1 of 5 | Former President Donald Trump is rushed off stage on July 13 by secret service after a shooting during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. On Monday, a House task force was named to investigate the attempted assassination. Photo by David Maxwell/EPA-EFE
July 29 (UPI) -- House Speaker Mike Johnson and minority leader Hakeem Jeffries announced the 13 members Monday who will lead a bipartisan task force, investigating the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
The seven Republican members of the task force will include Chairman Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, who represents the location of the assassination attempt; Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee; Rep. David Joyce of Ohio; Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida; Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida; Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana and Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas.
The six Democratic members of the task force will include Ranking member Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; Rep. Lou Correa of California; Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania; Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania; Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland and Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida.
"We have the utmost confidence in this bipartisan group of steady, highly qualified and capable members of Congress to move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability and help make certain such failures never happen again," Johnson, R-La., and Jeffries, D-N.Y., said Monday in a statement as they released the names.
The formation of the task force was approved last week in a unanimous House vote of 416 to 0. The Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump will investigate the July 13 shooting at a Pennsylvania rally, where a gunman struck the former president in the ear, killed a man and injured two other people.
Despite security for the event, Thomas Crooks, 20, managed to climb on a nearby roof with an AR-15-style weapon and was able to fire a number of rounds toward the president before he was killed by Secret Service.
The formation of the House task force also comes less than week after Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle announced her resignation.
"The Secret Service's solemn mission is to protect our nation's leaders and financial infrastructure. On July 13, we fell short on that mission," Cheatle wrote in her resignation letter. "The scrutiny over the last week has been intense and will continue to remain as our operational temp increases. As your director, I take full responsibility for the security lapse."
One day before she stepped down, Cheatle was grilled by lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing where FBI Director Christopher Wray also testified that they still "do not have a clear picture" of the shooter's motive or any accomplices.
"There doesn't appear to be a whole lot of interactions between him, face-to-face or digital, with a lot of people," Wray said, adding that "that doesn't mean there's not any."
The new task force will assume control over all House committee investigations into the Trump assassination attempt to determine "what went wrong," to "ensure accountability, to "prevent such an agency failure from ever happening again," and to "recommend reforms."
