FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that convicted felon and former president Donald Trump could have been struck by shrapnel instead of bullet during the assassination attempt on by a registered Republican on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray told the House Judiciary Committee.
“I don’t know right now whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.”
Shrapnel is defined as “small pieces of metal that fly through the air when a bomb or similar weapon explodes and are intended to injure people.”
Pennsylvania law enforcement briefed reporters on the scene immediately in the aftermath, saying Trump had been hit by debris from his teleprompter. Several members of law enforcement who were standing near him were hit with debris.
“Donald Trump was reportedly hit by glass shards, not a bullet, after a shooting occurred at scheduled rally in Pennsylvania. According to law enforcement, a bullet hit a teleprompter and Trump was grazed by glass shards,” the New Pittsburgh Courier reported the day following the shooting.
Early briefings caused confusion that Wray’s testimony does not clarify at this point. Snopes claimed that Trump was definitively hit with a bullet before Wray’s testimony.
Trump’s ear appeared to be grazed with an object, but as the FBI Director made apparent, it’s unclear what that object was. Trump has claimed he was shot in the ear and wore a large, conspicuous white bandage over his ear at the Republican Convention, which was copied by attendees sporting large white covers to their ears.
No licensed and/or treating medical personnel have confirmed he was shot as he stated. However, Butler County (a red, rural district in western Pennsylvania) district attorney Richard Goldinger told a reporter that Trump was grazed by gunfire.
One audience member was killed and two others were seriously injured. The FBI is still trying to determine the motive of the shooter.
“We do not know the motive. That is obviously one of the central questions in our investigation, and it’s been very frustrating to us that a lot of the usual kind of low-hanging-fruit places that we would find that have not yielded significant clues about his motive,” Wray said.
Republicans have accused the Secret Service of being derelict in their duty to protect a presidential candidate. However, the Secret Service deleted text messages requested by a watchdog dated January 5th and 6th in the aftermath of the Trump-incited deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. They denied deleting the messages intentionally.
The shooters’ motive is still unclear. Profiles on him diverge, some saying he was bullied and shy, while others say he was a conservative who enjoyed taking the conservative side of the argument in class and whose friends wore Trump hats. He was a registered Republican, but this fact did not stop Republican lawmakers from blaming Democrats for the shooting. He was wearing a T-shirt advertising The Demolition Ranch, a YouTube channel for gun enthusiasts.
A Philadelphia Inquirer profile quoted a classmate, Max R. Smith, recalling Tom Crooks making political statements. “He definitely was conservative. It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.”
Political violence began rising in 2016, “around the time of Trump’s first run for the presidency,” Gary LaFree, a University of Maryland criminologist who has tracked such violence in a terrorism database between 1970 and 2020, told Reuters.
A majority of Democratic lawmakers and President Biden have repeatedly pushed to ban assault weapons. 220 Republican House members and 49 Senators have consistently blocked gun safety. A common theme in Republican candidates’ ads is to pose with an assault weapon, sometimes even around a Christmas tree with their kids holding assault weapons.
No matter what hit Trump was hit, it occurred during an assassination attempt, which is unacceptable in a free country. While the venue chosen by the Trump campaign provided obvious logistical challenges for the Secret Service and local law enforcement, witness accounts of seeing the shooter on the roof before he shot into the crowd are chilling and speak to a security failure that wrought tragedy for one rally goer’s family and put two other people in serious condition.
Watch Wray’s full testimony here:
