Four Republicans, Miss Donald Trump, visit the scene of the shooting

Four Republican members of the House task force tasked with investigating the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump did not travel to the scene of the shooting in Pennsylvania on Monday.

The task force — made up of seven Republicans and six Democrats — was created in the wake of the July 13 shooting to investigate what went wrong and recommend solutions to ensure such an attack does not happen again.

Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, suffered an ear injury when a gunman opened fire during a campaign rally in Butler. One person was killed and two others were wounded before the Secret Service shot and killed the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks.

On Monday, all six Democrats on the task force and three of the Republicans were at Butler to survey the scene, NewsNation’s Joe Khalil wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Representatives Clay Higgins, Mark Green, Michael Waltz and Pat Fallon were absent.

Green’s social media accounts show he made visits to Tennessee College of Applied Technology and Vanderbilt University on Monday.

Higgins was campaigning in Louisiana on Monday, a post on his X account showed.

Newsweek reached out to all four congressmen for comment via email.

Khalil said in another X post that Monday’s visit was the first time the task force visited the scene as a group.

“It looks like everyone on the task force will be here at some point, if they haven’t already been,” Khalil wrote.

Higgins made a three-day trip to Butler in early August and later accused the FBI of obstructing investigative efforts in a preliminary investigative report.

In the report, Higgins said the FBI released Crooks’ body to his family for cremation before it could examine it, saying it “can only be described by any reasonable person as an obstacle to any further investigative effort.” An FBI spokesman said Higgins’ allegation was “inaccurate and without merit” and that Crooks’ body was released in coordination with the medical examiner’s office and local and state law enforcement “in accordance with normal procedures.”

In Butler on Monday, lawmakers expressed shock that the Secret Service had left Trump unprotected from multiple potential lines of fire.

“We certainly noted today that there were a lot of lines of sight that appear to have been unsecured that day, that didn’t have eyes or that weren’t secured,” said Rep. Jason Crow, a Democrat, according to The New York Times.

The Secret Service has acknowledged security failures, and last month Kimberly Cheatle resigned as director after facing mounting calls for her to resign.

Since then, at least five Secret Service agents have been placed on administrative leave, including the special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office, who was in charge of planning security ahead of the July 13 rally, the Associated Press reported.