At the House Republican Leadership press conference this morning, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., discussed the details of the newly-announced Task Force to Investigate the Assassination Attempt of presidential nominee Donald Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress tomorrow, and the Democrats’ anti-democratic effort to invalidate the votes of 14 million Americans.

During the press conference, Johnson also reacted to the breaking news report that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle announced she is resigning from her post.

“I’m glad she did the right thing. Look, the immediate reaction to her resignation, is that it is overdue. She should have done this at least a week ago. I’m happy to see that, I’m happy to see that she has heeded the call of both Republicans and Democrats,”Johnson said. “Now, we have to pick up the pieces. We have to rebuild the American people’s faith and trust in the Secret Service as an agency. It has an incredibly important responsibility in protecting presidents, former presidents and other officials in the executive branch and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Below are excerpts from the press conference.

On the bipartisan task force:

While we have a number of committees of jurisdiction who have already done great work on this, they leapt right into action as you would expect they would do, I think the moment calls for something unique and different. We need to move quickly. We need to get the answers that the American people deserve. And so we’re establishing a special task force in the House that will be bipartisan. It’ll be composed of seven Republicans, six Democrats. The composition of the committee will be persons who have expertise in the areas in question and a lot of insight about that. We will give the list of the composition of the committee the members by the end of this week.

But they’ll have three primary responsibilities. We have to get the answers of course about what happened. We need to make sure that accountability is ensured for the American people and that we need to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. The committee will have subpoena authority and they will begin immediately. A final report will be due from the committee no later than December 13, though we can probably expect that there will be interim reports along the way. We have a finite set of facts and circumstances here with regard to the event last Saturday, but there are deeper problems obviously in the Secret Service. And I think this task force would be the way for us to get to the bottom of that.

On Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress:

I’m happy to welcome Prime Minister Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what will be his fourth address to a joint session of Congress. He will set the record surpassing Winston Churchill as the foreign leader who has addressed Congress the most times, because we live in historic moments and because his testimony directly to Congress is so important with regard to what’s happening in Israel right now.

120 hostages languish in tunnels deep in that the land over there in Gaza, built by Hamas. That includes, of course, eight Americans and we will not and cannot forget that. Our two nations are united in our common cause to bring the hostages home and we are united to stand against our common enemies. As Iran and its proxies, including Hezbollah and the Houthis have become increasingly hostile, they attack Israelis in the north and in Tel Aviv, we have to be clear that Israel is not alone. It has never been more important than it is right now to stand with our closest ally in the Middle East.

On the anti-democratic Democrat party:

Just over 48 hours ago, just over 100 days before an election, Democrat party bosses forced Joe Biden off the ballot. They invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who went through the small ‘d’ democratic process and chose their nominee for president. The self-proclaimed party of democracy can’t claim to be that anymore, because they just steamrolled democracy and made a decision in a back room. And one thing is clear, if Joe Biden is not fit to run for president, he is not fit to run the country. We’re stating the obvious, we’re stating what everybody is seeing with their own eyes. And it’s a hard truth but it’s one that the country has to face.

Right now, we’re facing altogether increased threats around the globe because of this weakness. We’re facing threats right here at home and we’re sending the world a dangerous message. America needs strong, resolute leadership at this perilous moment. Joe Biden is not providing that, Kamala Harris is incapable of providing that, and we need to get Nov 5th here as quickly as possible.