The U.S. Secret Service has taken a modicum of responsibility for the security lapse that a young man with an assault rifle took shots at Presidential candidate Donald Trump on July 13. Nonetheless, the blame game continues. “At that particular site, we divided up areas of responsibility, but the Secret Service is totally responsible for the design and implementation and the execution of the site,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told CNN in an interview on July 16. In a prior interview with ABC News, Cheatle had said that local law enforcement was responsible for the building from the roof of which 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired shots at Trump at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.
“What I was trying to stress was that we just divided up areas of responsibility, and they provided support to those areas of responsibility,” Cheatle said of local law enforcement, adding that the agency “couldn’t do our job without them.”
When asked by CNN if the perimeter at the rally was too small, Cheatle said it “encompassed the area that we needed to secure the event that we had on that day.”
