WATCH: Acting Secret Service Boss Claims No Knowledge of Shooter on Roof at Trump Rally ‘Until They Heard Gunshots at 6:11 PM’

The new Acting Secret Service Director says the agency was never told would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was on the roof of the nearby building — until after he started shooting at former President Donald Trump, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

At a press conference on Capitol Hill, Ronald Rowe addressed the July 13 assassination attempt by 20-year-old Crooks, saying the agency was only working with the information there was a “suspicious individual” lurking outside the perimeter of the building.

Around the 5:30 minute mark of the conference, Rowe stated: “At 6 PM former president Trump took the stage to begin remarks and based on what I know right now, neither the Secret Service counter-sniper teams nor members of the former president's security detail had any knowledge that there was a man on the roof of the AGR building with a firearm.”

“It is my understanding that personnel were not aware the assailant had a firearm until they heard gunshots at 6:11 PM.”

Earlier, Rowe explained that an emergency services unit counter-sniper team member texted the Secret Service counter-sniper team leader about a suspicious person and sent two photos of what would later be determined as Crooks, at 5:53 PM.

At the time, Rowe appeared to insinuate that somehow the fault lay with the failure of local authorities who spotted Crooks two hours before the assassination attempt and failed to communicate this to the Secret Service.

However, he later said: “This was a secret service failure. That roof line should have been covered. We should have had better eyes on that.”

These remarks come following the backlash over the Secret Service dropping the ball on the assassination attempt, which led to Rowe becoming the agency’s acting director.

As RadarOnline previously reported, former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned following a bruising hearing at the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

Cheatle, 53, announced her decision to step down in an email issued to Secret Service agents which stated: “In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that I have made the difficult decision to step down as your director. I do not want my calls for resignation to be a distraction from the great work each and every one of you do towards our vital mission.”

She also acknowledged it is one of the agency’s “foremost duties” to protect the country’s leaders – and she “fell short of that mission” in failing to protect Trump from a would-be assassin during the campaign rally.

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In temporarily stepping into Cheatle’s role, Rowe also came under heavy fire in his own GOP hearing in which he was questioned on whether he'd fire agents over the incident.

Republican Senator, Josh Hawley, 44, snapped: “Isn’t the fact that a former president was shot, that a good American is dead, that other Americans were critically wounded – isn’t that enough mission failure for you to say that the person who decided that building should not be in the security perimeter probably ought to be stepped down?”

Rowe held his ground and pushed back against Hawley, saying: “I want to be neutral and make sure that we get to the bottom of it and interview everybody in order to determine if there was more than one person who perhaps exercised bad judgment ... What I need to know is exactly what happened, and I need my investigators to do their job, and I cannot put my thumb on the scale.”

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