'Nobody's ever come completely clean' on Trump assassination attempt, House task force chair says
Rep. Mark Kelly, R-Pa., who is leading the bipartisan House task force investigating the assassination attempt against former President Trump, vowed to "get the truth" Tuesday following the group's visit to the shooting site in Butler, Pennsylvania. Kelly joined "America's Newsroom" to discuss efforts to restore Americans' faith and trust in the government following the security lapse.
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REP. MARK KELLY: I do believe the American people can handle the truth, and we're going to get the truth for them. I think, too often in the past, nobody's ever come completely clean with what happened. I do want to make sure people who are watching us understand. There's something that happened that day, the preparation for that event was, was it too casual? I mean, I just don't understand when you have the most elite groups of law enforcement people in the world, whose sole job is to protect that candidate. How could we have failed? So obviously, we're even people just walking by said, there's somebody on the roof. I mean, why aren't we responding to that? And I think really what it comes down to, there's a great loss of faith and trust and confidence in the way our government is being run. And every member of this task force, we don't identify ourselves as Republican or Democrat. We identified ourselves as 13 Americans who are going to get the answers for the American people. Give it to them straight. Give it to them honest. I don't care how hard it is to listen to. We've got to understand that we can never allow this to happen again. And it's the preparation for anything that is the key to a successful ending. The preparation in this case was very light, not deep enough, and it wasn't coordinated.
On Monday, Kelly questioned what appears to have been a "frozen" response from law enforcement when they first spotted gunman Thomas Crooks.
Kelly's comments came after his second visit to the site of the assassination attempt at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds where Crooks shot at Trump during the former president's campaign rally on July 13, killing one attendee and severely wounding two others.
"I just want to know, who was quarterbacking it? Who was the one that made the decision? … And when the sniper already had the shooter in his sights and, what we've heard so far, he was waiting to get authorization to take the shot. … Some quarterback's got to make that call. If they're not making that call, the team can't move. And that's what I see here. It was kind of frozen for a while," Kelly told Fox News Digital.
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Fox News' Audrey Conklin contributed to this report.