As members of the official bipartisan task force investigating the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump met in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Monday, a small group of conservative lawmakers sat down with Dan Bongino, a right-wing talk show host and former Secret Service agent, for what they billed as part of their own probe into the shooting.
Kicking off their separate, partisan review of the assassination attempt, the unofficial group met at the Heritage Foundation headquarters to record a live podcast aired on Rumble and host an expert testimony panel styled like a congressional hearing (during which Bongino also joined as an expert).
“You take the risk to come and testify before Congress like this,” Rep. Eli Crane said to the panelists, which included Blackwater founder Erik Prince and Ben Shaffer, a police SWAT officer who was at the July 13 assassination attempt, sitting in a room a few blocks away from the actual Capitol.
Led by Reps. Cory Mills and Crane, along with Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs and Chip Roy, this group of lawmakers says it does not trust what will come out of any of the investigations being conducted in and outside of Congress.
“The days of just relying on Congress to get it done, or the FBI to do the investigation, and trust their results, and trust what they release, those days are over,” Biggs said.
“They’ll use the lowest level of classification to try and put it in a backroom,” Mills added.
Mills explained why he thought they weren’t with their colleagues in Pennsylvania. “We’re not people who are going to say yes just to go along to get along, and that’s why sometimes you’re not picked for these committees.”
Over the daylong event at The Heritage Foundation, they focused mostly on complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion, suggesting, without evidence, that Trump’s protective detail and the former head of the Secret Service were only hired because of it. They also elevated conspiracies that the security failures were somehow intentional, saying they needed more facts to disprove this belief. At different points, they suggested that Trump should have more Secret Service security than President Joe Biden.
Those on the official bipartisan committee, which Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries selected to conduct a somber and unbiased review of the tragic events, aren’t thrilled with this social media-fueled group of self-nominated “investigators.”
“It’s ridiculous that they’re doing that,” a Republican member of the task force told NOTUS. “They don’t have subpoena authority, so they’re not gonna get any answers.”
The unofficial group is aware of that latter fact.
“It’s going to be an uphill climb for us because we don’t have subpoena power,” Biggs said during the podcast.
Crane asked people to come forward at the end of the panel discussion. “We’re gonna need to rely on whistleblowers,” he said.
On Monday, they talked mostly about their own theories, digging into culture wars that have defined the right wing of the party under Trump.
“So what you’re saying is that DEI plays a major role, not a meritocracy, with regards to the culture that’s been fostered…” Mills said, prompting Bongino, a panelist at this point in the day.
“No, not a role — the major role,” Bongino responded. “The Secret Service right now is dominated by DEI.”
But not everyone on the panel entertained every proposition made by the group of lawmakers — particularly when they baselessly insinuated something much more nefarious was at play that day.
“I don’t believe that all of that is just accidental,” Roy said. “I don’t believe that this is all just incompetence.”
Crane was even more direct: “A lot of Americans believe that this was possibly an inside job,” he said.
Not even their experts could agree with that, though. “I don’t think this was a grand conspiracy,” Prince said. “I believe this was a litany of incompetence.”
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.