The House voted unanimously Wednesday night to authorize a task force to investigate the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) explained some details about the task force in a joint statement on Tuesday.
“The security failures that allowed an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life are shocking. In response to bipartisan demands for answers, we are announcing a House Task Force made up of seven Republicans and six Democrats to thoroughly investigate the matter,” Johnson and Jeffries said. “The task force will be empowered with subpoena authority and will move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability, and make certain such failures never happen again.”
Johnson said those on the panel “will be persons who have expertise in the areas in question."
The task force will have three main goals: investigate what happened, ensure accountability, and prevent future assassination attempts from happening.
The House has unanimously approved a bipartisan plan to set up a 13-member special task force to investigate the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/I0oxs4DjLo
— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) July 25, 2024
The security failures that allowed an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life are shocking. In response, @RepJeffries and I are announcing a House Task Force made up of seven Republicans and six Democrats to thoroughly investigate the matter.
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) July 23, 2024
The task force will be…
The House Freedom Caucus called on Johnson to block Rep. Bennie Thompson, among others, from serving on the task force over his previous calls to remove Trump’s Secret Service protection.
“In April, Rep. Bennie Thompson launched an effort with other radical progressive Democrats to deny Secret Service protection to President Trump – legislation that he continues to defend even after the attempted assassination on July 13,” the group said in a statement.
“We therefore urge the removal of Rep. Thompson as the Ranking Member of the House Committee on Homeland Security,” the group continued. “Similarly, his actions should invalidate Rep. Thompson from serving on the task force to investigate the attempted assassination of President Trump. Americans cannot trust that he will be an unbiased arbiter of the facts in the effort to get to the bottom of the greatest failure of the Secret Service in more than three decades.”
Johnson, for his part, said he's not interested anyway.
“I don’t even want to be on it,” Thompson told The Hill. “I’ve never expressed an interest.”