House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced the membership of a new, bipartisan task force that will investigate the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally earlier this month.
The task force will be led by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, who lives in the Pennsylvania town of Butler where the shooting took place, and includes seven Republicans and six Democrats in the GOP-controlled House. The top Democratic member will be Colorado Rep. Jason Crow.
“We have the utmost confidence in this bipartisan group of steady, highly qualified and capable Members of Congress to move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability and help make certain such failures never happen again,” said Johnson and Jeffries in a rare joint statement.
Beyond Kelly, the Republicans serving on the task force are Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, Ohio Rep. David Joyce, Florida Reps. Laurel Lee and Michael Waltz, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins and Texas Rep. Pat Fallon. The Democrats also joining the effort are California Rep. Lou Correa, Pennsylvania Reps. Madeline Dean and Chrissy Houlahan, Maryland Rep. Glenn Ivey and Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz.
A vote to establish the task force passed the House unanimously in a 416-0 vote last week.
“In the days after the shooting, my hometown of more than 13,000 people was thrust into the national spotlight. We, and the rest of the American people, saw rumors about the shooting and the shooter swirling on social media. We heard contradicting statements,” Kelly wrote in a Newsweek op-ed last week. “Separating truth from fiction is vital as law enforcement and Congress each conduct their respective investigations.”
Six of the 13 House members assigned to the task force are military veterans, something the congressional leaders emphasized in their press release announcing the membership. Two others, Lee of Florida and Ivey of Maryland, are former assistant U.S. attorneys.
The task force will have access to the full range of the House of Representatives’ investigative powers, including subpoena authority.
The panel will have three goals: to understand what went wrong on the day of the attempted assassination that killed one man and wounded Trump and two others, ensure accountability, and to prevent similar security failures from happening again. It will then make recommendations to the Secret Sevice and other government agencies, as well as propose legislation as necessary to prevent similar incidents from occuring in the future.
In the weeks since the shooting, local law enforcement and the Secret Service have pointed fingers and attributed blame to the array of entities responsible for security that day. Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle resigned last week amid outrage from members of both parties over the shooting of a former president and current major party nominee for president. As she left, Cheatle admitted that the agency "fell short" and wrote in an email to staff that "as your Director, I take full responsibility for the security lapse."
“It appears there were a number of security lapses — and it appears that this may not have been the first major security lapse for a national political candidate. This is unacceptable,” said Correa, a California Democrat on the task force who visited the site of the shooting earlier this month. “I'm committed to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to get to the bottom of what actually happened that day, and develop policy solutions to ensure we never face a close call like that again."
Crow, the ranking Democrat on the task force, said in a statement that he “will treat it like what it is: a solemn, urgent, and necessary responsibility. The American people deserve clear answers and assurances that we will not let this happen again.”
Trump was giving a campaign speech in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, July 13, when a 20-year-old gunman who lived about an hour drive away in western Pennsylvania opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle from atop a manufacturing building roughly 150 yards from the stage, according to the FBI. The former president had just turned his head to look at a chart of immigration data when either a bullet or fragments of a bullet hit his ear, the FBI said. While he bled from the ear and wore a bandage for the week following the shooting, Trump is “rapidly recovering,” Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson — a former White House doctor who has continued to review Trump’s medical records — wrote in a letter last week.
One rallygoer, Corey Comperatore, was killed, and two others were injured. The gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by a Secret Service counter-sniper.
Trump is expected to sit down with the FBI as part of their investigation into the assassination attempt. They have already conducted 450 interviews, including with Crooks’ parents, FBI special agent Kevin Rojkek said on a press call on Monday, but have yet to determine a motive. Rojek said the FBI has fleshed out a portrait of the gunman that reveals him to be a “highly intelligent” but reclusive 20-year-old whose primary social circle was his family and who maintained few friends and acquaintances throughout his life.
The FBI also believes Crooks spent months planning the assassination attempt, including the purchase of chemical precursors that investigators believe were used to create the explosive devices found in his car and his home. He also searched online for information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power plants, the attempted assassination in May of Slovakia's populist Prime Minister Robert Fico and the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
New details, meanwhile, were emerging about law enforcement security lapses that preceded the shooting, with Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, releasing text messages from members of the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit that showed how local officers had spotted a suspicious-looking man who turned out to be Crooks lurking around in the hour before the shooting.
“Kid learning around building we are in. AGR I believe it is,” one officer wrote to other counter-snipers, including a photograph of Crooks. “I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him.”
AGR is a reference to a complex of buildings that form AGR International Inc. Crooks scaled the roof of one of the buildings of the compound and fired eight shots at the rally stage with an AR-style rifle.
In an interview with ABC News, a Beaver County officer who sounded the alarm said that after sending the text, “I assumed that there would be somebody coming out to speak with this individual or find out what's going on.”
Another officer told ABC News that the group was supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service counter-snipers but that never happened. An email to the Secret Service was not immediately returned Monday.
Separate from the congressional task force and the FBI investigation, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — whose department includes the Secret Service — launched an “independent security review” into the attempted assassination earlier this month with bipartisan security experts tasked with producing a report in 45 days. Experts on the panel include former Obama administration Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, President George W. Bush’s former homeland security advisor Frances Townsend, former federal judge Mark Filip and former Maryland state police superintendent David Mitchell.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.