By Brendan Scanland
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s been two months since the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, PA. On Thursday, the task force investigating the assassination attempt received a closed-door briefing from the U.S. Secret Service.
“It’s the preparation for whatever it is that you’re going to do that is the key to having success. That day, for whatever reason, we can’t put those pieces together,” said Congressman Mike Kelly (R- PA) Chairman of the Task Force. “I can’t believe that we weren’t able to communicate. I can’t believe with the knowledge that we had well, we weren’t sure. We were sure we didn’t know for sure. And that’s the thing that keeps looming in my head,” he added.
The Task Force on The Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump continues to piece together a complicated puzzle.
“We probably have 2,500 pages, 2,600 pages of information that we’re going through,” said Kelly.
The FBI is conducting its own separate investigation but there is still no known motive as to what caused Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire at the July 13 rally.
Kelly says the body of Crooks was released by the Allegheny County Coroner to Crooks’ family, who had the body cremated before Kelly says his team had a chance to conduct their own review.
“That really shouldn’t have happened until we had completed everything we wanted to complete ahead of time. I’m not questioning anybody, but we wanted it to match up with what we had. We don’t have the ability to do that right now,” said Kelly.
Despite that roadblock, Kelly says cooperation in the investigation has been “very good.” The committee has arranged dozens of interviews and received thousands of documents in order to get to the bottom of what went wrong and what can be done to ensure it never happens again.
However, the Task Force still has a lot to piece together. Kelly says being thorough takes time.
“There’s so much to look through and it’s going to take a while to get through it. But we said from the beginning, we don’t want to be quick. We want to be thorough,” said Kelly.
The Task Force is expected to release its full investigative report by Dec 13.
