Pennsylvania Democrat stresses need for bipartisanship in probe of Trump assassination attempts

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) said Sunday that it is critical for the bipartisan task force investigating the assassination attempts against former President Trump to work swiftly and in a bipartisan fashion.

“It’s really important that this group works bipartisanly and quickly to be able to understand what happened, to be able to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, and to your conversation with Senator Rubio, to make sure that we restore the faith and trust with the American people in the institutions such as law enforcement and the Congress,” Houlahan said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” referencing an earlier interview with the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Houlahan was one of six Democrats and seven Republicans named to the bipartisan task force following the assassination attempt at a Trump rally in Butler, Pa.

In the recent interview, Houlahan said the task force was also looking into the most recent apparent assassination attempt against Trump, who was playing a round of golf at his course in West Palm Beach, Fla., when Secret Service agents noticed a man with a rifle poking through the perimeter of the golf course and fired shots at him.

The man fled before taking any shots, and he was arrested shortly after that and charged with two federal gun crimes: possession of a firearm as a convicted felon and using a weapon with obliterated serial numbers.

Houlahan said the task force has been “getting the answers that we’ve been asking for” as it proceeds in its probe of the incidents.

“We have been asking for quite a lot out of both the Secret Service as well as local law enforcement. And I believe that the answers have been largely forthcoming,” Houlahan said.

“If for whatever reason they’re not, the good thing about this particular group is that we have subpoena authority to be able to make sure that we get the answers,” she added.

Houlahan noted the “enormous gaps” in Secret Service operations and communication, as outlined in the internal review findings released Friday, but said she believes the current leadership is focused on addressing the problems.

“These are very, very serious issues, and they have come up in our conversations and in the briefings that we’ve received, and there were some enormous gaps that you’ve mentioned, in terms of people texting information to each other rather than using the radio. In terms of people not even knowing that there were two command centers, there were huge gaps. And there were also some gaps, frankly, in kind of culture and people being relatively lax in the way that they communicated with one another, and all of these things have to be fixed,” she said about the report’s findings when asked whether she trusts the leadership.

“I do believe that the attention of the organization is fully on all of the different things that they can and should be doing to be to correct themselves,” Houlahan continued. “I think also the attention of Congress is on them as well to make sure they have the resources to be able to make those corrections too.”