WATCH: Sen. Klobuchar questions acting Secret Service director on Trump rally shooting probe

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. questioned U.S. Secret Service acting director Ronald Rowe and FBI deputy director Paul Abbate in a hearing Tuesday.

When Klobuchar asked Rowe to describe what went wrong that lead to the fatal Trump rally shooting, Rowe answered that failures in imagination and assumption were to blame.

"I think this was a failure of imagination. A failure to imagine that we actually do live in a very dangerous world where people do actually want to do harm to our protectees. I think it was a failure to challenge our own assumptions, the assumptions that we know our partners are going to do everything they can, and they do this every day. But we didn't challenge our own assumptions of, 'we assume that someone's going to cover that, we assume that there's going to be uniform presence.' We didn't challenge that internally during that advance," Rowe said.

"So moving forward, I've directed that when we're talking to people and we're making requests, we are very specific about what we want," Rowe continued. "We are providing explicit instructions on exactly what our expectation is and what we need them to do and what we want them to do. That's the only way that we're going to be able to move forward beyond this."

The joint hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Senate Judiciary Committee was the latest to examine what investigators have learned about the shooter who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, as well as the security failures that preceded the deadly shooting.

Rowe, who since 2023 had been serving as deputy director of the Secret Service, was appointed acting director after Kimberly Cheatle’s resignation.

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