During a visit Monday to the site of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, lawmakers climbed onto the roof used to open fire on the rally and later expressed deep doubts about official explanations for why Secret Service agents weren’t stationed there.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has said agents weren’t put on the roof because the slope made it unsafe. But House Homeland Security members said they walked around on the roof Monday without difficulty.
“I can tell you that, just looking at the site, immediately there are things that just hit you, and the fact that those things weren’t covered is unacceptable, completely unacceptable,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) told reporters during the Butler, Pennsylvania, visit. “I was on that roof, the roof that the director said was really, really dangerous for Secret Service and other personnel to be on. I’m 70 years old. There’s nothing unsafe about that.”
Gimenez, a former SWAT team member, also posted a video on X that he recorded on the now-infamous roof.
“One thing’s for clear, it’s for sure: It’s way too close,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said after visiting the shooter’s vantage point. “You know, being up on the rooftop and looking at where the president was relative to the roof is so close for a sniper.”
McCaul also questioned why a counter-sniper team wasn’t stationed on a nearby water tower, which he said had a clear line of sight to where officials say Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, repeatedly fired an AR-15-style rifle, wounding Trump, killing one rallygoer and injuring several others.
With questions still swirling about why warnings to local police about the suspect were slow to reach Secret Service personnel, Homeland Security Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) said he learned Monday that local authorities were excluded from the Secret Service command posts for the July 13 rally, even though such officials had been granted that access at similar events in the past.
“Normally, the local law enforcement guys are allowed to sit in the Secret Service … control room,” Green said. “Today, the locals shared with us that they were not allowed to have anybody in there. So, that makes you want to dig a little further, right?”
Democratic members who joined in visiting the site of the Trump campaign rally in Butler expressed concern that campaigns had too much influence over the selection of event sites and appeared to be able to override security personnel despite complaints about logistical complexity.
“Who is in charge? Is it the Secret Service? Or is it the campaign?” asked Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.).
“I think there’s a lot of issues here that probably strongly suggested we never should have had the event here to start with,” added Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.). “That doesn't excuse the failures of the Secret Service that day. I think we definitely want to make sure we investigate those and get to the bottom of what happened. … I looked at all of the roofs that were around and my count was around 12 or so. And I just thought, maybe this isn’t the best place to have done this.”
As Democrats at the House Oversight Committee hearing back in Washington joined Republicans in calling for Cheatle’s resignation, the Democratic members on the Monday visit to western Pennsylvania stopped short of doing that.
“We [are] not quite through with all of the gathering of information,” the top Democrat on the Homeland Security panel, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said when asked whether he’d join calls for Cheatle to step down or be fired. “But we are not reluctant once, we gather it to make decisions, but we want to make sure we have all the information.”
