Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Penn., told Newsmax on Friday that legislators should continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump that occurred almost one year ago.
On July 13, 2024, a gunman fired at Trump from a rooftop while the then-former president was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooter was quickly killed by the Secret Service, which recently suspended six agency for failures related to the incident.
Reschenthaler, speaking to "Wake Up America" just a few days before the one-year anniversary of the incident, said, "in retrospect, it's amazing how fast the media moved off the assassination attempt."
He added "We still don't know too much about Matthew Thomas Crooks at all. How did a [20]-year-old kid have the wherewithal to do this? Why did he not have any social media profile at all? Anybody that knows a teenage kid now, they live on social media. What's going on with that?"
The congressman also questioned the Secret Service's comments about the situation, specifically the claim by the agency that they were unable to place a person on top of the roof where Crooks fired the shots because the steepness presented a safety concern.
"That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point," former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said in an interview that aired on ABC's "Good Morning America" in July of last year. "And so, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside."
Reschenthaler said, "Why are we told that that roof was too steep to put Secret Service on … when we know it wasn't that steep, because when Crooks was shot, his body didn't roll off the roof, it stayed on the roof. So how steep could it have been?"
He added that there are "tons of questions. We need to look more into it."
The congressman also criticized the Biden administration for not conducting proper oversight of the Secret Service after the incident, saying, "You don't have any other consequences until now."
"I feel like there was very little oversight by the Biden administration on what went wrong that day," he said.
"Certainly it does raise a red flag when you don't have anybody except Cheatle" leave the agency.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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