Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), chair of the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, conducts a site assessment of the Butler Farm Show grounds, Aug. 27, 2024. (Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump)
WASHINGTON (Tribune News Service) — The House task force investigating the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life at a Butler rally in July seeks to interview local law enforcement officers and review a host of related documents and communications, including medical reports on the gunman killed by a Secret Service sniper.
U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler, the task force chairman, and ranking member Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., sent several letters Tuesday requesting records on planning, operations and communications from Butler County and Beaver County agencies that were supporting the U.S. Secret Service and Pennsylvania State Police at the rally.
The task force leaders asked the local law enforcement teams to make members available for interviews by Sept. 30. The names of those requested for interviews were redacted “to protect the privacy of law enforcement officers,” the lawmakers wrote. The group previously sent federal and state agencies similar requests for documents, and visited the Butler site last week.
“The letters seek all documents and communications related to the Trump rally ... including planning, participation, and post-event actions and correspondence,” Mr. Kelly and Mr. Crow said in a news release. The letters went to the Butler Township Police Department, Butler County Sheriff’s Department, and both Butler and Beaver County’s Emergency Services Units.
The requests come as the bipartisan 13-member task force ramps up its investigation just two months before Election Day. Meanwhile, a handful of House Republicans with military and security backgrounds who were not tapped for the bipartisan group are conducting an independent inquiry featuring frequent broadsides of the Secret Service and FBI.
Federal, state and local agencies say they are cooperating with several ongoing investigations.
The FBI last week sought to downplay several conspiracy theories, noting that there is no evidence of any co-conspirators or other shooters, and that the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, had sought information on both Republican and Democratic events and exhibited “no definitive ideology ... either left-leaning or right-leaning.”
Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., who is leading the independent group alongside Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., has consistently suggested that extensive security failures — which allowed Crooks to elude authorities and fire eight rounds into the rally — were somehow intentional.
“I think that criminal gross negligence and purposeful intent will be indistinguishable,” he said during a panel with security experts hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, last week.
Other members of Congress, including Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have peppered federal, state and local law enforcement with records requests for weeks, leading to the release of body camera footage and texts among officers who had spotted Crooks and deemed him suspicious.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., says whistleblowers have alleged that several agents assigned to the rally were Department of Homeland Security agents who received minimal training, including a webinar with audio glitches.
“A two-hour, online webinar,” he told Fox News Tuesday. “The former president of the U.S. ... is sent out on stage, most of the people there are not trained, they’re not qualified. They only got a webinar training and even that didn’t work. It is absolutely outrageous.”
Mr. Hawley offered no proof or evidence in support of his claim. Republican lawmakers have also used the term “whistleblower” loosely in recent congressional investigations.
Ronald Rowe, the Secret Service’s acting director, told lawmakers at a hearing on Capitol Hill in July that Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, never would have been allowed on stage if the Secret Service were aware a dangerous individual was at the scene.
Communication about Crooks on the rooftop with a gun did not make it up the chain of communications to Secret Service in time to prevent the shooting, he said at the time.
He also said there were about 150 law enforcement officers at the Butler site on July 13, including about 70 Secret Service agents and more than 70 state and local law enforcement officers.
“The United States Secret Service has the highest level of respect for congressional oversight and our agency is fully cooperating and will continue to cooperate,” Anthony Guglielmi, the agency’s chief of communications, told the Post-Gazette when asked about the various investigations and recent statements by Mr. Hawley.
“Since the attempted assassination of former President Trump, we have provided over 1,500 pages of responsive documentation to Congress and have made our employees available for interviews. Those efforts will continue as our desire to learn from this failure and ensure it never happens again is unwavering. We welcome any and all efforts towards that end.”
Mr. Kelly and Mr. Crow on Tuesday also wrote to Butler County Coroner William Young and Allegheny County Medical Examiner Ariel Goldschmidt, requesting they provide several records on the recovery and examination of Crooks’s body by no later than Friday.
The task force requested the coroner’s report, including notes, photographs and recordings of the scene where Crooks was shot; the autopsy report along with a list of everyone present when the examination took place; a toxicology report; and all documents related to the recovery of Crooks’s body from the roof of the American Glass Research building and release from the coroner’s jurisdiction to his family.
The request follows claims from task force member Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., that the FBI released the crime scene too early, “cleaned up biological evidence” from the scene, and released the gunman’s body to his family for cremation 10 days after the shooting — which he argued amounted to “obstruction.” Mr. Higgins made the claims after visiting the Butler site and speaking with local officers, he said.
The FBI’s Pittsburgh office told the Post-Gazette that “nothing was rushed” in the aftermath of the shooting.
The crime scene was released to the property owners in phases as the agency completed its work at the AGR building, its surroundings and the farm show grounds. The cleaning of the spot where Crooks was shot and killed was “in keeping with normal procedures,” as was the release of his body to his family “after coordination with the coroner’s office and our state and local law enforcement partners,” the FBI said.
Crooks’s toxicology report showed no traces of alcohol or “drugs of abuse,” the FBI said.
“Any suggestion the FBI is interfering with congressional efforts to look into the attempted assassination which took place in Butler ... is inaccurate and unfounded,” the agency said.
“The FBI has been working closely with our law enforcement partners to conduct a thorough investigation into the shooting, and we have followed normal procedures in the handling of the crime scene and evidence.”
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