BUTLER, Pennsylvania — Rep. Mike Kelly has been a loud Trump ally for years. But as he begins the official investigation into the assassination attempt against the former president, he sees Donald Trump’s team as part of the problem.
Kelly first heard Trump would be coming to his home district 10 days before the July rally, and from the beginning, he warned the Trump campaign advance staff that the Butler Farm Show would be a “disaster” as a rally site, he told NOTUS during a 50-minute sit-down interview Monday. There’s only one lane going in or out of the venue because of construction, and the capacity is far smaller than the fairgrounds or the airport, where Trump campaigned in October 2020.
However, he claims the Trump campaign wouldn’t listen to him.
“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. 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 said. “That answer told me that nobody’s been here.”
“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,” Kelly said.
When asked afterwards to clarify what Kelly meant by saying the rally site would be “very dangerous,” a spokesperson for Kelly said they couldn’t “speak specifically to that word choice, but he was concerned particularly because there were larger venues in the area (crowd size and general safety) and also venues that were better for traffic. (This site has road work and it’s a two-lane highway.)”
“Venue size, traffic, and parking has 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,” a Trump campaign official told NOTUS.
Throughout Monday’s interview, Kelly insisted that his new task force and its members would stay away from partisan politics as they go about their mission. While the task force only has a few months before its final report is due on Dec. 13, he said he’s looking for a comprehensive answer to what errors led to the assassination attempt. Part of that answer involves Trump’s campaign.
There was a rash of security failures in the lead-up to the assassination attempt, which left one rally attendee dead and others injured. A warning from local police to the Secret Service minutes before shots were fired was never even heard because the agency didn’t pick up the right radios, CNN reported. The acting Secret Service director, who replaced the director ousted in the weeks after the shooting, told reporters earlier this month that the “roof should have been covered. We should have had eyes on that.”
Kelly said the investigation all circles back to one question — particularly for local and state law enforcement and federal agencies: “Why did you allow President Trump to go on that platform when you knew something wasn’t right?”
Since becoming chairman, Kelly said he’d spoken to Trump over the phone.
“He says, ‘Mike, I’m coming back to Butler, and it’s going to be outside.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, I’m glad you’re coming back to Butler, but let’s be really careful, OK?’ He says, ‘No, I’m coming back. I have a duty to come back.’”
Despite repeatedly insisting the investigation is a nonpolitical effort, Kelly still brought up a variety of political issues separate from the assassination attempt during the sit-down. He bashed the House committee that had investigated Jan. 6 as “a political show” that was “all for publicity.” He talked about the northern U.S. border that has “the highest percentage of people coming across that are terrorists.” He bashed the Biden administration’s approach to domestic energy. He said that how people responded to COVID-19 has “destroyed us as a people.”
He questioned conclusions from the Kennedy assassination, which occurred when he was in high school.
“People say, ‘Well, he did it by himself.’ Really? That’s hard to believe,” Kelly said.
Kelly said he wants to avoid the misinformation and conspiracy theories that have sprouted for decades around Kennedy in this investigation by being fully transparent.
Unlike other members of the task force appointed by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Kelly has no background in investigative work, law enforcement or the military. As the task force’s chairman, he’s under enormous pressure to deliver answers for the first assassination attempt on a president since 1981, encompassing four separate agencies, Trump campaign staff, local law enforcement and the shooter’s background in its scope.
Kelly is the first to acknowledge his professional background doesn’t fit with the others. His congressional office in Butler is surrounded by car dealerships bearing his name: Mike Kelly Chevrolet, Mike Kelly Kia, Mike Kelly Hyundai, Mike Kelly Mitsubishi and so on. In the town of 13,000, the chance is high that if you live in Butler and have a new car, you went through Kelly. It’s how he made his fortune (his net worth is estimated at $12.8 million) while also representing one of the lowest-income zip codes in the United States.
He does bring local connections to law enforcement and his firsthand account of the shooting to the table.
“I don’t believe I have to be in special forces or law enforcement to understand there’s something that’s not right that happened here,” Kelly said.
Kelly spoke onstage at the Butler rally ahead of Trump. He was returning to his seat when he said three different security officials refused to let him through. After showing both his congressional card and his ID, he said all the officials still didn’t believe he was a member of Congress. Eventually, Kelly made it to his reserved spot in the front row, but in the process, he had been separated from his wife, son and three grandchildren in attendance. Then gunshots rang out.
“I turn around, look over my shoulder at this lady with blood on her,” he said. “It really was just total chaos.”
Kelly’s family, who live nearby, had already arrived by the time he got through the crowd. Kelly hasn’t forgotten the shock of his 9-year-old grandson, Charles.
“He goes, ‘Grandpa, why would somebody want to kill President Trump?’” he said.
A little more than a week later, Kelly introduced a resolution in the House to create the bipartisan task force. Most of the members met onsite at the Butler Farm Show Monday afternoon. They were given a tour from Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe, where they went on the roof where the shooter fired at Trump.
On the same day that the group was onsite at Butler, several conservative GOP representatives left off the task force held their own separate forum on the assassination attempt. Kelly didn’t call the members out by name to NOTUS but made clear his colleagues were only seeking “that 15 minutes of fame.”
Kelly argued that to have answers on what happened, a “deep dive” is necessary.
“It’s not a fireworks moment for me,” Kelly said. “I don’t need to rush to somebody’s home the day after something horrible happens and make some type of a proclamation or stand on the Capitol steps. I really don’t need that,” he said. “What I need to do is, at the end of the day, put together a task force that was actually successful and got the answers to the American people.”
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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the date of the last attempted assassination on a U.S. president.
Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Reese Gorman contributed reporting.