House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday called for the country “to get back to civility” following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
“We need a unified message. We need to turn the temperature down. And I think it’s time for moral clarity,” Johnson told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Of course, we’ve got to get back to civility in this country.”
“The rhetoric has consequences. When you have a heated environment and you have political division in this country, like we have in the age of social media, everything is amplified and everyone can go on and turn the dials up every day. We need to work on bringing that down so that we can have thoughtful debate and we can have policy discussions,” he continued.
When asked about how the US Secret Service failed to protect Trump, Johnson said he hasn’t gotten a “satisfactory answer” from them yet.
On Saturday night, after the assassination attempt, Johnson announced an investigation into the incident.
“The House will conduct a full investigation of the tragic events today,” he said in a statement posted to social media site X.
“The American people deserve to know the truth. We will have Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and other appropriate officials from DHS and the FBI appear for a hearing before our committees ASAP,” added Johnson.
The shooter in Saturday's incident has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man who was located on the roof of a manufacturing plant about 130 yards from Trump's location.
The FBI said on Sunday that the shooter acted alone and that it is still actively investigating the shooter’s background – including working to gain access to his phone.
“We are working to get access to the phone,” Kevin Rojek, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, said. “We have shipped the phone to our lab at Quantico.”
Rojek also said the FBI has “not identified an ideology associated with the subject,” but cautioned that “we’re still very early in this investigation.”
He added the FBI doesn’t “have any kind of fidelity right now on the shooter’s actions immediately prior to him engaging the former president.”