During the final meeting of the House Task Force on the Assassination Attempt of Donald J. Trump, there was a split screen on Thursday — one where members touted the civility of the panel right after one lawmaker exploded at the acting Secret Service director and provided the 118th Congress with one of its most rancorous exchanges.
As members applauded the committee for the serious and bipartisan tone lawmakers had adopted in pursuing answers to the July assassination attempt — ranking Democrat Jason Crow said the hearing on Thursday was “actually one of the best hearings I’ve been a part of in my time in Congress” — the task force’s final meeting devolved into a screaming match between Rep. Pat Fallon and Ronald L. Rowe Jr., the current director of the Secret Service.
Fallon brought out a poster showing Rowe a couple rows behind Trump and Biden at the Sept. 11 Commemoration Ceremony this year, after he had been appointed acting director of the Secret Service on July 23. Fallon accused Rowe of attending the ceremony as a political stunt to gain attention, arguing that by being in such close proximity to Trump and Biden, Rowe was putting their security at risk.
In response, Rowe told Fallon that he was at Ground Zero in 2001, “going through the ashes of the World Trade Center.”
“I’m not asking that,” Fallon screamed back. “I was asking you if you were the special agent in charge.”
Rowe screamed back at Fallon. “I was there to pay respect for the service members that died on 9/11!” he said. “Do not invoke 9/11 for political purposes!”
Rep. Mike Kelly, the chair of the task force, looked for the gavel during the exchange, but the two kept screaming at each other for another minute before Kelly was able to stop the argument.
(Fallon later told reporters he didn’t know Rowe had been at Ground Zero, but that it didn’t change his position that it’s “a bunch of bullshit” that Rowe stood so close to Biden and Trump.)
“If I was a betting man, I’d go to Vegas and put some money on the fact that he is not going to hold that job permanently,” Fallon told reporters.
Despite the heated moment on Thursday, it was one of the few acrimonious displays during the task force’s five months of existence.
“All of us worked well together, you know, the other members. It’s hard to see how it could have gone any better,” Rep. Glenn Ivey told NOTUS after the hearing. “Except for that little moment today.”
Throughout the hearing, Rowe was clear: the Secret Service’s response before, during and after the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13 was a failure. He highlighted changes the Secret Service has already made and would continue to make, such as hiring hundreds of special agents and uniformed officers, putting a new communication system in place between agents and local law enforcement and deploying an autonomous robot to walk the seawall at Mar-a-Lago following a second assassination attempt on Trump.
The technological and personnel changes are only part of a deeper institutional change members of the task force are urging Rowe to take seriously: a change in the culture of leadership at the agency from the top down.
“And I’ll tell you, going to war, I didn’t give a shit if I died, what I didn’t want to do was fail,” Rep. Mark Green, a task force member and Homeland Security committee chair, told Rowe. “But your guys showed up that day and didn’t give a shit. There was apathy and complacency. Period.”
Task force member Lou Correa said the mission of the agency ahead is to “make Secret Service officers proud again.”
“We‘ve all watched those movies on TV. Secret Service agents take bullets for candidates. You’re kind of the guardians of democracy,” Correa said. “You make sure that it’s the voters and not an assassin’s bullet that determine the outcome of elections in this country.”
“And yet we hear that agents are demoralized, overworked, exhausted,” he said, pointing to the record-high turnover at the agency over the last two years.
Sixty percent of Secret Service agents have less than 10 years of experience, while 30% have less than five years under their belt.
After the hearing, Green told NOTUS he was disappointed by Rowe’s answers on changing the Secret Service culture.
“In the military, we do command climate surveys, and they’re on the commander, not on the platoon leaders, not on the company commanders. They’re on the guy in charge of the organization,” Green said.
Following Rowe’s testimony, task force members finalized a report on their findings and recommendations for congressional leaders and agencies that is set to be released early next week.
A major gap still to be determined is the motive of the deceased shooter, Thomas Crooks. The FBI and Department of Justice refused to turn over information — like the autopsy report, summaries of interviews with family members and digital analysis of electronic devices — citing the ongoing investigation.
Kelly, who was at the Butler rally just 60 feet away from Trump, said he’s hopeful the work to find answers would continue after the task force’s conclusion.
He said the identity of his hometown of Butler will forever be changed by July 13. And he said that, when his nine-year-old grandson asked him why someone had tried to kill President Trump, Kelly had no answer for him.
“As their grandfather, I’m appalled that they ever had to see that,” Kelly said during his closing remarks. “As a member of Congress, it strengthened my resolve that, you know what, we can go beyond this, we can be better than anybody imagined we could be, and accept the fact that we failed that day.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.