FBI Director Christopher Wray to be questioned about Trump’s shooting

Members of Congress are expected to demand answers from FBI Director Chris Wray about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, days after former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was forced to resign after betraying the FBI during another congressional hearing earlier this week.

Now it’s Wray’s turn in the hot seat, and it’s unlikely to go smoothly. The Judiciary Committee hearing is expected to focus on both the shooting at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the FBI’s “continued politicization.” Hearings about a separate foiled Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump are sure to be a point of contention.

A bombshell report last week revealed that the U.S. received intelligence about an Iranian assassination plot in the weeks before Trump was gunned down at the Pennsylvania rally. Meanwhile, House Republicans are expected to set up a bipartisan task force to investigate the shooting in a vote this week. The FBI and Secret Service told lawmakers last week that they had identified gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks as a person of interest 62 minutes before he fired a shot.

Twenty minutes passed between the time Secret Service agents spotted Crooks on the roof with a gun and him firing shots at the president. In a stunning moment, Cheatle admitted Monday that her agents on the ground were alerted between two and five times that a “suspicious person” had been reported before Trump took the stage.

As Trump walked around with little more than a bleeding ear, Crooks killed 50-year-old former fire chief Corey Comperatore and seriously wounded two other attendees sitting near where the former president spoke last week before being taken out.

The security chief has faced mounting questions about why there was no agent on the roof from which gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on the former president, and why Trump was allowed to take the stage even when a threat was detected. She has also been ridiculed for suggesting her agency was not on the roof because it was “sloping.”

The 20-year-old gunman, Crooks, was able to get within 520 feet of the podium where the former president was speaking when he opened fire. The building he was standing on was outside the security perimeter, despite being clearly within firing range. And that was despite the FBI learning of a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, which led to a beefing up of security for the former president in the days leading up to the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Cheatle said she believed she was the “best person” to lead the Secret Service at this time, but later agreed to bipartisan demands for her resignation. On the day of the rally, Trump walked onto the stage at 6:02 p.m. Crooks’ first shots rang out around 6:12 p.m. Cheatle was unable to tell lawmakers how the gunman got onto the roof.

At the time of the shooting, law enforcement officers were inside the building, 480 feet (147 meters) from where Trump was standing, but not on top of it. Cheatle curiously claimed that no officers were stationed on the roof because it was sloped. “That building in particular has a sloped roof at the highest point. And so, you know, there is a safety factor that would be taken into consideration, that we wouldn’t want to put anybody on a sloped roof,” she told ABC News in an interview Tuesday. “And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from the inside.”

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