During testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, the acting director of the Secret Service told lawmakers that his force had prepared for local law enforcement agencies to provide counter-snipers on the perimeter of former President Donald Trump’s deadly rally on July 13th. That came as news to officers in Butler, Pennsylvania, who told outlets that they were never asked to do so.

The New York Times reported on remarks by Acting Director Ronald Rowe Jr. before the House Oversight Committee where he insisted an investigation into the assassination attempt is ongoing and was grilled by furious lawmakers who were incredulous that he has not fired anyone involved in the historic security failure. At one point Rowe expressed disappointment at state and local security partners for not positioning a counter-sniper on the roof where a 20-year-old man was able to fire multiple rifle rounds at President Trump, striking him once. “They should have been on the roof,” the chief said in what amounted to a mirror excuse of that given by former Director Kimberly Cheatle who resigned last week.

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In a shocking admission, Rowe said it was the Secret Service’s responsibility to tell local teams tasked with guarding the rally’s perimeter that they were expected to have snipers ready. That request may not have been made, he admitted, a baffling shortcoming that left him questioning the decision-making processes within his own agency. “We need to be very direct to our local law enforcement counterparts that they understand exactly what their expectation is,” he told lawmakers.

Ultimately, Rowe said, the failure to secure President Trump and a death and injuries to rallygoers was “a failure of imagination” to see that “we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually want to do harm to our protectee.” However, he added, “We didn’t challenge our own assumptions. We assumed that someone is going to cover that.”

Authorities have played a lengthy blame game since the shooting, and Rowe’s comments are sure to rankle local officers who have cited a lack of communication from the Secret Service and delays in responding to the shooter and are still participating in an after-action investigation by the FBI. “We are looking at this, and they should have been on the roof, and the fact they were in the building is something I’m still trying to understand.” Mr. Rowe said, promising the Secret Service would do better in the future in its coordination efforts.

That explanation wasn’t good enough for Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) who aggressively questioned the acting director about his previous denials of additional security to President Trump and asked why no one in the agency has been fired as a result. “Isn’t the fact that a former president was shot, that a good American is dead, that other Americans were critically wounded — isn’t that enough mission failure for you to say that the person who decided that building should not be in the security perimeter probably ought to be stepped down?” Hawley asked him. “I want to be neutral and make sure that we get to the bottom of it and interview everybody in order to determine if there was more than one person who perhaps exercised bad judgment,” Rowe replied, saying he does not want to “zero in on one or two individuals.”

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