Acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr., who replaced Kimberly Cheatle in the position after she resigned following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump earlier in the month, delivered testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, where he told lawmakers in Congress that his agents prepared local law enforcement agencies in order to provide counter-snipers around the perimeter of the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. This contradicts what officers told media outlets who said no such request was ever made.
Boy, the incompetence just keeps getting worse and worse, doesn’t it? It’s almost at unbelievable levels. I’m not saying this was an inside job or anything — my tinfoil hat is still in the drawer beneath my keyboard — but this whole mess of confusion is beginning to make such theories look a whole lot more plausible.
Check out more details on this story from Trending Politics News:
The New York Times reported on remarks by Acting Director Ronald Rowe Jr. before the House Oversight Committee where he insisted an investigation into the assassination attempt is ongoing and was grilled by furious lawmakers who were incredulous that he has not fired anyone involved in the historic security failure. At one point Rowe expressed disappointment at state and local security partners for not positioning a counter-sniper on the roof where a 20-year-old man was able to fire multiple rifle rounds at President Trump, striking him once. “They should have been on the roof,” the chief said in what amounted to a mirror excuse of that given by former Director Kimberly Cheatle who resigned last week.
In a shocking admission, Rowe said it was the Secret Service’s responsibility to tell local teams tasked with guarding the rally’s perimeter that they were expected to have snipers ready. That request may not have been made, he admitted, a baffling shortcoming that left him questioning the decision-making processes within his own agency. “We need to be very direct to our local law enforcement counterparts that they understand exactly what their expectation is,” he told lawmakers.
Ultimately, Rowe said, the failure to secure President Trump and a death and injuries to rallygoers was “a failure of imagination” to see that “we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually want to do harm to our protectee.” However, he added, “We didn’t challenge our own assumptions. We assumed that someone is going to cover that.”
Many of the so-called “authorities” who were involved in this deadly debacle have been playing a never ending game of “pass the buck,” and it’s unlikely that Rowe’s turn in the contest is going to lead to it being over anytime soon. In fact, what he said is probably going to make local police officials ticked off since they have complained about the lack of communication they received from the Secret Service and all of the delays in responding to the shooter. In fact, the cops are still participating in an after-action investigation into the shooting being conducted by the FBI. “We are looking at this, and they should have been on the roof, and the fact they were in the building is something I’m still trying to understand.” Mr. Rowe remarked, promising the Secret Service would do a far better job in the future when it comes to coordination efforts.
However, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley was not at all impressed with Rowe’s answer, going on to grill him on both sides like a slab of meat in a southern barbecue concerning his previous denials of additional security for President Trump. He asked Rowe why there was no one in the agency who had been fired over that.
“Isn’t the fact that a former president was shot, that a good American is dead, that other Americans were critically wounded — isn’t that enough mission failure for you to say that the person who decided that building should not be in the security perimeter probably ought to be stepped down?” Hawley asked him. “I want to be neutral and make sure that we get to the bottom of it and interview everybody in order to determine if there was more than one person who perhaps exercised bad judgment,” Rowe replied, saying he does not want to “zero in on one or two individuals.”
I’m beginning to wonder if we will ever untangle all of this crap. How was this allowed to happen? So much doesn’t make sense. Let’s hope the investigations into the assassination attempt yield some fruit sometime soon.