Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) says federal law enforcement will need to be subpoenaed by Congress to get to the bottom of what caused the security failures behind the two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump.
Johnson’s comment was made shortly after the Senate released its first public report on the first assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, which revealed numerous security lapses under the Secret Service’s watch. Johnson stated that the Senate has yet to receive any details from either the Secret Service or the FBI, including an autopsy report on shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks or any interview transcripts from the latter agency.
“So again, from my standpoint, this continues to be a slow-walking of information to us,” Johnson said on Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime. “We don’t know anything about Crooks. We don’t know the encrypted accounts, the social media, and yet the FBI releases the manifesto from the other assassin. And by the way, we don’t have the CIA or the FBI or the CBP files on that guy either. So again, federal law enforcement is being completely opaque.”
Johnson reiterated that because federal agencies are “slow-walking,” they will “have to be subpoenaed to get the information that Congress is requesting.”
The preliminary 94-page report from the Senate on the first assassination attempt stated that the Secret Service had “credible intelligence” at Trump’s rally in Butler, hence why countersnipers were sent. The Butler County Emergency Services Unit had also attempted to tell the Secret Service that there was not enough manpower to secure the rally, though the Secret Service has claimed it never heard about the concerns.
“Every single one of these actions is directly related to a failure in the U.S. Secret Service’s planning, communications, intelligence sharing, and law enforcement coordination efforts,” Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-MI) told reporters Tuesday ahead of the report’s release. “Every single one of those failures was preventable, and the consequences of those failures were dire.”
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A House bipartisan task force held its first meeting Thursday, during which the members underscored that the Secret Service was responsible for the rally’s security failures.
Former first lady Melania Trump blamed Democrats and the media for “fueling a toxic atmosphere” that led to the two assassination attempts on her husband. The second attempt happened earlier this month when the former president was golfing at the Trump National Golf Club in Florida.