Top Secret Service officials still refuse to answer basic questions surrounding the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, indignant Republican senators claimed after a Senate hearing headlined by the new acting agency director.
The hearing, held 17 days after an assassin’s bullet struck Trump, featured Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe and Deputy Director Paul Abbate. The pair earned higher marks than disgraced former chief Kimberly Cheatle – a low bar, to be sure – but left senators with more questions than answers.
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Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) credited the “individual and systemic failures by the Secret Service on the day this assassination attempt” for fueling increasing public anxiety amid a cratering economy and a broader collapse of faith in governmental institutions.
“Back home, this is all that people wanted to talk about is the Secret Service failure,” he said, adding “I’ll tell you, it’s because people back home don’t feel safe.”
Marshall called for the creation of an independent nonpolitical commission “leaving no rock unturned” investigating the Secret Service failures as well as for President Joe Biden to immediately appoint a crisis leadership team “to go into the Secret Service, establish that leadership, turn things upside down and begin providing adequate protection for President Trump and others.”
“The Secret Service has had 48% turnover in a year’s time,” he said. “Barely 50% of them trust their senior leadership. Look, the Secret Service is negligent, incompetent. And there’s a cultural failure within their organization.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) lambasted the agency for its refusal or inability to provide “basic information” about the July 13 assassination attempt 17 days later, including “information that we quite honestly should have known within hours.”
He blasted the agency for believing it is not accountable to Congress, saying local law enforcement is providing more answers than the Secret Service.
“Their officials just gave us the big middle finger,” he said of the Secret Service.
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Johnson called for whistleblowers inside the agency to contact his staff, which is leading its own investigation, but insisted the Secret Service leadership must cooperate fully as well.
“We have to have transcribed interviews of all the Secret Service personnel at the site, people involved in the planning,” he said, continuing “We need those interviews fast. We need them now because memories fade, memories can be influenced.”
Johnson commended Democrat Sens. Richard Blumenthal (CT) and Gary Peters (MI) for echoing that bipartisan request during the hearing.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) criticized the Secret Service for giving conflicting information on the shooter. Initially, Secret Service claimed the shooter was a supporter of conservative policies based on social media accounts the agency alleged he operated.
She said a more current account shows the shooter “to be someone who is leftist in his leanings. He was pro-illegal immigration. He was pro-lock downs, pro those leftist policies. So what we need to hear from the FBI is clarity around this.
“We did not need them to come in and provide testimony where they are going to get to contradict themselves,” she said. “We need some certainty. I don’t know why they would be trying to nuance this. What we have was an assassination attempt on President Trump. And we want to know what happened.”
Blackburn joined Johnson in calling for whistleblowers to come forward with information being withheld by Secret Service leadership as well as attacking the culture within the agency. She discussed a whistleblower email alerting the Senate that “the mission at the Secret Service right now is CYA, and that every supervisor is exercising CYA. I think this is completely inappropriate.”
She noted the urgency of the Secret Service’s mission, saying “this isn’t like a federal agency that misses their casework numbers or a company that misses the revenue numbers. When the Secret Service screws up, people die.”
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) proposed a flurry of questions the Secret Service should be – but apparently is not – able to answer, including the identity of the agent in charge, standards operating procedures in play, and even the decision makers and the plan itself, among many others.
“If you can’t answer those simple questions, then what are you hiding?” he asked.
Mullin reiterated that the senators’ frustrations lay with Secret Service leadership, not the agents on the ground.
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“I spoke with President Trump the day after the assassination attempt, and I’ll tell you the first thing he did is he praised the Secret Service, the ones that were in his diamond for doing the job,” Mullin recalled.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) commended the bravery of the line agents while also blasting “the political leadership of the Secret Service,” calling July 13 “the worst and most catastrophic security failure of the Secret Service since 1981, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.”
He commended Rowe for doing “marginally better than his predecessor” during the hearing.
“Acting Director Rowe at least acknowledged that their failure to secure the roof from where the shooter fired was indefensible,” Cruz said. “That being said he continued the pattern we have seen from the Biden administration of stonewalling.”
“In the immediate wake of the shooting, the Secret Service official spokesperson sent out a tweet saying ‘the Trump team never asked for additional security. We never denied them additional security. In fact, we gave them additional security.’ We now know that tweet is a lie,” Cruz continued. “The person who said it, the Secret Service spokesperson, still has his job. The Acting Director refused to answer whether he personally approved that tweet. He refused to answer whether the then-director approved that tweet.”
Cruz then blasted the acting director for not answering how many times Trump asked for and was denied additional protection. “He started talking about ‘well, there’s a committee and this committee goes to that committee’ and it was a marvel of bureaucratic nonsense,” Cruz said.
“Apparently, in the Biden Secret Service, the buck stops nowhere. Nobody has responsibility.”
Cruz then raised alleged political motivations driving the Secret Service leadership’s decisions:
I asked him, is the individual who denied additional coverage for President Trump the same individual who denied coverage for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Utterly indefensible that RFK went months without Secret Service protection. His father was assassinated running for president. His uncle was assassinated when he was president. RFK Jr. had had multiple death attempts. And yet the Biden administration refused to give him Secret Service protection until after the attempted assassination of President Trump.
I believe that decision was political. I believe that decision was partisan and the political leadership of Secret Service understaffed the security detail of President Trump for the same reason they did not provide security to RFK Jr.
Cruz excoriated the agency for refusing to answer questions regarding the relevant size of Trump’s detail to Biden’s or the first lady’s or the threats directed at Trump compared to the others.
“The rational inference from the evidence we know now is it was political bias at the top at the leadership of the Secret Service that led to insufficient agents and insufficient resources being devoted to protecting President Trump, and if it is true, we need to see in writing the discussion of why they didn’t act sufficiently to keep the president safe,” Cruz said.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) went further, suggesting the Secret Service never should have allowed Trump to take the stage after identifying a suspicious person with a rangefinder, as well as why they didn’t remove him from the stage spectators and local law enforcement noticed that the shooter on the roof with a rifle.
Mocking the agencies earlier assertion it had not assigned an agent to the roof because of safety protocols regarding sloped services – protocols since debunked, Lee noted “noticeably absent today was the sloped roof defense.”
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“That was absurd, as was the Secret Service’s initial denials of the repeated requests made to the Secret Service for additional protection also unanswered,” Lee said.
Lee joined his colleagues in condemning the agency’s inability to answer basic questions or shoot investigators straight so far removed from the assassination attempt.
“Nobody wants to believe the worst, to suspect the worst, about what happens within government,” he said. “But when they lied to us repeatedly, then when they refused to answer the most basic questions, when they almost willfully declined to take any of the most basic precautions in order to protect the president – the former president, and I hope the next President of the United States – one has to wonder.
Lee closed with a powerful but haunting biblical analogy.
“Remember, King David didn’t personally kill Uriah the Hittite,” he noted. “But he let him go out into a battlefield where he knew there was an imminent risk of great bodily injury. And he made sure he didn’t have adequate protection. We’ve got to get to the bottom of these questions to make sure that Donald Trump was not intended to be a Uriah the Hittite.”
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
