WASHINGTON (NEWSnet/AP) — The director of the Secret Service says the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally was the agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.

Director Kimberly Cheatle told lawmakers during a congressional hearing Monday that she takes full responsibility for the agency’s missteps, adding: “On July 13, we failed.”

Cheatle was speaking Monday before the House Oversight Committee, amid calls for her to resign over security failures during the shooting where a 20-year-old gunman attempted to assassinate the Republican candidate and former president.

This was the first of what will certainly be multiple investigations into the situation, given the announcements so far. One attendee was dead, Trump was wounded in the ear and two other attendees were injured after Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed atop the roof of a nearby building and opened fire.

Lawmakers have been expressing anger over how the gunman could get so close to a Secret Service protectee, specifically a former president. The Secret Service has acknowledged it denied some requests by Trump’s campaign for increased security at his events in the years before the assassination attempt.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has called what happened a “failure” while several lawmakers have called on Cheatle to resign or for President Joe Biden to fire her.

The Secret Service has said Cheatle does not intend to step down.

Before the shooting, local law enforcement had noticed Crooks pacing around the edges of the rally, peering into the lens of a rangefinder toward the rooftops behind the stage where the president later stood, officials have told The Associated Press.

Witnesses later saw him climbing up the side of a squat manufacturing building that was within 157 yards from the stage. He then set up his AR-style rifle and lay on the rooftop, a detonator in his pocket to set off crude explosive devices that were stashed in his car parked nearby.

The attack on Trump was the most serious attempt to assassinate a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.

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