Acting Secret Service director admits ‘complacency’ at July Trump rally

By Holmes Lybrand and Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

(CNN) — Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe admitted a shocking breach of protocol before former President Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.

“There was complacency on the part of others that led to a breach in protocol,” Rowe said at a news conference Friday. Those employees “will be held accountable.”

“This agency has among the most robust table of penalties in the entirety of the federal government and these penalties will be administered according to our disciplinary process,” Rowe said, declining to say what those penalties may look like.

The acting director also said that the Secret Service is continuing to evaluate its security posture around Trump following the apparent attempted assassination this weekend at a Florida golf course.

The agency reviews “every incident,” Rowe said in response to a question from CNN. “We look at everything, and it doesn’t matter whether there’s a critical incident that occurs. So we are looking and we’re reevaluating.”

Ready for January 6, 2025

Rowe also said the Secret Service and other law enforcement have all of the resources they need to protect the 2024 election certification process on January 6, 2025.

Heightened security around the upcoming election certification process has been widely reported, as the proceeding was disrupted during the last election cycle by a violent mob attempting to stop the certification from going forward.

Rowe said that the Secret Service has “great partnerships with all the law enforcement agencies in Washington, DC,” such as the US Capitol Police, and that the various agencies are used to cooperating for other high profile national security events like the president’s annual State of the Union address or a state funeral.

“We will have what we need,” Rowe said.

‘Serious’ failures on July 13

In a report released Friday, the agency described “serious communications failures between the US Secret Service and local law enforcement that made it harder for officers to respond to the attempted assassin.”

Law enforcement’s failed communications that day have been at the front of criticism targeting the Secret Service in the aftermath of the attempted assassination. The report said that those failures were “especially acute” when warnings about the would-be assassin never made it to Trump’s security detail, despite local officers learning of his presence on a nearby roof before any shots were fired.

“A consistent theme gathered from state and local law enforcement personnel who helped secure the Butler rally was the presence of communications deficiencies,” the report said. “These deficiencies included gaps in colocation of law enforcement resources to share information, the variety of radio frequencies/channels used… and the capability of agency personnel to clearly convey the Secret Service’s protective needs.”

One of those deficiencies was that there were “multiple standard conduits of communication that were not in operation on July 13,” which, if used, would have increased the likelihood that important information about the threat to Trump could be widely communicated.

The report also said that some of the local law enforcement entities working the rally “had no knowledge that there were two separate communications centers on site.”

“As a result, those entities were operating under the misimpression that the Secret Service was directly receiving their radio transmissions,” it states.

Golf course protection

Rowe declined to fully explain Friday how agents were securing Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course before an apparent assassination attempt over the weekend.

The man who investigators have said appeared to have been targeting the former president hid in bushes next to a fence that stood between the golf course and a busy public street.

A Secret Service agent spotted the man and fired at him before Trump was ever in the suspect’s line of sight, law enforcement has said.

Rowe said that agents were “sweeping ahead,” but would not say whether those agents were monitoring the public or private side of the fence.

“Having been there and seen the vantage point whether they were on the public side or the where the private side, the bottom line is the individual was detected,” he said.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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