The House’s two investigations into the attempted assassination of Donald Trump held competing events on Monday.
Why are there two investigations, and why are they competing? you might ask. Well, the first is the official bipartisan task force, which the House unanimously voted to create in late July. House Speaker Mike Johnson did the right thing then, working with Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries to appoint members—including mostly serious Republicans—to investigate what happened on July 13.
On Monday, this panel met with law enforcement in Butler, Pennsylvania, and toured the rally grounds where the attempted assassination took place. At the same time, a few hundred miles away, some of the House GOP’s least serious members held a forum in Washington, D.C., and called it “hearing,” the first of their so-called “parallel investigation.”
“While this is the first hearing ... it won’t be the last,” far-right Rep. Cory Mills said during the event. “This is a message to all of Congress. … There are members [and] conservatives who will not be silenced.”
This “parallel investigation” isn’t much of one. Involving many of the usual GOP blowhards—including Reps. Matt Gaetz and Eli Crane, among others—it can’t issue subpoenas, unlike the real task force. And it will have to rely on whistleblowers and members of the public to obtain information.
Worse, it is predicated on the baseless idea that the Secret Service—under President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security Department—is “not trying to send their best” to protect Trump, and intentionally allowed communication and surveillance failures to happen at the rally. In other words, let the conspiracy theories flow!
Undeterred by this clown show, the real task force got down to business on Wednesday, following the aforementioned trip to Pennsylvania. The co-chairs, GOP Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania and Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, made a sweeping request for information in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr.
“The Task Force is investigating all actions by any agency, Department, officer, or employee of the federal government, as well as State and local law enforcement or any other State or local government or private entities or individuals” related to the event, Crow and Kelly wrote.
Meanwhile, the problem children are stewing in their resentment over not being picked for the real panel.
“Three snipers in Congress—myself, Cory Mills, and Morgan Luttrell—[and] not one of us got put on the task force,” Crane said in an interview last week. “You would think that one of us would have got put on the task force, but no, it was politically selected, the people that were on it.”
And as another slap in the face to Johnson, Crane said they “just don’t trust the leadership to release the truth to the American people.”
Johnson also has a bit of a problem with his supposedly serious members on the real task force. Only three of the seven Republicans on it showed up at that site visit on Monday, while all six Democrats did.
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