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Ronald Rowe, the acting director of the US Secret Service agency, and the deputy director of the FBI, Paul Abbate, are testifying at a joint hearing of the two Senate committees on the assassination of former President Trump. In the center of the senators' interest are the shortcomings of the security measures in the hours before the assassination.
The acting director of the Secret Service agency said he considered it "inexcusable" the lack of security agents on the roof from where the gunman fired at former President Trump. Mr. Rowe said he had recently been on the scene in Butler, Pennsylvania.
"I felt ashamed of what I saw. As a career officer and employee of the Secret Service for 25 years, I cannot understand why there were no agents on that roof", he said.
Mr. Rowe also blamed local authorities for not sharing what he described as vital data with federal authorities.
According to him, they had not shared the information that an armed person had been spotted on a roof near the gathering place a few minutes before the July 13 attack.
"Local officers did not share this information, they kept such data isolated," he said. "It's very disturbing to me that we didn't get this information as quickly as we should have. We didn't know that an incident was happening ," he said.
Meanwhile, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said the social media profile believed to belong to the perpetrator, Thomas Matthew Crook, showed he supported political violence and anti-Semitic and anti-immigration content.
The posts were made in 2019 and 2020, when he was in high school.
"More than 700 comments have been made from this profile," he said. "Some comments reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration content and support political violence."
Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned last week after widespread criticism from lawmakers.
Yesterday, the FBI announced new details from the investigation into the motive for the attack of 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crook. According to authorities, he had searched the Internet for information related to mass shootings, power plants, improvised explosive devices, and the attempted assassination of the prime minister of Slovakia in May.
The FBI announced that Mr. Trump has agreed to be questioned by its agents in the role of a crime victim. The FBI said last week that the former president was hit in the ear by a bullet or part of it during an assassination attempt on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Mr Trump announced yesterday that he expects the questioning to take place on Thursday.
Lawmakers want answers from the acting director of the Secret Service about how assassin Crooks was able to get so close to Mr. Trump.
Investigators believe he fired 8 times at Mr Trump with an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon similar to a Kalashnikov from the roof of a building 135 meters from the podium where Mr Trump was giving his speech.
One of the participants in the rally was killed and two others were injured. The perpetrator of the incident was shot dead with a sniper by a Secret Service agent.
During last week's hearing, former director Cheatle said the Secret Service had failed in its mission to protect Mr. Trump.
She called the assassination attempt the Secret Service's "worst failure" in decades and vowed to do everything possible to find out what went wrong and make sure it doesn't happen again. more.
She admitted that the Secret Service had been notified two to five times about a suspicious person before the attack on the rally. She also said that the roof from where the perpetrator opened fire was identified as a possible position a few days before the election meeting was held.
She said she had apologized to Mr. Trump during a phone call after the assassination.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Mr. Trump stood by the Secret Service agents who protected him after the assassination, but said he believes the rooftop where Crooks fired from should have had agents and that there should have been more communication. good with the local police.
He praised the agent who shot the perpetrator, but noted that "it would have been better if he had shot him 9 seconds earlier."
Regarding the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump, a series of investigations are being conducted by committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as a special bipartisan group set up by the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives Hakeem Jeffries. / VOA
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