The newly formed House task force on the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump last month is officially opening its investigation – taking the lead from the House committees that have begun to look into the security failures at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa. last month.
The bipartisan task force, headed by Representative Mike Kelly (R., Pa.) and Representative Jason Crow (D., Colo.), sent letters to the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security requesting all information that has been produced to House and Senate committees up to this point, Punchbowl News first reported.
“The Task Force requests all documents and information that have been produced to date, to any committee of the House or Senate related to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump,” Kelly and Crow wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Secret Service acting director Ron Rowe.
Lawmakers are also requesting staff briefings with the DOJ, FBI, DHS, and Secret Service “to discuss the Task Force’s priorities with respect to documents and information moving forward.”
Kelly and Crow told the agencies that requests from the task force for documents and information supersede those made by other lawmakers and committees. Moving forward, the agencies are being asked to produce documents and information directly to the task force.
House lawmakers voted unanimously last month to form the bipartisan task force, and soon after Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) announced the panel’s membership. Kelly, whose district encompasses Butler, is chairman of the task force, which has until December to produce a report on its findings. Republicans have seven members on the task force compared to six for Democrats, but the panel appears to be acting in a bipartisan manner.
House and Senate committees have already held high-profile public hearings with Secret Service and FBI leadership on the security failures that allowed 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks to fire eight shots into the crowd from a rooftop nearby Trump’s rally in Butler. Republican senators have also been independently investigating the assassination attempt through whistleblower correspondence and requests for information from law enforcement and private companies.
The first hearing about the assassination attempt, featuring then-Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle, prompted her resignation last month after she received a barrage of bipartisan criticism for refusing to answer basic questions about how Crooks managed to carry out the shooting. Since then, a hearing with Wray yielded significant new details about the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Crooks and how he planned the attack.
At this time, Crooks is believed to have been a loner and gun-hobbyist who conducted the attack by himself after fixating on Trump and other public figures. Crooks’s motive remains unclear.
A Senate hearing with Rowe and FBI deputy director Paul Abbate divulged more information about the Secret Service’s startling communication breakdown leading up to Crooks’s attack, to the point where agents did not know Crooks was on the roof with a firearm until he fired into the crowd.
Former fire chief Corey Comperatore was killed while protecting his family from bullets. Trump was wounded during the attack when a bullet grazed his right ear, and two others were also wounded.