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Republican leading House task force probe of Trump shooting explains why campaign shares blame

August 28, 2024 | | Print Article

The House Republican chosen by Speaker Mike Johnson to head the Trump assassination task force has suggested the Trump campaign deserves some of the blame for the attempted assassination.

Speaking this week with the ostensibly non-partisan Allbritton Journalism Institute, Pennsylvania Rep. ​​Mike Kelly complained that former President Donald Trump’s campaign had ignored his warnings about holding a rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds.

“I made a statement [to the campaign] when they first told me that [they’d be holding a rally in Butler],” he said. “I said, ‘You can’t do it there. It’s too small.’ The idea was that they had already made a decision, but it’s not the right place.”

“The answer came back, ‘Well, we’ve already made a decision.’ I said, ‘Well, then, who did the site visit?’ And the answer back was, ‘Congressman, we told you we’ve already made a decision.’ That answer told me that nobody’s been here,” he added.

And that, according to Kelly, was a big mistake.

“I said to them, ‘You guys made the wrong decision. This is going to be very dangerous.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’ve already made the decision.’ So from that point on, I was concerned,” he concluded.

When asked afterward to clarify what he’d meant by saying the Butler Farm Show grounds were “very dangerous,” his spokesperson said they couldn’t “speak specifically to that word choice.”

But, the spokesperson continued, Kelly “was concerned particularly because there were larger venues in the area (crowd size and general safety) and also venues that were better for traffic. (This site has road work and it’s a two-lane highway.)”

The Trump campaign was not pleased by Kelly’s complaint.

“Venue size, traffic, and parking have nothing to do with the assassination attempt on President Trump’s life, and any suggestion that the campaign was aware of information that could have prevented the President being shot is appalling and categorically false,” a spokesperson said.

In fairness to Kelly, he’s a staunch Trump supporter who spoke at the Butler rally on July 13th just minutes before Trump himself took the stage. Moreover, Kelly also trash-talked the hell out of the Democrats during his interview with the Allbritton Journalism Institute.

“He bashed the House committee that had investigated Jan. 6 as ‘a political show’ that was ‘all for publicity,'” according to the institute. “He talked about the northern U.S. border that has ‘the highest percentage of people coming across that are terrorists.’ He bashed the Biden administration’s approach to domestic energy. He said that how people responded to COVID-19 has ‘destroyed us as a people.'”

So he’s not a bad guy, though his complaints about the Trump campaign do seem to underscore the disappointment many on the right feel about the official Trump assassination task force as conceived by Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Critics say the problem with the official congressional investigation is that Johnson worked too closely with Jeffries in deciding who should serve on the task force. As a result, the task force is allegedly stocked with a bunch of week-kneed Republicans and Democrats.

Conversely, missing from the task force are the two most hardcore congressional Republicans, former Navy SEAL Eli Crane, a trained sniper, and Cory Mills, a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran.

It just so happens these two men are now leading an independent investigation into the Trump assassination plot.

During an appearance last week on the “War Room” podcast, Crane called Johnson and Jeffries’ decision to not include him and Mills on the official task force “political” and suggested the official task force might try to engage in a cover-up of some sort.

He added that “not only are the witnesses that are called going to be politically selected but what information is released to the public is also going to be political as well.”

In a separate statement to The Hill, Crane accused the official task force of having originally been “put together politically.”

Vivek Saxena
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