Senator Marshall Blasts Secret Service and FBI Leadership, Calls for New, Unbiased Leadership

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. joined Evening Edit on Fox Business and The Record on Newsmax just hours after Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe, Jr testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) Committee. 

During the hearing, Senator Marshall grilled Director Rowe about the massive security failures at the highest levels on July 13th and expressed his frustration for the limited information provided to Congress and the public still- 17 days following the shooting.

You may click HERE or on the image above to watch Senator Marshall’s full interview.

Highlights from Senator Marshall’s interview include:

“What I would share with you is that folks back home don’t trust the FBI. They have no faith or competence in the Secret Service right now. And this hearing did nothing to relieve those fears that the Secret Service has significant institutional problems, cultural issues within it. And that’s why they need a big change. We need somebody to come in there, a crisis intervention team.”

“And I’m just telling you, there’s nothing that this secret service director is gonna be able to do right now. He cannot see the forest for the trees that he’s not objective. He’s trying to protect everybody’s job. People should be at least placed on leave until we get to the bottom of it.”

“He would not tell us who was responsible for denying President Trump more security, he wouldn’t tell us who makes the decisions to say no, we’re not going to use a drone. He would not say who drew this security line and left 10 buildings within the direct line of the President. So even within days, a normal post-mortem on a event like this should reveal those basic stops to say, here’s where the basic mistakes were, these are the people that we’ve relieved of their duty, we’ve made these corrections to protect President Trump at the next rally.”

You may click HERE or on the image above to watch Senator Marshall’s full interview.

Highlights from Senator Marshall’s interview include:

“He [Secret Service Acting Director Rowe] did deflect the blame to the local police and my specific question for him was did the Secret Service hold their meeting that morning with local police. Local police officers said that meeting never happened. I did not get a direct answer from the acting director. And he says on the one hand that he wants to cooperate with investigations, but he’s not taking full accountability.”

“We’ve all seen enough that there were individual failures. There were systemic failures there as well. So if he’s gonna do the blame game, then he’s not the right guy. This is why I’m calling for a crisis intervention team to come in there. Somebody needs to come in from the outside and clean that place out, start from the top down until they get it right. They go through their protocols or standard operating procedures, and recreate a culture of excellence.”

“My second question for the acting director is why was that building not in the primary security range. There were 10 buildings within 500 yards that had a direct line of sight to President Trump, and they weren’t in the primary security range. At least he did come forth and say exactly what happened during those seven or eight minutes as you describe it. Here’s a 21 year old lone wolf, a kid with really minimal military security experiences, he jumps up on an air conditioner, jumps up on a building, and then scales the roof of four different buildings jumping from building to building. That’s what was going on in those seven or eight minutes. If we had a drone in the air, we should have seen him. I don’t know why there wasn’t some better direct line of sight looking down. There’s a water tower, we could have had secret service agents on. Again, operational control loss, systemic failure after systemic failure.”

“There’s really no one within the Secret Service I think that can turn the program around. We need to bring somebody from the outside in. I feel like we fired the head coach, but the assistant coach is still there. We need to rip the bandage off. We need to bring in new management and start over.”