The Secret Service’s acting director told lawmakers Tuesday that he considered it indefensible that the roof used by the gunman in the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump was unsecured and said it was regrettable that local law enforcement had not alerted his agency before the shooting that an armed subject had been spotted on a nearby roof. Ronald Rowe Jr. also testified that he recently visited the shooting site and lied down on the roof of the building where shots were fired in order to evaluate the gunman’s line of sight during the July 13 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “What I saw made me ashamed. As a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year Secret Service veteran, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured,” he said. The FBI, meanwhile, disclosed new details about Crooks, with Deputy Director Paul Abbate saying a social media account believed to be associated with the gunman suspected in the assassination attempt espoused political violence and included antisemitic and anti-immigrant sentiment. The posts were from the 2019-2020 timeframe, when Crooks would have been in high school. “Something just very recently uncovered that I want to share is a social-media account which is believed to be associated with the shooter in about the 2019-2020 time frame,” Abbate said. “There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.” Abbate did not identify the social media platform, saying investigators were still trying to definitively determine that it belonged to Crooks. However, he indicated that it was separate from an account on a different platform called Gab that was active in 2021. The chief executive of Gab posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, during the Senate hearing that Crooks’s presence on that platform was consistent with being “pro-Biden and in particular pro-Biden’s immigration policy.” On Monday, the FBI revealed that Crooks had looked online for information about mass shootings, power plants, improvised explosive devices and the May assassination attempt of the Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico. The FBI also said that Trump has agreed to be interviewed by agents as a crime victim. The testimony was the most detailed catalog to date by the Secret Service of law enforcement failings and miscommunications, with Rowe accepting blame for his own agency’s mistakes while also pointedly criticizing local law enforcement for communication breakdowns that resulted in his agency not receiving information that a gunman, later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, had been seen on the roof of a building less than 150 yards (135 meters) from the rally stage where Trump was speaking. “Neither the Secret Service counter sniper teams nor members of the former president’s security detail had any knowledge that there was a man on the roof of the building with a firearm,” Rowe said. “It is my understanding those personnel were not aware the assailant had a firearm until they heard gunshots.” He said that the shooting amounted to a “failure on multiple levels,” including a failure of imagination and a “failure to challenge our assumptions.” “We assumed that the state and locals had it,” Rowe said. “We made an assumption that there was […]