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WASHINGTON —Members of a bipartisan House panel investigating the Trump assassination attempts suggested during its first hearing Thursday that the failures that led to a gunman being able to open fire on former President Donald Trump were with the U.S. Secret Service, not local police.
In his opening statement, the Republican co-chair of the committee, Rep. Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania, blamed a cascade of failures by the Secret Service that allowed the gunman, Thomas Michael Crooks, to gain access to the roof of a nearby building and open fire on Trump. Trump was wounded and a man attending the rally with his family was killed.
"In the days leading up to the rally, it was not a single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our country's most elite group of security professionals. There were security failures on multiple fronts," said Kelly.
The panel - composed of seven Republicans and six Democrats - has spent the last two months analyzing the security failures that allowed a gunman to scale a roof and open fire at the former president during a July 13 campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Now they are also investigating this month's Secret Service arrest of a man with a rifle on Trump's Florida golf course who sought to assassinate the Republican presidential nominee.
The suspect in the second assassination attempt, Ryan Wesley Routh, was allegedly aiming a rifle through the shrubbery surrounding Trump's West Palm Beach golf course when he was detected by a Secret Service agent. The agent opened fire and Routh fled before being apprehended by local authorities.
The hearing Thursday is the first time the task force presents its findings to the public after spending weeks conducting nearly two dozen interviews with law enforcement and receiving more than 2,800 pages of documents from the Secret Service. It focuses on the use of local law enforcement by the Secret Service, featuring testimony from Pennsylvania and Butler County police officials.