Rep. Mike Kelly, the Pennsylvania Republican who chaired the bipartisan House task force investigating the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, just admitted something that should stop every American mid-scroll: two years into the investigation, new revelations are still catching lawmakers off guard.
The people in charge of finding out what happened don't have the full picture. Two years later.
Kelly, who represents the district where 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto a rooftop and opened fire on a presidential campaign rally — killing one attendee who was shielding his family — described a federal apparatus that stonewalled the investigation from the start. "During our piece that we were working on, none of the federal agencies were working with us at all," Kelly told Just The News. "They were going to work on their own, and they told us, 'We're going to do ours, and then we'll get back to you.'"
The punchline: "So this is two years later. Nobody's gotten back to us."
The task force released its report on December 10, 2024, but the information pipeline from federal agencies never opened. Kelly placed the blame squarely on the timeline. "That's under the former administration," he said. "So everything that's under the executive branch at that time, under the Biden administration, we had no access to information at that time."
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who has pursued his own parallel investigation, has encountered similar resistance. The pattern is consistent across both chambers: the agencies tasked with protecting a presidential candidate failed, and then the agencies tasked with explaining the failure went silent.
One detail that continues to haunt the investigation involves Crooks' father, Matthew Crooks, who reportedly attempted to intervene in May 2024 — two months before the shooting — to prevent his son from accessing firearms. What happened between that intervention and July remains one of the central unanswered questions. A father flagged a problem. Two months later, his son nearly assassinated a president from a rooftop. The gap between those two events is where the answers should be, and it's exactly where the federal record goes quiet.
The Biden administration's Justice Department controlled the investigative apparatus during the critical window. Every document, every interview, every internal review sat behind an executive branch that had no political incentive to cooperate with a congressional inquiry into the near-assassination of its opponent. Kelly didn't have to spell out the implications. The facts do that on their own.
Congressional investigations depend on the agencies they're investigating to hand over evidence. When those agencies refuse, the investigation doesn't fail because the questions were wrong. It fails because the structure assumes good faith from institutions that have spent a decade proving they don't operate that way.
New revelations are surfacing now — under a different administration with different priorities for disclosure. The fact that Republican lawmakers who spent two years on this investigation are genuinely surprised by what they're seeing tells you exactly how much was kept from them the first time around.
A 20-year-old got onto a rooftop with a rifle at a presidential rally. A man died protecting his family. The candidate survived by inches. And two years later, the chairman of the investigation says nobody ever got back to him.