“You were told 90 minutes out. You were 60 minutes out,” he said of the snipers. “You were told by text. You were told by radios on the tactical net. I don’t understand. You’re expecting people to believe the implausible because they can’t be expected to believe the alternative that this much incompetence was displayed on the same day.”

Acting Secret Service Director Robert Rowe testified on Capitol Hill that the agency accepted culpability for the historic security failure but appeared to imitate his predecessor’s argument that local law enforcement were responsible for securing the perimeter of the rally. Earlier this week, Rowe was found to be “directly involved” in denying Trump’s team a full array of Secret Service resources, including additional counter-snipers for the rally. Several sources familiar with agency machinations told RealClearPolitics Rowe worked closely with former director Kimberly Cheatle to turn down requests by the Trump campaign for “magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.” Specifically, Rowe ordered that Secret Service snipers not attend Trump rallies that were outside the driving distance of the agency’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. The drive time from the nation’s capital to Butler is approximately four and a half hours northwest, conceivably putting the rally location far outside Rowe’s radar.

On Wednesday FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate provided lawmakers an update on his investigation into the failed coordination between the Secret Service and local authorities admitting for the first time that the agency’s anti-drone technology suffered a meltdown that day. He also announced that a failed chain of communication prevented warnings about the gunman from reaching counter-snipers at least 30 seconds before the shooting began. “If we’d had that information they’d have been able to address it more quickly. 

It appears that that information was stuck or siloed in that state or local channel,” Rowe admitted before pointing to other ways in which the Secret Service did its best to partner with police in Butler, Pennsylvania that day. “It is troubling to me that we did not get that information as quickly as we should have. We didn’t know that there was this incident going on, and the only thing we had was, locals were working on an issue at the 3 o’clock, which was to the president’s right which was where the shot came. Nothing about the man on the roof, nothing about a man with a gun, none of that information ever made it over our net.”