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Congress is snapping into action to investigate the shocking assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump by a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man.

Senate’s turn to investigate Trump assassination attempt

Last week, the House Oversight Committee got major results probing the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump when the panel grilled then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and forced her resignation. Today, it’s the Senate’s turn for oversight of the deadly incident.

Cheatle’s replacement, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr., will testify alongside Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate in front of a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security and Government Affairs committees.

We’re expecting less fireworks than what we saw in the House. For starters, Cheatle’s resignation has already been secured — a main demand of many lawmakers in both chambers.

And the Senate is a little late to the game here.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who sits on the Judiciary Committee, pointed out that Congress already heard from Cheatle and FBI Director Christopher Wray in the last week.

“Frankly, I don’t expect a lot more new information to come up,” Cornyn said. “We all have a pretty clear idea of what happened. And it represents a profound failure by the Secret Service.”

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) told us that a lot about the shooting “has already come out” and mentioned she may not even attend the whole hearing, citing a conflicting hearing on Tuesday.

Yet serious questions still remain over how a 20-year-old shooter came within inches of killing Trump during a July 13 rally in Butler, Pa.

Senators we spoke to said they were most curious to learn more about the failure in communication between local law enforcement and the Secret Service. The New York Times reported on Sunday that local police spotted the shooter hours before Trump was shot but lost track of him in the rally space.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said he wanted to learn about the shooter’s motive, based on what investigators may have learned about his conversations with the shooter’s parents.

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