Senator Dave McCormick was set to join President Donald Trump on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, precisely one year ago on Sunday when unexpected gunfire erupted.

However, just before the senator’s scheduled appearance alongside the president, Trump altered his plans, opting to first present a chart to the rally crowd. This chart illustrated the extent of the illegal immigration crisis believed to be exacerbated by then-President Joe Biden.

It was a fateful decision.

As Trump turned to read the chart displayed on a screen to his right, a bullet struck through his right ear. Had it been a few millimeters to the left, the course of history could have taken a tragically different turn.

‘I saw the President get hit and go down,’ recalled Senator McCormick in an exclusive interview with Daily Mail. ‘I saw the Secret Service pile on top of him. I was literally right in the front row to his right.’

‘I’ve been in combat,’ said Senator McCormick, a retired Army officer. ‘I was served in Iraq in the first Gulf War. 

‘For the President to get shot, go down and then stand back up, with that balance of Secret Service around him and be shaking his fist, ‘Fight, fight, fight’ [is] very, very uncommon behavior under fire. 

‘One-hundred people get shot at, 99 of them stay down in the fetal position. It is, very rare for any person to stand up,’ he observed. Second, Senator McCormick was struck by the bravery of the rally attendees that day. 

‘The crowd didn’t panic… People stampede, people get hurt, run over. None of that happened. People were largely in place and started to chant USA. I mean, it was kind of a just the whole thing was a remarkable moment.’ 

To so many, the near killing of a former president and then-candidate for the office was unimaginable. But a year on from the attempted assassination of President Trump by 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks, even Senator McCormick – a Pennsylvania senator, who witnessed it all and has as much desire as anyone for answers – still does not know how this was allowed to happened.

‘I’m not a conspiracy theorist,’ Senator McCormick told the Daily Mail. ‘I don’t have some grand theory of how this came about. But Americans deserve better, more coherent answers to how this could have occurred, because the consequences of it could have been so significant.’

A Congressional committee in December published a detailed report into the Secret Service’s failings that day. But the investigators did not look into the motivations or preparations of Crooks, who was shot dead after firing eight shots in six seconds.

Crooks missed the president but his shots struck and killed Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old fire chief of Buffalo Township, who was sitting on the rally stage.

Two other attendees, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, were injured.

The director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned ten days after the July 13 shooting. This week, the six Secret Service agents assigned to protect Trump that day were suspended. Their names have not been revealed. And no one else has been held accountable for the failures.

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and was a co-author of the December report on the assassination attempt, is seeking further answers, but claims he is being ‘stonewalled’.

On Thursday, Johnson approved a subpoena to secure more information from the FBI and Department of Justice – both of which are now headed by Trump loyalists who have long vowed to shine a light on the so-called secrets of the deep state.

The apparent inability to secure answers from the Trump administration intelligence community baffles him.

‘Everybody else seems to have been moving on here and not particularly interested in an investigation. I am,’ Johnson said. ‘I’m moving forward, which is why I approved a subpoena.’

Both Mike Kelly, the Pennsylvania representative who chaired the special House task force investigating the attempt, and Jason Crow, the top Democrat on the committee, stressed their work address the mistakes the lead to the shooting. But they don’t claim to have all the answers either.

‘In the year since the attempted assassination of President Trump, Congress has taken significant steps to investigate the events of July 13,’ said Kelly. ‘Our Task Force produced nearly 40 recommendations to modernize the Secret Service and to better protect America’s leaders.’

But he admitted that he, ‘like many in the Butler community’, was still searching for answers.

‘I still have questions about everything that led up to, and unfolded on, July 13. May we continue to pursue the truth to get the American people the answers they deserve.’

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative from Georgia, told the Daily Mail that it was ‘unforgivable’ that Americans know so little about that day and, specifically, the gunman.

‘Still to this day, we know absolutely nothing about the young man that shot President Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania a year ago,’ claimed Greene.

‘It’s just a betrayal of President Trump and all the people that voted for him,’ she said.

John Fetterman, senator for Pennsylvania, echoed Greene’s calls for more information to be released.

‘I do not believe that there’s like a conspiracy to withhold any information on him, but of course, I would want all of the facts on that,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘I fully support that. Thank God the president was not fatally hit… I can’t imagine the way our nation would be if he was killed.’

While some information about Crooks is known, key questions remain unanswered.

His father and sister were both Libertarians; his mother was a Democrat. Crooks himself, his father said, would discuss both Trump and Joe Biden but showed no particular sentiment either way.

He was said by his father to be acting erratically in the year leading up to the shooting – dancing alone in his bedroom at night and talking to himself with dramatic hand gestures.

Crooks’s internet search history revealed he had looked up ‘DNC convention’ and ‘when is the RNC in 2024,’ the FBI confirmed. He also sought articles on Trump, Biden and guns.

From the summer of 2023 onwards, Crooks begun using encrypted email and VPN systems that disguised his online activity. And it is still not publicly known what he was searching for during that period.

Crooks made dozens of ‘gun-related’ purchases using aliases online and bought chemicals to construct explosive which he hid in his bedroom, but his parents thought little of their curious, academically-gifted son, who wanted to become an engineer.

There is no evidence that Crooks had any accomplices, but the potential encryption of his communications makes that difficult.

And, indeed, the great looming question is: Why did he do it?

‘Motive is just one part of the many questions I think that we still have,’ said Senator McCormick.