Republican Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania was in the audience in Butler, Pennsylvania, with his family, including three of his grandchildren, when a would-be assassin opened fire on former President Donald J. Trump, coming inches from killing him.
They heard the gunshots, saw the blood and witnessed the panic in the crowd as two people were seriously injured and one man – Corey Comperatore, a firefighter who died protecting his family – was killed.
Then Charles, Mr Kelly’s nine-year-old grandson, asked him a question: “Grandpa, why would anyone want to shoot President Trump?”
“I said, ‘Charles, I just can’t answer that. I don’t know,'” Kelly recalled. “He said, ‘This is just crazy.’ And I thought, here’s a 9-year-old boy who lived through all of this. This is something he shouldn’t have had to experience, and it’s something he’s going to carry with him.”
Now Kelly is faced with the task of answering the most important questions about what happened on July 13, the day of the shooting. Speaker Mike Johnson has appointed him to head a bipartisan task force that will lead the congressional investigation into the shooting. The new task force will take over the leadership of the various House investigations.
Many of the task force members are lawmakers with military or legal experience. Kelly, on the other hand, has a background in auto sales and was a member of the Budget Committee. But Kelly, 76, brings his personal experiences to the mission. It was his district where the shooting occurred, its residents and his own family were affected. He was the first to propose the task force and feels a responsibility to see it through.
“I’m watching the president. He’s probably 50 to 60 feet away,” Kelly said of witnessing the assassination. “He’s walking across a map and he just turns his head, and all of a sudden there’s this pop and then he grabs the side of his head, and a series of thoughts go through my mind. My first thought is: Where’s my wife? Where’s my grandchildren? Where’s my son? I saw the president go down. I saw the Secret Service covering him. Then over my left shoulder, where the makeshift bleachers were, there was a woman crying, ‘He’s hurt. He’s hurt.’ And I turned over my left shoulder and looked about 25 to 30 feet up into the bleachers, and I saw her, and she was covered in blood.”
When he heard about the Butler site, Kelly said he had serious concerns, particularly about security and a lack of planning. He raised those concerns with the Trump campaign.
“I said, ‘I think this is a mistake,'” Kelly recalled. “I asked, ‘Who made the visit? Who visited the site?’ And the answer was, ‘Mr. Representative, we have already made a decision.’ I said, ‘You have absolutely no idea what you are doing.’ After what happened on July 13, I feel even stronger today. I am even more convinced that the original preparation was not done properly.”
Mr. Kelly is an ardent supporter of Mr. Trump and stood by him through two impeachment trials, including while the former president lied about massive voter fraud in the 2020 election. Mr. Kelly has called Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial “another date that will live in infamy.” One of the leaders of that impeachment trial was Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, who is now the ranking Democrat on the task force and Mr. Kelly’s partner in the shooting investigation.
In the 2020 election, Mr. Kelly unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the ballots of Pennsylvanians who voted by mail, a method considered popular among Democrats.
Mr. Kelly’s former chief of staff was also involved in an attempt to bring fake electoral certificates into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn President Biden’s victory. Mr. Kelly has denied involvement in that attempt.
He has promised to lead the task force in a bipartisan manner and to work with Mr. Crow.
“I look at it as 13 members of the House, not seven Republicans and six Democrats,” Kelly said. “These are all very, very serious people. They don’t want to be in the spotlight. They want to shed some light on what happened on July 13.”
Mr. Kelly has already brought in experienced staff as special advisers, including William A. Burck, a sought-after lawyer for leading Republicans.
On Monday, Kelly and Crow sent joint letters to the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Department of Justice and the FBI demanding documents and interviews.
Mr Kelly presented his suggestions for setting up the Task Force directly to Mr Johnson.
“I talked to Mike and said, ‘Listen, this is my hometown,'” he recalled. “‘This is where I grew up. This is where I played baseball for the American Legion. This is where my family was that day. I saw it in real time. I saw the aftermath of what happened. I’m an eyewitness to it.'”
He wants to get to the bottom of law enforcement failures, such as why the Secret Service allowed Mr. Trump to take the stage when its agents knew there was a suspicious person somewhere on the grounds. But he also wants to learn more about the shooter: Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper shortly after he opened fire.
“We don’t know much about Crooks,” Kelly said. “I want to find out more about: ‘Who is this person?'”
He expressed hope that a serious, bipartisan report would help curb the conspiracy theories he said are surfacing online in the wake of the shooting.
“Because there are no solid facts, conspiracy theories continue to spread,” Kelly said.
