During a House Oversight Committee hearing on Monday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) gave closing remarks about the Secret Service's failures after the assassination attempt against former President Trump.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Mr. Chairman and Director Chito, I also want to thank you for your patience over the course
00:07of what must have been a very long and trying hearing for you.
00:14It has been an unusually encouraging hearing and an unusually depressing hearing.
00:19And what's encouraging, Mr. Chairman, is that we came together to issue a strong statement
00:24deploring and categorically denouncing political violence in America.
00:30And I also didn't see any daylight between the members of the two parties today at the
00:35hearing in terms of our bafflement and outrage about the shocking operational failures that
00:41led to disaster and near catastrophe on July 13, 2024.
00:49What is depressing is the extraordinary communications gap between the Director of the Secret Service
00:55and Congress.
00:58And I don't want to add to the Director's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
01:06But I will be joining the Chairman in calling for the resignation of the Director just because
01:12I think that this relationship is irretrievable at this point.
01:18And I think that the Director has lost the confidence of Congress at a very urgent and
01:24tender moment in the history of the country.
01:27And we need to very quickly move beyond this.
01:30But what I will say, Mr. Chairman, is that I took this hearing to be about two major
01:35policy failures.
01:36And one policy failure is the one that got the vast majority of the attention, which
01:41was the failure of the Secret Service to effectively respond to a gunman on a roof
01:49within 150 yards of a presidential visit and speech.
01:58But the other failure is on the part of Congress, because the mass shooting that took place
02:04in Butler, Pennsylvania, is replicated all over the country every day.
02:10And in fact, as I said, Mr. Chairman, it happened that evening in Alabama, in Birmingham, Alabama,
02:18where there was a mass shooting, where more people even were killed and wounded than were
02:22killed and wounded in Butler, Pennsylvania.
02:24So it's true, the President, the former President, and a handful of people who get the Secret
02:29Service protection are the only people in America we thought were safe from an AR-15
02:35attack.
02:36It's clear that they're not safe either.
02:38And we've got to get to the bottom of that.
02:40But we also have to get to the bottom of the larger problem, which is that the whole country
02:45is living like this in fear and in terror of assault weapon attacks in movie theaters,
02:52churches, synagogues, mosques, supermarkets, Walmarts, you know, any place where an audience
03:01or a public gathers.
03:03And the worst was in Las Vegas, where a gunman got up on a roof and then just mowed down
03:0960 people below him and wounded hundreds and hundreds of other people.
03:15So we've got to deal with that problem.
03:18Yes, we've got to move as swiftly as we can to deal with the problems of the Secret Service.
03:23But the broader problem is still there.
03:27And I just wish to the heavens that our colleagues that could get together on the question of
03:35presidential security against an AR-15 attack could get together on the question of public
03:41security against an AR-15 attack, because all of us are vulnerable.
03:47All of our families are in danger by this.
03:50And the rest of the world doesn't live this way.
03:52And we have to look to see how uniquely strange it is that we allow 20-year-olds to access
03:59AR-15s, weapons of mass destruction, and show up in public places to endanger other people.
04:06And I hope, Mr. Chairman, we can work together on that with the same spirit of bipartisan
04:11commitment to the public safety that was exemplified here today.
04:15And I yield back to you.
04:16The Ranking Member yields back.
04:18I'll deliver my closing remarks.
04:21Mr. Cheadle, I've subpoenaed you.