House unanimously approves task force to investigate assassination attempt on Trump
The House on Wednesday formally authorized a task force to investigate the assassination attempt against former President Trump, centralizing the chamber's probes into the attack.
In a display of bipartisanship on Wednesday night, House lawmakers voted unanimously to approve a resolution to create the task force.
The panel is set to have 13 members, with 7 Republicans and 6 Democrats, and will have subpoena authority.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have been working closely on the matter, and announced some details of the task force in a joint release earlier this week.
Johnson said the lawmakers who will be on the panel “will be persons who have expertise in the areas in question.”
“They'll have three primary responsibilities: We have to get the answers, of course, about what happened. We need to make sure that accountability is ensured to the American people. And then we need to prevent anything like this from ever happening again,” Johnson said earlier this week.
The task force will produce a final report by Dec. 13, but will have interim reports along the way, Johnson said.
The Speaker said earlier Wednesday that he and Jeffries were still finalizing the list of members to appoint to the panel, but will release their selections on Thursday before lawmakers leave Washington for an early August recess.
There was some posturing about the makeup of the panel earlier on Wednesday, when the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus put out a statement saying that Homeland Security Committee ranking member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) should not be appointed to the task force. The group took issue with a bill Thompson led that would have stripped Secret Service protection detail for protectees who were sentenced for a felony conviction, an apparent nod to Trump.
But Thompson himself quickly made the issue moot. Asked if he even wanted to be on the task force, Thompson told The Hill: “No.”
“I don’t even want to be on it,” Thompson said. “I’ve never expressed an interest.”
The House’s task force on the Butler, Pa. rally shooting — in which a gunman left the former president injured, one rally attendee dead and two others severely injured – will centralize the chamber’s investigations into the matter, which thus far had been conducted across several committees.
The House Oversight Committee on Monday held a blockbuster hearing with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, whose evasiveness frustrated lawmakers so much that even Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top democrat on the panel, called for her to resign – finding unusual agreement with the panel’s Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) on the matter.
Cheatle, facing bipartisan disapproval and pressure, resigned from her post on Tuesday.
The House Homeland Security Committee has also been involved in assessing security failures, with Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) leading a bipartisan group of lawmakers to tour the Butler, Pa. rally and shooting site on Monday, and hosting local law enforcement personnel for a hearing on Tuesday.
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), who was in the front row at Trump’s rally during the attack, was the lead sponsor of the resolution to create the task force.
Speaking on the House floor, Kelly honored the rally attendee who died in the attack, Corey Comperatore, and grieved for his community. His hometown of Butler, Pa., Kelly said, will now “always be remembered” for the assassination attempt.
“The people of Butler and the people of the United States deserve answers,” Kelly said.