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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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Questions have been raised about why drones were not deployed on the day a gunman shot at former President Donald Trump.
On July 13, a gunman, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, opened fire from a rooftop near where Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He killed one rallygoer and seriously wounded two others before being shot dead by the Secret Service.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, sustained an injury to his right ear, and made a triumphant appearance at the Republican National Convention days later with a bandage over his wound.
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Since the shooting, multiple investigations have been launched—into the crime and how a shooter was able to get so close to the former president. There have been questions about missteps by the Secret Service and growing calls for the agency's director, Kimberly Cheatle, to resign after the attempt on Trump's life. She has said she will not.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, said Cheatle was asked in a law enforcement briefing with senators on Wednesday why drones were not deployed to detect potential threats from elevated positions during Saturday's rally.
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"You had one senator who asked, 'Were there drones, yes or no?'" Cruz said on Verdict, his podcast. "And the answer from the head of the Secret Service was, 'We determined that the risk from that rooftop was mitigated by countersnipers.'"
Cruz criticized Cheatle for not acknowledging during the call that drones should have been in use. He also questioned how an advance Secret Service team that scoped out the scene ahead of the event to identify potential areas of concern did not realize that the rooftop where the gunman opened fire from was sloped, meaning countersnipers would not be able to see everywhere on the rooftop.
"I'm pretty sure the roof didn't suddenly slant itself in between when they advanced the scene and when it occurred," he said. "In other words, they could have figured out if your quote 'mitigation' is countersnipers and they don't have a line of sight to a place a sniper could be, then you don't have effective mitigation. She addressed none of that."
Newsweek has contacted Cruz's office for further comment via email.
On Monday, Cheatle is expected to appear at a congressional hearing before the House Oversight Committee, having been subpoenaed by its Republican chair. She is likely to face further questions about why drones were not deployed.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said he asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about drones in a call after the shooting.
"It is standard practice now for drones to be in the air over an event like this," Johnson said in a recent interview, adding, "We are compiling now a longer list of very serious and important questions that must be answered immediately."
Johnson also said he would set up a task force to investigate security failures that had occurred.
The Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed that the Secret Service did not request Special Government Interest waivers to fly drones over the event.
"The FAA did not issue any event SGI waivers prior to last Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania," an FAA spokesperson told Newsweek. "On-scene law enforcement could have been operating drones under their individual agency authorizations."
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told Newsweek that the agency "cannot comment on matters related to an ongoing investigation at this time."
He added: "We of course are committed to working with the appropriate and relevant investigations of what happened on July 13, including with Congress, the Inspector General, and both internal and independent reviews."
In an interview with ABC News, Cheatle said the shooting was "unacceptable" and "something that shouldn't happen again."
She added that snipers had not been placed on the rooftop used by the gunman because it was sloped. "That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point," she said. "And so, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside."
President Joe Biden has ordered an independent review of the shooting. "We'll share the results of that independent review with the American people as well," he said on Sunday.
The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general has also launched an investigation into the Secret Service's handling of the shooting.
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