Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., chairman of the House task force investigating the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, set the tone in his opening statement of the committee's first hearing Thursday by saying the attempt was not prevented "because of failures by the Secret Service."
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was able to climb to the top of a building about 130 yards away from where Trump was speaking during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting the former president in the right ear. Crooks killed a spectator and seriously injured two others before a Secret Service countersniper gunned him down.
The hearing came days after the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee issued a 133-page report on the assassination attempt that highlighted several failures by the Secret Service in Butler.
"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," Kelly said. "There were security failures on multiple fronts."
The task force of seven Republicans and six Democrats has spent two months analyzing the security failures at the rally, conducting nearly two dozen interviews with law enforcement, and receiving thousands of pages of documents from the Secret Service.
The task force also is investigating a second assassination attempt on Trump on Sept. 15, when Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was spotted by a Secret Service agent pointing a gun in a tree line on Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, several hundred yards away from where the Republican presidential nominee was playing. Routh has been charged with attempted assassination of a political candidate and is facing federal gun charges.
Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., the ranking Democrat on the task force, asked Patrick Sullivan, a former Secret Service agent, why there wasn't a unified command station on the Butler grounds.
"Is that atypical in your experience?" Crow asked. "Would there normally be one command and control station to unify command and communications?"
"Yes, that's very atypical," Sullivan replied. "Normally, there's an overall command post for the entire visit, and each site will have a security room for radio traffic to that individual site is controlled. And the command post — the overall command post — should be at the state, local police, Secret Service, and other federal partners that may be assisting.
"So this is very unusual that the way it turned out here at this site."
Democrats on the task force reportedly refused to attend an afternoon session of the panel during which Republican Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona and Cory Mills of Florida, both former military snipers, testified.
Crane and Mills were not picked for the task force but have proposed theories that the assassination attempt was an inside job. They have been conducting their own investigation, although they don't have subpoena power and reportedly promised to share anything with task force.
"I don't want to be any part of spreading conspiracies," Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., said, according to The New York Times.
"I'm always somebody who wants to collect the facts first, not jump in with my own conclusion and try to make the ending meet my conclusion. So that's why I think it'll be best if they can say what they want, and I hope we do return to the bipartisan spirit and consensus spirit that brought us to this."