The Secret Service failed to properly take charge of securing the rally at which the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump took place, Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, told Newsmax on Wednesday.
Joyce, who is one of the 13 members of the bipartisan task force in the House to probe the attempted assassination, told "National Report" that "some things I learned yesterday" at the testimony of Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe on Capitol Hill was that the agency "had outsourced [responsibility for] the roof [from which the shooter fired] to local law enforcement, and the local law enforcement, as I understood from the testimony yesterday, thought it was too hot to be up on the roof."
Joyce dismissed this as an excuse, saying emphatically that "the Secret Service is in charge, they are in charge of everyone who is at the scene ... they don't have the ability to say, 'Oh, we tasked someone else with that.' "
The congressman insisted "there should have been a walk-through on Friday that laid out everybody's position and known where everybody is going to be [the next night for the rally], and that is why you have, I believe, a 84-second delay" between identifying the suspect on the roof and the counter-snipers taking out the active shooter that got off the shots at Trump.
Joyce said it was also concerning and a complete communication breakdown that the shooter, just an hour before the rally was to begin "could be walking around with a range finder and put up a drone over the area without it being taken out by a Secret Service drone and that law enforcement knew [beforehand that] the shooter was a suspicious person, but they couldn't transmit on the same wavelength to let the Secret Service know his whereabouts."
He also said it was bewildering that the known threat from Iran on Trump's life did not dictate "a much more secure perimeter than what took place there."
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Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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