WASHINGTON >> Members of a bipartisan House task force investigating the Trump assassination attempts emphasized during their first hearing Thursday that the Secret Service, not local authorities, was responsible for the failures in planning and communications that led to a gunman being able to open fire on former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

Lawmakers repeatedly questioned why the agency tasked with protecting the country’s top leaders didn’t do a better job communicating with local authorities during the July 13 rally, particularly when it came to securing the building that was widely agreed to be a security threat but that ultimately was left so unprotected that gunman Thomas Michael Crooks was able to climb up and open fire on Trump.

“In the days leading up to the rally, it was not a single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our country’s most elite group of security professionals. There were security failures on multiple fronts,” said the Republican co-chair of the committee, Rep. Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania.

“The communication between the Secret Service and local and state partners was disjointed and unclear,” said Rep. Jason Crow, the ranking Democrat on the panel, who also praised the local law enforcement.

Trump was wounded and a man attending the rally with his family was killed.

The panel — comprised of seven Republicans and six Democrats — has spent the last two months analyzing the security failures at the rally, conducting nearly two dozen interviews with law enforcement and receiving more than 2,800 pages of documents from the Secret Service.

The lawmakers are also investigating a second assassination attempt on Trump that happened earlier this month where a man with a rifle sought to assassinate the GOP presidential nominee while he was golfing at one of his courses in southern Florida.

But the hearing Thursday focused on the rally shooting with testimony from Pennsylvania and Butler County police officials.

The Secret Service often relies on local authorities to secure bigger events where protectees like Trump appear around the country. But after the Butler rally, the agency was heavily criticized for failing to clearly communicate what it needed from those local agencies that day.

One key question has been why there were no law enforcement personnel on top of the AGR building where Crooks eventually climbed up and took his shots, considering that it was so close to the rally stage and afforded a clear line of sight to Trump.

“A 10-year old looking at that satellite image could have seen that the greatest threat posed to the president that day” was the building near the stage, said Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas.