Bipartisan Task Force probing Trump's assassination attempts holds first hearing

A bipartisan congressional task force investigating the assassination attempts against Donald Trump is set to hold its first hearing Thursday as lawmakers rush to ensure candidate safety just weeks before the US presidential election.

The panel -- comprised of seven Republicans and six Democrats -- has spent the last two months trying to decipher the security failures that allowed a gunman to scale a roof and open fire at the former president during a July 13 campaign rally in Pennsylvania, killing a spectator. Now they are also investigating this month's Secret Service arrest of a man with a rifle on Trump's Florida golf course who also allegedly sought to assassinate the GOP presidential nominee.

The suspect in the second assassination attempt, Ryan Wesley Routh, was allegedly aiming a rifle through the shrubbery surrounding Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course when he was detected by a Secret Service agent. The agent opened fire and Routh fled before being apprehended by local authorities.

Representative Jason Crow, the top Democrat on the task force, said the group is now shifting to "a longer term, holistic look at both Butler and Florida".

The hearing Thursday will be the first time the task force will present its findings to the public after spending weeks conducting nearly two dozen interviews with law enforcement and receiving more than 2,800 pages of documents from the Secret Service. It will focus on the use of local law enforcement by the Secret Service, featuring testimony from Pennsylvania state and Butler County police officials.

The Secret Service often relies on local authorities to secure bigger events where protectees like Trump appear around the country. But after the Butler rally, the Secret Service was heavily criticised for failing to clearly communicate what they needed from those local agencies that day.

Thursday's session will be the fourth congressional hearing about the Butler shooting since July. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned one day after she appeared before a congressional hearing where she was berated for hours by both Democrats and Republicans for the agency's security failures.

Cheatle called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades, but she angered lawmakers by failing to answer specific questions about the investigation.

An interim report Wednesday from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is also conducting an investigation, said the Secret Service failed to give clear instructions on how state and local officials should cover the building where the gunman eventually took up position. Their report also said the agency didn’t make sure they could share information with local partners in real-time.

The Secret Service has also released a five-page document summarising the key conclusions of a yet-to-be-finalized agency report on what went wrong in Butler. The House panel is expected to propose a series of legislative reforms and issue their own final report before Dec. 13.

While the oversight investigations have been bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans have disagreed on whether to give the Secret Service more money in the wake of its failures. A government funding bill that passed Wednesday includes an additional $231 million for the agency, even though many Republicans were skeptical and said an internal overhaul of the Secret Service is needed.

As lawmakers prepare to probe the second attempt in Florida, they are also grappling with the major differences between the two assassination attempts.

“It’s going to be different in a lot of respects. I mean, the size of the event was very different. The use of local law enforcement was very different. The challenges were different,” Crow said. “Whereas in Butler, there are very obvious series of cascading failures.”

The Colorado lawmaker said the Justice Department and FBI have also informed Congress that given the ongoing criminal investigation into what happened in Florida and the prosecution of Routh, it will be more challenging for them to turn over documents or provide witness testimony.

The shooter in Butler, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed by a sniper.