Four Republicans Miss Donald Trump Rally Shooting Site Visit

Four Republican members of the House task force charged with investigating the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump missed traveling to the scene of the shooting in Pennsylvania on Monday.

The task force—comprising seven Republicans and six Democrats—was created in the wake of the July 13 shooting to investigate what went wrong and recommend solutions to ensure such an attack doesn’t happen again.

Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, sustained an ear injury when a gunman opened fire during a campaign rally in Butler. One person was killed and two others were injured before the Secret Service shot and killed the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks.

On Monday, all six Democrats on the task force and three of the Republicans were in Butler to survey the scene, NewsNation’s Joe Khalil wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Representatives Clay Higgins, Mark Green, Michael Waltz and Pat Fallon were reportedly absent.

Green’s social media accounts show he made visits to the Tennessee College of Applied Technology Dickson and Vanderbilt University on Monday.

Higgins was campaigning in Louisiana on Monday, a post on his X account showed.

Newsweek has contacted all four of the congressmen’s representatives for comment via email.

Khalil said in another X post that Monday’s visit was the first time the task force had visited the scene as a group.

“It seems as though all the members of the task force will be here at some point, if they haven’t already,” Khalil wrote.

Higgins made a three-day trip to Butler earlier in August and later accused the FBI of obstructing investigative efforts in a preliminary investigative report.

In the report, Higgins said the FBI released Crooks’ body to his family for cremation before he was able to examine it, saying it could “only be described by any reasonable man as an obstruction to any following investigative effort.” An FBI spokesperson said Higgins’ allegation was “inaccurate and unfounded” and that Crooks’ body was released in coordination with the coroner’s office and local and state law enforcement “in keeping with normal procedures.”

In Butler on Monday, lawmakers expressed shock that the Secret Service had left Trump unprotected from several potential lines of fire.

“I definitely took note today that there were a lot of lines of sight that appear to have been unsecured that day, that didn’t have eyes on or that weren’t secured,” said Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat, according to The New York Times.

The Secret Service has acknowledged security failures, and last month, Kimberly Cheatle resigned as director after facing growing calls to step down.

Since then, at least five Secret Service agents have been placed on administrative leave, including the special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office, which was responsible for the security planning ahead of the July 13 rally, the Associated Press reported.