“I want to thank the task force giving the opportunity to actually testify before you,” Rep. Cory Mills said in his opening statement to the panel investigating the assassination attempts against Donald Trump. Except neither Mills nor Rep. Eli Crane, who was sitting next to him, was on the list of witnesses for the group’s first official hearing. And only three members of the 13-person task force were present listening to Mills — all of them Republicans.
In fact, the official hearing was technically over.
This was a follow-up meeting, which Democrats were given less than a day’s notice about.
“I don’t know what a heads-up is anymore. Is it weeks? Is it hours? Is it minutes?” Rep. Mike Kelly, who leads the official task force, told reporters. “They knew that we were going to do this. I also know that this fly-out day is important because some people already have reservations made and have to get out.”
It was a notable moment of partisanship in what has otherwise been billed as a somber, apolitical review of a tragic and dangerous moment for democracy. Mills and Crane are running their own separate unofficial investigation into the assassination attempts — one that has elevated fringe theories and, so far, has been held out of Heritage Foundation headquarters and partially via a podcast.
Kelly said the meeting with the Republican representatives was because both are “spec ops guys.” In addition to Kelly, Reps. Laurel Lee and Clay Higgins were the only two on the official task force who stayed to listen.
Mills and Crane have defended their controversial approach as “open-minded and willing to look at anything and everything, even if it might be outside the official narrative.”
“I certainly appreciate the thoughts and perspective,” Lee said, adding that the committee was “committed to ensuring that we review and investigate all of the relevant theories.”
Mills and Crane both previously told NOTUS that they wanted their efforts to supplement the official task force. Even so, they’ve said that the only reason they started their own investigation is because of the “political tactics” involved in who was appointed by Speaker Mike Johnson to conduct the official investigation.
Kelly shrugged off questions of partisanship in allowing them to address a small number of Republicans on the panel.
“You know what? At this point in my life, I’m not that fragile,” he said. “I’m not here as a Republican, I’m here as an American.”
Rep. Jason Crow, the ranking member of the official task force, meanwhile, is staying optimistic that this secondary, and ill-attended, meeting won’t change much.
“My hope is that we can return to that consensus basis,” he said. “It’s too important for our country not to have this.”
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.