‘The Secret Service Has To Be 100% Correct All The Time’: Correa Responds To Trump Rally Shooting
On Tuesday, Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA) questioned officials on the investigation of the shooting at the Trump rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
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NewsTranscript
00:00I now recognize Mr. Crea for five minutes of questioning.
00:03Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank you and the Ranking Member for putting together
00:08the trip to Butler yesterday.
00:11Good eye-opening trip, and Colonel Parris, thank you for hosting us out there.
00:22I certainly hope that the Secret Service does cooperate with us in our investigation as
00:27to what went wrong.
00:30Secret Service has to be 100% correct all the time.
00:34There's small force, 2,300 plus maybe 1,300, so you local, state, local police officers
00:43are the force multiplier, and to hear you say that miscommunication was an element here
00:51is unacceptable.
00:53We talked earlier to the fact that FirstNet was put together post-911, it's a little bit
01:00over 20 years ago, and to hear that we still don't have the technology for people on the
01:06ground to talk with each other is of concern.
01:10It's even of greater concern to me when I was taking a tour of that farm in Butler,
01:19Pennsylvania yesterday, I had local law enforcement officers, local electeds coming to me, whispering
01:30to me, there's more here to the story, we need to talk about what actually happened.
01:38To have people that were on the ground there, concerned, afraid of stepping forward is unacceptable.
01:46To tell us of other failures that maybe this committee does not know about yet, that were
01:52part of what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, is unacceptable.
01:59I asked one of the officers, safety officers, could you talk to the Secret Service, said
02:09no, we can't communicate.
02:12Took us 15 minutes to communicate with him.
02:16Local elected official who said, I have other stories I need to talk to you about, let me
02:21have a moment.
02:22Ladies and gentlemen, we're four and a half months away from this election.
02:28Pennsylvania is a battleground state.
02:30You will have these kinds of events again.
02:34And to know that we don't have the facts, let alone execute a plan to fix the holes,
02:40is unacceptable to our democracy and to our country.
02:47We can talk about the facts.
02:48The facts are a lot of things went wrong.
02:52Let's talk about how to fix it.
02:54Fix it now.
02:55I think we start with accepting the fact that things went wrong and that we need more resources.
03:03Colonel Parris, your volunteers, your officers that you put on the line to help the Secret
03:09Service, are they actually compensated somewhere for their overtime, their extra time they're
03:13out there?
03:15They're in a paid status, yes.
03:17We assign them to those duties and if they incur overtime as a result of the contract,
03:22the contractual bargaining agreement, we pay them.
03:25So let me ask you something in the minute and a half I have left.
03:29One of the local officers there, after we spoke a while, I said, well, let me summarize
03:37what you just told me.
03:39You're asking me who's in charge and he asked me, yeah, I want to know who's in charge.
03:47I said, well, let's talk some more and he said, Lou, we don't know if it's the campaign
03:54or the Secret Service that's in charge here.
03:57He said, if I called for a row of dump trucks to be put up behind the stand, it wouldn't
04:05happen because the optics would not be good for a campaign rally.
04:11I want to know who is in charge protecting our national candidates and Mr. Chairman,
04:19I'd like to see if we can ask those tough questions.
04:22This is not a Democrat or Republican issue.
04:25This is about trying to come up with some rules, protocol to make sure this does not
04:30happen again.
04:33After the events, we can sit here, we can point fingers at each other and talk about
04:39partisanship.
04:40It's not going to fix our democracy, our electoral system.
04:44Mr. Chairman, I do hope we go back and talk to a lot of those folks who are not here today,
04:52who wanted to talk, who weren't invited, and a lot of people, even if we invite them, are
04:59not going to talk because, frankly speaking, they want to keep their heads down as the
05:05shooting continues.
05:06Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield.