During a press conference on Tuesday, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah questioned why the Secret Service permitted former President Donald Trump to take the stage on July 13 despite being aware of a potential threat more than an hour beforehand.

The Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees conducted a joint hearing with the Secret Service and FBI to examine the security lapses that allowed the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during his rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, earlier this month. At a press conference following the hearing, Lee criticized the Secret Service for repeatedly lying about the events of that day and questioned their motives for doing so.

“Why on earth did they ever let Donald Trump take the stage?” Lee asked during the press conference.

“It’s not as though the Secret Service has comported itself in a manner that calls out to us, to defer to them, to have confidence in them,” Lee said during the press conference. “Nobody wants to believe the worst, to suspect the worst about what happens within government. But when they lied to us repeatedly, then when they refused to answer the most basic questions, when they almost willfully declined to take any of the most basic precautions in order to protect the former president.”

“These are and should be obvious and easy, basic questions for the Secret Service to answer, and they have had no fewer than 17 days since the attack to answer these questions,” Lee said during the press conference. “These are questions that they should have started asking and probably should have been able to answer within 24 hours.”

“What I heard, what my colleagues heard, what you heard if you were watching was we’re looking into it,” Lee said during the press conference. “I’m sorry, that doesn’t cut it.”

“Remember, King David didn’t personally kill Uriah the Hittite,” Lee continued. “But he let them go out into a battlefield where he knew there was an imminent risk of grave bodily injury. And he made sure he didn’t have adequate protection. We got to get to the bottom of these questions to make sure that Donald Trump was not intended to be a Uriah the Hittite.”

WATCH:

That darned sloped roof!
pic.twitter.com/Gl7D737K1S

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) July 30, 2024