‘Not Trying To Shift Blame’: Secret Service Director Accepts Responsibility For Trump Rally Failure

4 months ago

On Friday, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe held a press conference about the assassination attempt against former President Trump.

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Transcript

00:00Thank you so much for doing this.

00:02I have a question about the review that you did, the picture that you showed in the Senate

00:08the other day of the vantage point that the local snipers had.

00:12How do you know that that's the window that they were actually posted at?

00:16Because they're saying that they're on a completely other side of the building.

00:20And related to that, has the Secret Service actually interviewed the snipers that were

00:24in the AGR building?

00:27So thank you for that.

00:28So once the FBI had released the Butler Farm Show site, we were able to take custody of

00:36it and we sent the full resources of our Office of Investigations, which included the Forensic

00:42Services Division.

00:44We did a full site reconstruction, and this is part of our ongoing mission assurance review.

00:50And as part of that, that also included the plotting and also trying to identify not only

00:57our personnel were, but also where state and local law enforcement were.

01:02And then the second part of your question was?

01:04Well, so, I mean, how did you identify where they were?

01:09And have you interviewed the local snipers?

01:12So the mission assurance, we're starting with our federal personnel and working out.

01:17We will get, if they're willing to be interviewed, we will ask for the local law enforcement

01:21on site to be interviewed that day.

01:24How we went back and reconstructed that was based on what we had based on the ops plan

01:29and then also based on what our own folks, as they understood it, on the day of.

01:35Well, but I mean, you talked a lot about how you may not have been as specific as you need

01:40to be.

01:41So how do you know that they were in that window, that if they looked left, they couldn't

01:44see you?

01:45Yeah.

01:46Because they're saying there's no way they couldn't see any of the rooms from where they

01:49were posted on the other side.

01:51So I think what we'll do is we'll let the mission assurance play that out and we'll

01:55look forward to interviewing them and definitely getting their side of the story.

02:00But what I also want to reiterate is this was a Secret Service failure.

02:05And so they should not be blamed.

02:07We're not trying to shift blame to anybody.

02:11And that's the important takeaway, that we need our state and local partners out there

02:15doing this with us every day.

‘Not Trying To Shift Blame’: Secret Service Director Accepts Responsibility For Trump Rally Failure

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