Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah questioned during a press conference on Tuesday why the Secret Service allowed former President Donald Trump to take the stage on July 13 when they knew of a potential threat over an hour prior.
The Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees held a joint hearing with the Secret Service and the FBI to investigate the security failures that permitted the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during his rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, earlier this month. During the press conference after the hearing, Lee said that the Secret Service lied repeatedly about the events that day and questioned their motives in doing so.
“Why on earth did they ever let Donald Trump take the stage?” Lee asked during the press conference.
“It’s not as though the Secret Service has comported itself in a manner that calls out to us, to defer to them, to have confidence in them,” Lee said during the press conference. “Nobody wants to believe the worst, to suspect the worst about what happens within government. But when they lied to us repeatedly, then when they refused to answer the most basic questions, when they almost willfully declined to take any of the most basic precautions in order to protect the former president.”
20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate the former president from a rooftop positioned just 130 yards from the stage. Crooks was reportedly spotted by witnesses, flagged by the Secret Service nearly an hour before and was identified by a local counter sniper nearly 100 minutes before Trump took the stage.
“These are and should be obvious and easy, basic questions for the Secret Service to answer, and they have had no fewer than 17 days since the attack to answer these questions,” Lee said during the press conference. “These are questions that they should have started asking and probably should have been able to answer within 24 hours.”
“What I heard, what my colleagues heard, what you heard if you were watching was we’re looking into it,” Lee said during the press conference. “I’m sorry, that doesn’t cut it.
Crooks wounded the Republican nominee and killed attendee Corey Comperatore during the attack. He also injured attendees James Copenhaver and David Dutch, who are both in stable condition as of last Monday.
“Remember, King David didn’t personally kill Uriah the Hittite,” Lee said during the press conference. “But he let them go out into a battlefield where he knew there was an imminent risk of grave bodily injury. And he made sure he didn’t have adequate protection. We got to get to the bottom of these questions to make sure that Donald Trump was not intended to be a Uriah the Hittite.”
