Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) will lead the 13-member bipartisan task force charged with investigating the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and exposing the security failures that led up to it at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced the seven House Republicans and six Democrats who will make up the panel on Monday. The task force will look into communication errors between federal and local law enforcement that allowed a 20-year-old man to climb onto a nearby building and take shots at rally attendees, leaving one attendee dead and three, including the former president, injured.
Kelly, whose hometown is Butler, represents the district, and he is the author of the resolution that established the task force when it passed last week.
The other Republicans on the task force will be Reps. Mark Green (R-TN), Dave Joyce (R-OH), Laurel Lee (R-FL), Michael Waltz (R-FL), Clay Higgins (R-LA), and Pat Fallon (R-TX). All of the GOP lawmakers have either former military or law experience. Their committee assignments span across Homeland Security, Oversight, and Intelligence.
The six Democrats on the task force are Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) as ranking member and Reps. Lou Correa (D-CA), Madeleine Dean (D-PA), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Glenn Ivey (D-MD), and Jared Moskowitz (D-FL).
Moskowitz and Houlahan both issued statements after the announcement expressing their gratitude to Johnson and Jeffries (D-NY) for selecting them.
“America deserves to know all the failures that day and to make sure we fix them for the future,” Moskowitz said in a post to X. “After the shooting at my high school in Parkland, I helped create the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Commission to investigate the failures that led to 17 people being killed.”
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Many of the 13 members selected to sit on the task force traveled to the site of the shooting on the day of the House Oversight Committee hearing where former Secret Service Kimberly Cheatle provided a lackluster testimony, resulting in many members on both sides of the aisle calling on her to resign. Cheatle at first brushed off calls to resign but later stepped down from her position one day later.
The acting Secret Service director, Ronald L. Rowe, Jr., will testify before a joint hearing with the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees on Tuesday.
