The House Republican leading the investigation into the attempted assassination of Donald Trump said in an interview released Tuesday that he warned the former president's campaign staff about using the site where the shooting took place.
Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., in an interview with the Allbritton Journalism Institute’s NOTUS publication, said he warned the Trump campaign against holding a rally at the site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, attempted to kill the former president.
"I made a statement [to the campaign] when they first told me that, I said, 'You can't do it there. It's too small.' The idea was that they had already made a decision, but it's not the right place," Kelly said. "The answer came back, 'Well, we've already made a decision.' I said, 'Well, then, who did the site visit?' And the answer back was, 'Congressman, we told you we've already made a decision.’"
Kelly is leading the bipartisan task force assigned to investigate what went wrong at the rally on July 13 at the Butler Farm Show grounds in Kelly's home district that led to Trump getting shot in the right ear, one man killed and two others seriously injured.
Kelly said the campaign's answer to him "told me that nobody's been here," adding, "I said to them, 'You guys made the wrong decision. This is going to be very dangerous.' And they said, 'Well, we've already made the decision.' So, from that point on, I was concerned."
A spokesperson from Kelly's office said Kelly "was concerned particularly because there were larger venues in the area [crowd size and general safety] and also venues that were better for traffic [The site has road work and it’s a two-lane highway]."
A Trump campaign official said in a statement when asked for comment: "Venue size, traffic, and parking have nothing to do with the assassination attempt on President Trump's life, and any suggestion that the campaign was aware of information that could have prevented the president being shot is appalling and categorically false."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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