WASHINGTON (AP) – A bipartisan congressional task force investigating the assassination attempts against Donald Trump held its first hearing as lawmakers rush to ensure candidate safety just weeks before the United States (US) presidential election.
The panel – comprised of seven Republicans and six Democrats – has spent the last two months trying to decipher the security failures that allowed a gunman to scale a roof and open fire at the former president during a July 13 campaign rally in Pennsylvania, killing a spectator.
Now they are also investigating this month’s Secret Service arrest of a man with a rifle on Trump’s Florida golf course who also allegedly sought to assassinate the GOP presidential nominee.
The suspect in the second assassination attempt, Ryan Wesley Routh, was allegedly aiming a rifle through the shrubbery surrounding Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course when he was detected by a Secret Service agent. The agent opened fire and Routh fled before being apprehended by local authorities.
Representative Jason Crow, the top Democrat on the task force, said the group is now shifting to “a longer term, holistic look at both Butler and Florida”.
The hearing yesterday was the first time the task force will present its findings to the public after spending weeks conducting nearly two dozen interviews with law enforcement and receiving more than 2,800 pages of documents from the Secret Service. It will focus on the use of local law enforcement by the Secret Service, featuring testimony from Pennsylvania state and Butler County police officials.
The Secret Service often relies on local authorities to secure bigger events where protectees like Trump appear around the country. But after the Butler rally, the Secret Service was heavily criticised for failing to clearly communicate what they needed from those local agencies that day.
Yesterday’s session was the fourth congressional hearing about the Butler shooting since July. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned one day after she appeared before a congressional hearing where she was berated for hours by both Democrats and Republicans for the agency’s security failures.
Cheatle called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades, but she angered lawmakers by failing to answer specific questions about the investigation.
