Speaker Johnson: ‘More Questions Than Answers’ on Shootings

(Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

There are “lots more questions than answers” about whether there were lapses in security at the Butler County Fairgrounds in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the site of the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday.

The Louisiana Republican, appearing on NBC’s “Today,” said he asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas several “pointed questions” about what had happened, including about whether drones were being used in the vicinity that could have spotted the shooter, who was on a roof near the Trump rally stage.

“That would be an obvious thing,” said Johnson. “You would be able to spot someone on a roof. He didn’t know when I asked him that question last night. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but he didn’t know last night. We need to know how an individual could be at that elevation that was seen by, apparently, bystanders on the ground. How could not that not be noticed by the Secret Service?”

Johnson said he has already announced that there will be a full congressional investigation of the attack to determine if there were any lapses in security and whatever else Americans need to know about what happened.

Trump suffered a shot wound to his ear and one rallygoer was killed after the gunman, identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of nearby Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, opened fire. Two other rallygoers were seriously wounded.

Johnson noted that he and Trump have spent a great deal of time together, and he sent the former president a text immediately after the shootings.

“I knew that he wouldn’t see it for some time, but to just tell him that what we all saw, what seems to be a miracle,” he said. “I believe that God spared him, and that bullet went just apparently a millimeter from doing real and permanent damage to him or perhaps taking his life.”

But Trump, Johnson said, “has an inexhaustible reservoir of energy and strength that’s almost inexplicable to us sometimes. But he’ll keep fighting, and he should.”

Meanwhile, Johnson said that the nation must “turn the rhetoric down” in the United States.

“We’ve got to turn the temperature down in this country,” he said. “We need leaders of all parties on both sides to call that out and make sure that happens so that we can go forward and maintain our free society that we all are blessed to have.”

The attempt, Johnson added, was a “horrific act of political violence” that must be “roundly condemned.”

“Obviously, we can’t go on like this as a society,” he said. “You know, our prayers are with President Trump. All the rally attendees, certainly the family of the individual that lost their life and those who are injured.”

But Trump, who was shot just days before he is to be nominated as the Republican nominee for the presidency, has been vilified with rhetoric that has “just been over the top,” said Johnson.

“There’s no figure in American history, at least in the modern era, maybe since Lincoln, that has been so vilified and really persecuted by media and Hollywood elites, political figures, even the legal system,” Johnson said. “When the message goes out constantly, that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy, and that the Republic would end, it heats up the environment. We cannot do that. It’s simply not true. Everyone needs to turn the rhetoric down.”