WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly says lawmakers and federal agencies still don't have a complete picture of what allowed a gunman to nearly assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in the congressman's hometown of Butler last year.

"Like many in the Butler community, I still have questions about everything that led up to, and unfolded on, July 13," Kelly told the Post-Gazette in a statement Thursday. "May we continue to pursue the truth to get the American people the answers they deserve."

The Republican congressman, who co-chaired a bipartisan task force investigating the attempted assassination, said Congress had taken significant steps to dig in to the attack. He said he and his colleagues continue to work with Secret Service Director Sean Curran and the agency to implement nearly 40 task force recommendations to bolster security and modernize protection efforts.

The task force's investigation officially wrapped up in December. But lawmakers and multiple agencies are still probing the issue to help prevent future attacks.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General still lists as ongoing its inquiry into the Secret Service's preparedness and processes for protecting Trump.

The FBI has led the ongoing attempted assassination and domestic terrorism investigation into the 20-year-old Bethel Park gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, working with the Justice Department, Secret Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The FBI's Pittsburgh field office told the Post-Gazette this past week it had nothing to add to previous statements on its investigation.

Reps. Cory Mills, R-Fla., and Eli Crane, R-Ariz., who were not tapped for the task force, held a forum last year along with other GOP lawmakers and interviewed security experts to dig into the shooting as well as the government's preparations and response. Crane said on X Wednesday that, "There are still a lot of unanswered questions."

An independent review panel, ordered by then-President Joe Biden and working with DHS, completed an inquiry between August and October. The panel conducted almost five dozen interviews with federal, state and local personnel, traveled to Butler to conduct detailed site surveys, and collected more than 7,000 documents.

Like the task force, the panel found severe failures in planning, training, communication and more, suggesting "deep flaws in the Secret Service," according to its final report in October.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released on Saturday a Government Accountability Office report finding "the Secret Service had no process to share classified threat information with partners when the information was not considered an imminent threat."

GAO's investigation, which Grassley requested last summer, also exposed "a litany of (Secret Service) procedural and planning errors, including misallocation of resources, lack of training and pervasive communication failures, all of which contributed to an unsecure environment" at the Butler rally, according to the senator's office.

Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., who co-chaired the task force alongside Kelly, told the Post-Gazette on Thursday that protecting the country's leaders "goes beyond partisan politics."

"Right now, we are witnessing a tragic rise in political violence across the country," he said. "Last year, President Trump was targeted; this year, a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were assassinated. I'll continue conducting oversight to ensure this administration implements the task force's recommendations so that our leaders are protected."

Secret Service changes

The Secret Service has introduced a new fleet of military-grade drones and mobile command posts that allow agents to communicate via radio directly with local police, Matt Quinn, the agency's deputy director, told CBS News on Wednesday.

That type of system didn't exist at the Butler rally, and communication failures and coordination among federal, state and local agencies were a major target of the task force and other investigators.

Quinn told CBS that his agency was "totally accountable" for what happened at the Butler Farm Show grounds that day, and he provided details of previously announced disciplinary action against agents involved with the rally.

Six U.S. Secret Service members were suspended without pay or benefits in the aftermath. The penalties ranged from 10 to 42 days of leave, and when the suspended employees returned to work, they were given restricted roles with less operational responsibility, Quinn said.

"We aren't going to fire our way out of this," he told CBS. "We're going to focus on the root cause and fix the deficiencies that put us in that situation."

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told the Post-Gazette Thursday that, "We have been working with all the oversight entities including U.S. Senate, Government Accountability Office, Inspector General ... on all of the reports."

Before the task force released its final report in December, the Secret Service said it had provided more than 1,500 pages of documents and made personnel available for interviews in response to requests from Congress.

"Our desire to learn from this failure and ensure it never happens again is unwavering," Guglielmi said in September.

Thousands of interviews

The task force wound up reviewing more than 20,000 pages of records linked to the Butler shooting and another foiled assassination attempt at a Trump golf course in Florida in September.

While the task force's report said the agency provided significant cooperation, lawmakers said Department of Homeland Security policies "restricted certain important documents to in-camera review, and the overclassification of documents hindered the task force's investigation."

While Kelly didn't fully detail what remaining questions he has, he and Crow previously said the Department of Justice withheld information related to ongoing investigations, specifically regarding the actions and motives of Crooks and Ryan Routh, the would-be assassin in Florida.

The FBI countered that assertion.

The agency told the Post-Gazette in December that it shared "documentation of more than 80 interviews with members of the (Secret Service) and other law enforcement agencies who responded on July 13; 17 detailed and technical laboratory reports analyzing the bullets, IEDs, Crooks' drone, DNA and other evidence; classified intelligence documents; records of communications with the (Secret Service) prior to the rally; photos of evidence; verified timeline based on evidence; dispatch log of 911 call from Crooks' parents; autopsy evidence documents; and other documents."

Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of FBI Pittsburgh, told reporters last summer that the agency had conducted "nearly 1,000 interviews, served numerous search warrants, issued dozens of subpoenas, and analyzed hundreds of hours of video footage."

Crooks in the month leading up to the attack searched former President Joe Biden and Trump online more than 60 times, and on July 5 looked up the dates of the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

A day later, he registered to attend the Butler rally and searched for "how far was Oswald from Kennedy," and for details and photos of the grounds.

One bullet struck and injured Trump, while former firefighter Corey Comperatore was killed and two attendees were also shot but survived.

Trump's closest advisers, including eventual White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, didn't know the president's condition when he was rushed out of the rally, according to excerpts from "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America," obtained by the Post-Gazette this past week.

Only when Trump, then the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, later began cracking jokes in his hospital bed did his aides realize he was OK, according to authors Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal, Tyler Pager of the New York Times and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post.

"They thought I had four or five bullets in me because there was so much blood," said Trump. He had also refused to take a stretcher into the hospital because "he didn't want the visual," the authors wrote.

Drones and tightened security

The book highlights increased threats of political violence and additional security measures that the Trump campaign had to grapple with in the wake of the assassination attempts — including ongoing threats from Iran.

Trump, for one, complained that his Secret Service detail made it harder for him to cheat at golf, the authors wrote. Meanwhile, the campaign and Secret Service grew increasingly concerned about drones, including in Pennsylvania and California.

In September, en route to a farmers' event that required taking country roads southeast of Pittsburgh, Wiles received a call from the Secret Service notifying her there was "an unknown drone overhead, and they couldn't shake it," according to the book.

"They might have to split Trump from the rest of the motorcade," the authors wrote. "Wiles thought to herself, 'This is it.' The drone followed them for almost the entire drive but never did anything."

Kelly and several lawmakers, and the task force, have suggested the undermanned Secret Service should consider separating from DHS either as an independent agency or move back under the U.S. Treasury Department, where it was formed.

The task force noted the Secret Service may be overburdened. The U.N. General Assembly relies on the agency to protect foreign dignitaries — a job that could potentially "be transferred or abrogated in order to focus on the (agency's) primary duty: to protect the president and other critical U.S. leaders."

Reps. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat, and Mike Lawler, a Republican, both of New York, introduced legislation in August that would shift the Secret Service's financial crimes investigations to Treasury, and force the agency to stick solely to protecting the president and other officials.

Kelly called on Americans reflecting "on the tragic events that unfolded in Butler" to pray for the Comperatore family, the injured rallygoers David Dutch and James Copenhaver, and for Trump.

"In the wake of tragedy, the Butler community remains united and stronger than ever," he said.

_____

© 2025 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Visit www.post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.