U.S. House Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer today subpoenaed Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to appear at a hearing, “Oversight of the U.S. Secret Service and the Attempted Assassination of President Donald J. Trump,” on July 22/
“Americans demand accountability and transparency about the Secret Service’s failures that led to the attempted assassination of President Trump, but they aren’t getting that from President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security. We have many questions for Director Cheatle about the Secret Service’s historic failure and she must appear before the House Oversight Committee next week.”
Read the cover letter and subpoena here.
“The United States Secret Service has a no-fail mission, yet it failed on Saturday when a madman attempted to assassinate President Trump, killed an innocent victim, and harmed others. We are grateful to the brave Secret Service agents who acted quickly to protect President Trump after shots were fired and the American patriots who sought to help victims, but questions remain about how a rooftop within proximity to President Trump was left unsecure,” Comer said. “Americans demand answers from Director Kimberly Cheatle about these security lapses and how we can prevent this from happening again.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson also said Wednesday he is creating a special task force to investigate the assassination attempt.
Speaker Johnson said he’s spoken with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as well as the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines and leadership of the FBI, although not directly with FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“The answers that they are providing to us thus far are not satisfactory,” he told the Daily Signal. “So I announced this morning that we are gonna set up a special task force, a precision strike on this, it will be a bipartisan investigatory group and they will have subpoena authority. We’re going to get down to the bottom of this quickly.”
In the Senate, U.S. Democrat Sen. Gary Peters and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee respectively, announced Tuesday the committee will conduct a bipartisan investigation and plan to hold a hearing to examine security failures that led to the attempted assassination of Trump.
Senators Peters and Paul are requesting an urgent briefing for the members of the committee on the shooting and additional information from U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to be followed by a public hearing. Additional investigative requests for documents and testimony will follow, the two said. So far, the committee, run by Democrats, has not made a forceful stance to require Cheatle, Mayorkas, Wray, or other security officials to appear. At this stage, the committee is making just a vague promise to look into it.