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WASHINGTON: Nearly two weeks after Donald Trump’s near-assassination, the FBI confirmed Friday that a bullet struck the former president in the ear, seeking to clarify conflicting accounts of what caused the former president’s injuries after a gunman opened fire at a rally in Pennsylvania.
“What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, either whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle,” the agency said in a statement.
The FBI’s statement is the most definitive account yet from law enforcement of Trump’s injuries and follows ambiguous comments earlier in the week from Director Christopher Wray that appeared to cast doubt on whether Trump was actually shot.
The comment infuriated Trump and his allies and further fueled conspiracy theories that have flourished on both sides of the political spectrum amid a dearth of information following the July 13 attack.
So far, federal law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation, including the FBI and the Secret Service, have repeatedly declined to provide information about what caused Trump’s injuries. Trump’s campaign has also refused to release medical records from the hospital where he was first treated or make doctors at the hospital available to answer questions.
The updates come either from Trump himself or from Trump’s former White House physician, Ronny Jackson, a staunch ally who now represents Texas in Congress. While Jackson has treated Trump since the night of the attack, he is under considerable scrutiny and is not Trump’s primary care physician.
The FBI’s apparent reluctance to immediately vouch for the former president’s version of events — as well as the anger he and some of his supporters have directed at the bureau in the wake of the shooting — have also sparked new tensions between the Republican nominee and the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency, over which he may soon regain control.
Trump and his supporters have repeatedly accused federal law enforcement of being used as a weapon against him.
Questions about the extent and nature of Trump’s injury began to mount immediately after the attack, as his campaign officials and law enforcement officials declined to answer questions about his condition or the treatment he received after Trump narrowly escaped death in an assassination attempt by a gunman armed with a high-caliber rifle.
These questions have persisted despite photos showing the trail of a projectile whizzing past Trump’s head, photographs showing Trump’s teleprompter glass intact after the shooting, and Trump himself’s account in a post on Truth Social hours after the shooting that he was “hit by a bullet that pierced the top of my right ear.”
“I immediately knew something was wrong, I heard a whistle, gunshots, and immediately felt the bullet go through the skin,” he wrote.
Days later, in a nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump described the horrific scene in detail while wearing a large white gauze bandage over his right ear.
“I heard a loud whistling sound and felt something hit me really, really hard, on my right ear. I thought, ‘Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet,'” he said.
“If I had not moved my head at that very last moment, the assassin’s bullet would have hit its target perfectly, and I would not be here tonight,” Trump said.
But the first medical report on Trump’s condition didn’t emerge until a week after the shooting, when Jackson released his first letter Saturday night. In that letter, he said the bullet that struck Trump “produced a 2-centimeter-wide wound that extended to the cartilaginous surface of the ear.” He also revealed that Trump had undergone a CT scan at the hospital.
But federal law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation, including the FBI and the Secret Service, have refused to confirm that version. And Wray’s testimony provided seemingly contradictory answers on the issue.
“We wonder if it was a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray testified, before appearing to suggest that it was indeed a bullet.
“I don’t know if that bullet, in addition to causing the scratch, could also have landed elsewhere,” he said.
The next day, the FBI attempted to clarify matters, saying in a statement that the shooting was an “attempt to assassinate former President Trump that resulted in his injury, the death of a heroic father, and the injuries of several other victims.” The FBI also said Thursday that its shooting reconstruction team is continuing to examine bullet fragments and other evidence at the scene.
Jackson, who has been treating the former president since the night of the July 13 shooting, told The Associated Press on Thursday that any suggestion that Trump’s ear was bloodied by anything other than a bullet was reckless.
“It was a gunshot wound,” Jackson said. “You can’t make those statements. It gives rise to all these conspiracy theories.”
In his letter Friday, Jackson insisted there was “absolutely no evidence” that Trump was hit by anything other than a bullet and said it was “false and inappropriate to suggest otherwise.”
He wrote that at Butler Memorial Hospital, where the Republican candidate was rushed to after the shooting, he was evaluated and treated for a “gunshot wound to the right ear.”
“Having served as an emergency physician for over 20 years in the U.S. Navy, including as a combat medic on the battlefield in Iraq, I have treated numerous gunshot wounds during my career,” he wrote. “Based on my direct observations of the injury, my relevant clinical experience, and my extensive experience evaluating and treating patients with similar injuries, I fully agree with the initial assessment and treatment provided by the physicians and nurses at Butler Memorial Hospital on the day of the shooting.”
The FBI declined to comment on Jackson’s letters.
Asked whether the campaign would release those hospital records or allow the doctors who treated him to speak out, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung lambasted the media for asking the question.
“The media has no shame in engaging in disgusting conspiracy theories,” he said. “Facts are facts, and to question a heinous assassination attempt that took one life and injured two others is unacceptable.”
In emails sent last week, he told the AP that “medical reports” had already been provided.
“It’s sad that some people still don’t believe a shooting took place,” Cheung said, “even after one person was killed and others were injured.”
Anyone who believes in conspiracies, he added, “is either mentally deficient or is deliberately peddling lies for political reasons.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close Trump ally, also urged Wray to correct his testimony in a letter to the FBI director Friday, saying that the fact that Trump was shot “has been made clear in the briefings received by my office and should not be a point of contention.”
“As head of the FBI, you should not create confusion on such issues, as it further damages the agency’s credibility with millions of Americans,” he wrote.
Trump also lashed out at Wray in a post on his Truth Social social network, saying it was “no wonder the once-famous FBI has lost America’s trust!”
“No, unfortunately it was a bullet that hit my ear, and it hit it hard. There was no glass, no shrapnel,” he wrote.
On Friday, he called Wray’s comments “very damaging to the great people who work at the FBI.”
Jackson has come under intense scrutiny over the years.
After submitting Trump to a medical exam in 2018, he made headlines by suggesting that “if he had followed a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he could live to be 200.”
He was reportedly demoted by the Navy after the Defense Department’s inspector general released a scathing report on his conduct as a top White House physician, which found that Jackson made “sexual and denigrating” comments about a female subordinate and took prescription sleeping pills, raising concerns among colleagues about his ability to provide proper medical care.
In 2017, Donald Trump nominated Wray to replace the fired James Comey as FBI director. But the then-president quickly stepped aside as the FBI continued its investigation into Russian interference in the election.
Trump openly flirted with the idea of ​​firing Wray as his term drew to a close, and he lashed out again after the FBI executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to retrieve boxes of classified documents from his presidency.