The FBI director has cast doubt on whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet during the assassination attempt at a political rally in Pennsylvania.
Christopher Wray was updating Congress on the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler on Wednesday when he made the explosive statement.
“With respect to former President Trump, there is some question as to whether it was a bullet or shrapnel that struck his ear,” Wray said.
‘I don’t know now if that bullet, in addition to causing the graze, could have landed somewhere else.’
Wray was referring to security failures that allowed gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire. Crooks, 20, killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, and wounded two other people, including Trump, during the shooting.
The presidential candidate has since given lengthy accounts of the moment he was shot and was seen with a bandage over his ear.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has cast doubt on whether Donald Trump was actually shot during an assassination attempt at a political rally in Pennsylvania.
“When I fell, the bullets were flying over my head and you could hear them, it was like zip, zip,” he said.
The former president claims his Secret Service team “thought it was all over when I fell” because “a lot of blood came out” after they grazed his ear.
Trump, 78, argued with his agents, telling them he was “not going to be taken on a stretcher” and instead vowing to “get up.”
He added that a last-minute turn of his head to look at a screen was what saved him from the bullet.
“I’m supposed to be dead. The most incredible thing is that not only did I transform, but I transformed at exactly the right time and in exactly the right amount,” he added, stating that he survived “either by luck or by God.”
Some initial reports on the day of the shooting speculated that Trump may have been struck by a piece of broken glass when a bullet struck the teleprompter.
However, the teleprompter theory was debunked when photos showed that both glass screens They were intact after the attack.
Trump listened to testimony from Wray, who also detailed how Crooks had investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy before the shooting.
The gunman had done a Google search a week earlier for “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?” according to Wray, who said the suspect had shown a keen interest in public figures but had otherwise left no clear clues to an ideological motive.
The July 6 online search, retrieved from a laptop the FBI says is linked to Crooks, is a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman who killed Kennedy from a sniper position in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Wray said his understanding was that a bullet or some shrapnel “was what grazed (Trump’s) ear” during the assassination attempt on Butler on July 13.
Trump raised his fist toward the crowd and appeared to say “fight” before being escorted off the stage by his security team on July 13, 2024.
“It’s a record that’s obviously significant in terms of his mental state. That was the same day that he apparently registered” for Trump’s rally, Wray told the House Judiciary Committee.
The FBI is investigating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.
The investigation has plunged the FBI into a political maelstrom months before the presidential election, with lawmakers and the public pressing for details about what may have motivated Crooks.
“We don’t know the motive. That’s obviously one of the central questions in our investigation, and we’ve found it very frustrating that many of the easiest places to find have not yielded significant clues as to their motive,” Wray said.
The hearing had been scheduled well before the shooting as part of the committee’s routine oversight of the FBI and the Justice Department.
Questions about the shooting dominated the session, but other topics included the FBI’s diversity efforts, election interference, the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and whether Wray had personally observed any cognitive decline in meetings with Biden before his decision to withdraw from the election.
His response that he had not witnessed any problems with the president’s mental state did not impress Trump, and the Republican candidate called for Wray to resign.
“I watched the Congressional hearing today when Christopher Wray was asked whether or not he had noticed any cognitive degeneration in his many conversations with Corrupt Joe Biden,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.
Crowd members in Butler, Pennsylvania, rushed to his aid after the shooting.
The presidential candidate has since given lengthy accounts of the moment he was shot and was seen wearing a bandage over his ear.
‘Wray should immediately resign from the FBI and stop ‘cannibalizing’ Congress every time he goes up, which he loves to do, because anyone can see that Joe Biden has cognitive and physical disabilities.
“And if you can’t see that, you sure as hell can’t run the FBI… unless you want to illegally run the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Wray needs to resign, and NOW, for LYING TO CONGRESS!”
The FBI was not involved in ensuring the security of the rally and therefore avoided the same level of scrutiny directed at the Secret Service for the lapses leading up to the event.
On Tuesday, Kimberly Cheatle resigned as head of the agency amid mounting questions about its colossal security failures at the rally.
Cheatle took responsibility for the catastrophic mistakes after coming under fire from both Republicans and Democrats when she appeared before Congress on Monday.
The security chief had faced mounting questions about why there was no officer stationed on the roof from which Crooks opened fire on the former president, and why Trump was allowed on stage even when a threat was detected.
Crooks had been identified as a suspect hours before the shooting occurred.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle has dramatically announced her resignation following the massive security failures that led to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
Wray’s congressional testimony addressed security failures that allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire despite being identified as a suspect on the day of the shooting.
A sniper shot and killed him, but not before he was able to fire a burst of bullets into the crowd.
Wray said Crooks used mechanical equipment on the ground and vertical pipes to raise himself to the roof of a low manufacturing building that was 157 yards (135 meters) from the stage.
He fired eight shots from an AR-style rifle before being killed.
The Warren Commission report analyzing the Kennedy assassination assessed that Kennedy had been shot in the neck at a distance of between 174.9 and 190.8 feet.