“An incident like this cannot happen,” Mayorkas said. “We are talking about a failure.”
“We will be looking through an independent review at how this happened, why it happened and making recommendations and findings to ensure that it does not happen again,” he said.
Mayorkas, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and other Biden administration officials are facing pressure to explain whether errors in security planning for the Trump rally could have allowed the 20-year-old to Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire from an unsecured rooftop 450 feet away. Trump was wounded in the shooting. One man in the crowd was killed and two others were injured.
Cheatle has not spoken publicly since the attack, though in a statement Monday he said the agency would cooperate fully with an independent review and “work with appropriate congressional committees on any oversight actions.”
The United States Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Its director is appointed by the White House.
Lawmakers are launching their own investigations into the assassination attempt. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Monday that Cheatle will testify before lawmakers on July 22.
Johnson said he spoke with Mayorkas hours after the attack and pressed the DHS secretary to explain why the Secret Service was not using surveillance drones to monitor the rally from above. “Where were the drones?” Johnson said, speaking on the Brian Kilmeade show. “Obviously, you would have seen someone on a rooftop.”
Johnson said he and other Republican lawmakers were consulting with former law enforcement officials to come up with a list of questions for Mayorkas and other Homeland Security officials.
Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Monday that the panel will conduct a bipartisan investigation into the shooting. The senators plan to hold a hearing “to examine the security failures” that led to the shooting, the committee announced.
The House Oversight Committee will receive a briefing on the assassination attempt on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the planning.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Ranking Member Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) received briefings Monday morning from FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. Those briefings have been described as preliminary.
The Secret Service agents who protected Trump and killed his attacker have been widely praised for acting quickly and decisively, but it remains unclear how Crooks was able to gain access to a nearby rooftop with an AR-style rifle.
Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary during the Obama administration, said the Biden administration should urgently assess the failures at Trump’s rally to prevent another attack in the coming months as the nation remains deeply divided ahead of the November election.
“Someone needs to get on top of this investigation as soon as possible,” Panetta, now a member of the National Security Advisory Council, said in a telephone interview. “We’re not at the end of a political campaign, we’re at the beginning of a political campaign. We need to quickly learn what went wrong and make sure we’ve corrected it.”
When he was White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, Panetta said, he would meet with the Secret Service before presidential events to make sure they had considered all possible scenarios and were prepared for contingencies.
“The fact that he showed up on top of a rooftop with a rifle and had time to sit down and shoot tells you something went very wrong,” Panetta said. “I don’t know how in the world you could have let that happen.”
Bill Bratton, a former New York police commissioner and member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, said he expected the FBI-led criminal investigation to take priority over the administrative inquiry into the Secret Service’s actions. Authorities must conclusively and urgently determine whether the shooter acted alone — which Bratton said appears increasingly likely — or in concert with some terrorist organization, he said.
“What was the motivation?” he said. “That’s what they’re dealing with right now.”
Bratton praised the Secret Service agents who protected Trump during the attack, but said the agency’s preparations ahead of the rally appeared “deficient” and “not the Secret Service’s finest hour.”
“No one is questioning the bravery and the actions that were taken after the incident began, the Secret Service putting their bodies between the sniper and the president,” he said. “What is really going to be focused on is the moments leading up to it. There is a possibility that people will lose their jobs as a result of this, no doubt.”
Emilio T. Gonzalez, a former Army intelligence officer and Homeland Security official, said the shooting revealed glaring failures in Secret Service planning and resources.
“This was terribly, terribly organized from a security perspective,” Gonzalez, a Trump supporter, said in an interview.
“This guy should never have been this close to President Trump. His protection by the Secret Service should have been airtight, and it wasn’t,” he added. “So the question is: why wasn’t it?”
Jacqueline Alemany, Abigail Hauslohner, Carol D. Leonnig, Maria Luisa Paul and Leo Sands contributed to this report.
