Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, told Newsmax on Tuesday that the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday was "an epic and historic failure" on the part of the Secret Service.
Appearing on "National Report," Fallon compared the Secret Service's failure to prevent the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, to the agency's failure to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
"This is akin to what happened on Nov. 22, 1963, and there's no way around it," said Fallon, who sits on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which is set to hear testimony from Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on Monday.
"You need to secure rooftops," he added, referring to the suspected shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, positioning himself on the roof of a nearby building that had a clear view of the stage where Trump was speaking Saturday.
"No one is going to shoot President Trump from that distance from inside the building," Fallon said. "Why wasn't the roof covered?"
He noted that law enforcement snipers shot and killed Crooks just after he began firing, but said, "That kid should have never gotten on the roof in the first place," adding,"The Secret Service's job is not to react to a shooting, it's to prevent it in the first place. So, we need to have accountability."
"President Trump, by a millimeter, escaped assassination, and God knows what kind of historic civil unrest we would have had in this country had he been killed," he said.
Fallon also hit the agency for its response after the incident, saying, "The Secret Service is just kind of shrugging their shoulders. We need to dig into why there needs to be accountability. We need to make sure that this never happens again, whether it's independent, Democrat, or Republican."
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