service knew their shooters were inside the AGR Building — a position designed to allow them to look for threats inside the rally crowd as opposed to threats to the president from outside — and there was no “feedback or guidance” from the Secret Service that they wanted the team anywhere else.
“They knew where we would be,” Lenz said. "They knew what our plan was.”
Lenz also testified that Secret Service officials did not check with him or his team to make sure they were in place before Trump went on stage and that the emergency communication for July 13 had not been worked out in advance.
Drew Blasko, an assistant team leader of the sniper unit within the Butler Township Emergency Services Unit, testified that he shared his concerns about the building with the Secret Service ahead of the rally and said his team didn’t have the manpower to post anyone there. He said he asked the Secret Service that additional people be posted there and was told "that they would take care of it.”
Some of the witnesses also said that there had been discussions ahead of time about using opaque screens or large farm equipment to block the line of sight to the stage, but it's not clear what happened to those suggestions.
Another issue that lawmakers emphasized was the difficulty of the various agencies to talk to each other on radios or cellphones. And they questioned why there were two command posts as opposed to one unified post where the Secret Service could have directly communicated with all the state and local authorities.
Patrick Sullivan, a retired Secret Service agent who was not involved in the Butler rally but attended the hearing as an expert on the agency's practices and procedures, said it was not a typical setup. “There should be just one overall command post," he said.
Lawmakers struggled in their questioning Thursday to get witnesses to zero in on a single individual or moment that led to the assassination attempt. Local police officials and a retired Secret Service agent also testifying instead pointed to a series of incidents and mistakes that ultimately allowed Crooks to remain undeterred for a prolonged period of time and eventually take his shot at the former president.
“Communication was totally lacking here," said Rep. Correa, a Democrat from California. “What went wrong? Who’s in charge?”
Thursday’s session was the fourth congressional hearing about the Butler shooting since July. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned one day after she appeared before a congressional hearing where she was berated for hours by both Democrats and Republicans for the agency’s security failures.
Cheatle called the Pennsylvania attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades, but she angered lawmakers by failing to answer specific questions about the investigation.
An interim report Wednesday from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is also conducting an investigation, said the Secret Service failed to give clear instructions on how state and local officials should cover the building where the gunman eventually took up position. The report also said the agency didn’t make sure it could share information with local partners in real-time.
The Secret Service has also released a five-page document summarizing the key conclusions of a yet-to-be-finalized agency report on what went wrong in Butler. Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe has said that the agency is ultimately responsible for what happened. He's cited complacency by the agency's staff and said they needed to do a better job communicating with local and state officials.
The House panel is expected to propose a series of legislative reforms and issue a final report before Dec. 13.
While the oversight investigations have been bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans have disagreed on whether to give the Secret Service more money in the wake of its failures. A government funding bill that passed Wednesday includes an additional $231 million for the agency, even though many Republicans were skeptical and said an internal overhaul of the Secret Service is needed.