Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted the gunman who shot former President Donald Trump on Saturday had a “direct line” of sight and that such a positioning should have never been possible.
“A direct line of sight like that to the former president should not occur,” Mayorkas told ABC News’s Good Morning America Monday morning. “That’s why President Biden directed an independent review of the incident.”
Mayorkas, who was impeached by the House earlier this year for his handling of the southern border during years of record-high illegal immigration, has come under fire as the leader of the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees the Secret Service.
Republicans and the Trump-aligned America First Legal group immediately called for an investigation into how the Secret Service planned for the rally and responded during the attack.
Mayorkas has vowed to “learn everything about the assailant who, of course, the Secret Service so bravely neutralized.”
“We are going to really study the event independently and make recommendations to the Secret Service and to me so that we can assure the safety and security of our protectees, which is one of our most vital missions in the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and across the government,” Mayorkas said.
The FBI is the lead investigative agency.
Witnesses at the rally told reporters they had attempted to flag down local police or Secret Secret agents when they saw a man crawling on the roof of a nearby building.
The suspected shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, is believed to have shot at Trump from atop a nearby building during the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
this BBC interview with a guy outside the security perimeter who claims he saw the shooter before he fired is absolutely wild pic.twitter.com/vJpKZTxSAe
— Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) July 13, 2024
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A witness who claimed to have seen the gunman open fire at Trump’s rally said Secret Service agents encountered the shooter immediately afterward and “blew his head off.”
The BBC spoke with an unnamed witness who was outside the crowd standing by a nearby building in the vicinity who said he and another person attempted to flag local and federal police about a suspicious person “crawling” onto the back of a roof with a rifle.