We’ll give Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe credit: He says he’s ashamed, and he should be. After all, his agency is responsible for one of if not the most catastrophic security failures in Secret Service history.

Rowe testified yesterday during a joint congressional hearing, and he acquitted himself far more honorably than did his predecessor, disgraced DEI hire and former Pepsi security director Kim Cheatle.

Indeed, Rowe at least owned up to the spectacular security lapses that allowed a 20-year-old would-be assassin to make multiple reconnaissance trips to Donald Trump’s Butler, Pennsylvania, rally site; to fly a drone at the site just hours before the attack; to be seen suspiciously walking around outside the rally with a backpack and using a rangefinder some 90 minutes before Trump took the stage; to climb upon the most advantageous rooftop position available despite having been seen by multiple bystanders who were frantically pointing him out to law enforcement; and to fire off at least six rounds before finally being taken out by Secret Service countersnipers. And all this, most outrageously, while Donald Trump was allowed to take the stage and thereby expose himself to a known threat.

Yes, it’s true that President John F. Kennedy was actually assassinated, while former president Trump escaped that same fate by a literal inch. And Sara Jane Moore fired a .38 caliber revolver at President Gerald Ford from 40 feet away outside a San Francisco hotel in 1975. And John Hinckley opened fire on President Ronald Reagan from just feet away outside the Hilton hotel in 1981.

But think of the tactical and procedural improvements that have been adopted by the Secret Service in the more than 60 years since Kennedy was killed. And think of the surveillance and communicative and technological capabilities that today’s Secret Service has at its disposal compared to those of decades ago.

To say that these lapses were both shocking and disgraceful is to be kind. To suggest anything more nefarious than profound and even willful negligence, though, is to enter a very dark place.

And yet, the American people deserve answers. Why, for example, can our best intelligence services not access the encrypted communications of the assassin, when they can seemingly access every other communication under the sun? Why do we still know so little about Thomas Crooks and how he was radicalized?

Why is it that Andrew Torba, the CEO of the Gab social media platform, “is pushing back against claims made by [FBI] deputy director Paul Abbate that the agency has found anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic posts made by the shooter, Thomas Crooks”?

As the National Pulse adds:

Abbate, during a joint hearing before two U.S. Senate committees on Tuesday, claimed the bureau had found what it believes to be social media posts made by Crooks between 2019 and 2020 that contained the racially charged comments.

“This is not consistent with Gab’s understanding of the shooter’s motives based on an Emergency Disclosure Request (EDR) we received from the FBI last week for the Gab account ‘EpicMicrowave’ which, based on the content of that EDR, the FBI appeared to think belonged to Thomas Crooks,” Torba wrote in a post on X responding to Abbate’s claims. He continued: “Normally we don’t confirm the existence or content of law enforcement communications. In this instance we had to make an exception due to the overwhelming public interest in disclosure and transparency.”

Wrote Torba: “The story is this: the account for which data was requested was, UNEQUIVOCALLY, pro-Biden and in particular pro-Biden’s immigration policy,” adding: “To the best of Gab’s knowledge, as of 2021, Crooks was a pro-lockdown, pro-immigration, left-wing Joe Biden supporter.”

So, according to the FBI, Crooks was “a registered Republican.” But according to a more honest and forthcoming broker, Crooks’s leanings were “unequivocally” “pro-Biden.”

“I believe that the Secret Service leadership made a political decision to deny these requests [for additional security],” said a clearly frustrated Texas Senator Ted Cruz to Rowe. “And I think the Biden administration has been suffused with partisan politics.”

Rowe sidestepped that charge. But to deny that politics may have played a part in the denial of additional security for Trump is to ignore the fact that the Biden administration continually denied Secret Service protection to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. despite his family’s awful history of assassination. Could it have something to do with the fact that Kennedy, like Trump, posed a serious threat to Joe Biden’s reelection prospects?

Some will argue that Donald Trump is not a sitting president, and so he doesn’t rate the sort of protection that, say, Joe or Jill Biden would rate. But Donald Trump isn’t just any former president. He’s the current front-runner to be the next president, and to those on the unhinged Left, he’s the most reviled political figure in American history.

These distinctions might be lost on the current leadership at the Secret Service, but not everyone there is content to simply move forward without holding people accountable.

Consider the desperate measure undertaken by a Secret Service countersniper with more than 20 years on that team, who on Monday night sent a lengthy e-mail to everyone in the agency’s Uniform Division. According to that email: “I’m not stopping until 5 high level supervisors … are either fired or removed from their current positions. This agency NEEDS to change, if not now, WHEN? The NEXT assassination attempt in 30 days?” He added: “We all SHOULD expect another attempt to happen before November. We’ve exposed our inability to protect our leaders due to our leadership.”

In response, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn said to Rowe: “The public has lost trust in the ability to execute the mission to protect, and I want to know how you feel about the fact that employees in your agency are worried about covering their behind and not worried about protecting a former president.”

Updated with additional thoughts on the Secret Service’s denial of requests for greater security for Donald Trump, and an expanded quotation from a Secret Service whistleblower.