WASHINGTON >> Members of a bipartisan House task force investigating the Donald 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 the former president and GOP presidential nominee during a campaign rally 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 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. Crooks was killed at the scene by a Secret Service sniper.

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 allegedly sought to assassinate the candidate while Trump was golfing in southern Florida.

In that case, no shots were fired by the alleged assailant.

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

Using local authorities

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.

Edward Lenz, commander for the Butler County Emergency Services Unit who was in charge of the local tactical units operating at the Butler rally, said his agency was never asked to put a sniper team on top of the roof and never said that they would. Lenz said the Secret Service knew their shooters were inside the AGR Building — a position designed to allow them to look for threats inside the rally crowd as opposed to threats to the president from outside — and there was no “feedback or guidance” from the Secret Service that they wanted the team anywhere else.

“They knew where we would be,” Lenz said. “They knew what our plan was.”

Lenz also testified that Secret Service officials did not check with him or his team to make sure they were in place before Trump went on stage and that the emergency communication had not been worked out in advance.

Drew Blasko, an assistant team leader of the sniper unit within the Butler Township Emergency Services Unit, testified that he shared his concerns about the building with the Secret Service ahead of the rally and said his team didn’t have the manpower to post anyone there. He said he asked the Secret Service that additional people be posted there and was told “that they would take care of it.”

Who was responsible?

Lawmakers struggled in their questioning Thursday to get witnesses to zero in on a single individual or moment that led to the assassination attempt.

“Communication was totally lacking here,” said Rep. Lou Correa, a Democrat from California. “What went wrong? Who’s in charge?”

An interim report Wednesday from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is also conducting an investigation, said the Secret Service failed to give clear instructions on how state and local officials should cover the building where the gunman eventually took up position. The report also said the agency didn’t make sure it could share information with local partners in real-time.