By FARNOUSH AMIRI and REBECCA SANTANA
WASHINGTON (AP) — Members of a bipartisan House panel investigating the Trump assassination attempts suggested during their first hearing Thursday that the failures that led to a gunman being able to open fire on former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania were with the U.S. Secret Service, not local police.
In his opening statement, the Republican co-chair of the committee, Rep. Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania, blamed a cascade of failures by the Secret Service that allowed a gunman, Thomas Michael Crooks, to gain access to the roof of a nearby building and open fire on Trump. Trump was wounded and a man attending the rally with his family was killed.
“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. There were security failures on multiple fronts,” said Kelly.
The panel — comprised of seven Republicans and six Democrats — has spent the last two months analyzing 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. Crooks was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper positioned on a nearby roof.
Now the panel is also investigating this month’s Secret Service arrest of a man with a rifle on Trump’s Florida golf course who 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.
The hearing Thursday was the first time the task force presented 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 focused on the use of local law enforcement by the Secret Service, featuring testimony from Pennsylvania 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 criticized for failing to clearly communicate what it needed from those local agencies that day.
Thursday’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 Pennsylvania 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.
An interim report Wednesday from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is also conducting an investigation, said the Secret Service failed to give clear instructions on how state and local officials should cover the building where the gunman eventually took up position. The report also said the agency didn’t make sure it could share information with local partners in real-time.
The Secret Service has also released a five-page document summarizing the key conclusions of a yet-to-be-finalized agency report on what went wrong in Butler. Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe has said that the Secret Service is ultimately responsible for what happened in Butler, and during a news conference last week to announce the results of that report he cited complacency by the agency’s staff and said that they need to do a better job communicating with local and state officials.
The House panel is expected to propose a series of legislative reforms and issue its own final report before Dec. 13.
While the oversight investigations have been bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans have disagreed on whether to give the Secret Service more money in the wake of its failures. A government funding bill that passed Wednesday includes an additional $231 million for the agency, even though many Republicans were skeptical and said an internal overhaul of the Secret Service is needed.
As lawmakers prepare to probe the second attempt in Florida, they are also grappling with the major differences between the two assassination attempts.
“It’s going to be different in a lot of respects. I mean, the size of the event was very different. The use of local law enforcement was very different. The challenges were different,” said Rep. Jason Crow. “Whereas in Butler, there are very obvious series of cascading failures.”
The Colorado Democrat said the Justice Department and FBI have also informed Congress that given the ongoing criminal investigation into what happened in Florida and the prosecution of Routh, it will be more challenging for them to turn over documents or provide witness testimony.
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