Chairman of Trump Shooting Inquiry Brings Personal Experience to the Task

Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania was in the audience with family, including three of his grandchildren, during the shooting.

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The site of former President Donald J. Trump’s rally on July 13 in Butler, Pa., after an assassination attempt. Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania is chairman of a bipartisan task force that will be the lead congressional investigation into the shooting.

Representative Mike Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania, was in the audience with family, including three of his grandchildren in Butler, Pa., when a would-be assassin opened fire on former President Donald J. Trump, coming just inches away from killing him.

They heard the gunshots, saw the blood and witnessed the panic surge through the crowd as two people were critically injured and one man — Corey Comperatore, a firefighter who died protecting his family — was killed.

Afterward, Mr. Kelly’s 9-year-old grandson, Charles, asked him a question: “Grandpa, why would somebody want to shoot President Trump?”

“I said, ‘Charles, I just can’t answer that. I don’t know,’” Mr. Kelly recalled. “He says, ‘This is just crazy.’ And I’m thinking, here’s a 9-year-old boy who has witnessed this all. This is something he should not have had to witness, and it’s something he’s going to carry with him.”

Now, Mr. Kelly is tasked with answering the major questions about what happened on July 13, the day of the shooting. Speaker Mike Johnson has named him chairman of a bipartisan task force that will be the lead congressional investigation into the shooting. The new task force will take over leadership of the various House inquiries.

ImageMr. Kelly made the pitch to Speaker Mike Johnson to create the task force. He has pledged to run it in a bipartisan way.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

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