FBI investigators have asked to interview Donald Trump as they determine whether a bullet or a piece of shrapnel hit the former president during an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
On Wednesday, while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that “there is some question about whether or not it was a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
According to a Thursday report in The New York Times, citing the F.B.I. and a federal law enforcement official, the agency is keen to talk to Trump in order to get a more detailed version of events surrounding the incident and, according to the official, a more complete record of his injury, The Times notes.
It comes as the FBI confirmed that it was examining a number of metal fragments found littered around the stage at the time of the shooting to help determine if a piece of shrapnel was responsible for Trump’s bloodied ear, the Times report noted.
Investigators recovered eight shell casings from the roof where the shooter, Matthew Thomas Crooks, fired at Trump—but it is unclear if any bullets have been recovered. “There’s a chance we can never find them, ” Michael Harrigan, a former FBI special agent who ran the bureau firearms training unit in Quantico, VA, previously told the Daily Beast.
Trump and his campaign have since pushed back hard on the idea that anything other than a bullet hit the former president on July 13.
“No, it was, unfortunately, a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Thursday evening. “There was no glass, there was no shrapnel. The hospital called it a ‘bullet wound to the ear,’ and that is what it was.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately return a request for comment from the Daily Beast regarding the FBI’s proposed interview. It is unclear when the FBI asked Trump for the interview, but the former president insisted on Thursday night “the FBI never even checked” what hit his ear at the rally. The FBI told The Times that the bureau’s shooting reconstruction team “continues to examine evidence from the scene, including bullet fragments, and the investigation remains ongoing.”
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Trump’s former White House physician, released a statement on Saturday confirming he “sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear,” which produced a “2 cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear.”
However, Trump’s official treatment from Butler Memorial Hospital has not been released.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) also pushed back Thursday on the notion that Trump may have been wounded by shrapnel. “We’ve all seen the video, we’ve seen the analysis, we’ve heard it from multiple sources in different angles that a bullet went through his ear. I’m not sure it matters that much,” he told NBC.
Answers over the apparent culprit of Trump’s ear wound appears to be low on the priority scale of the FBI.
“The bureau’s priority is finding whether anybody helped the shooter and eliminating any ongoing threat,” Harrigan told The Times.
“From an investigative standpoint, knowing what happened to the president’s ear doesn’t really matter.”
Trump previously called on Wray to resign for stating that his interactions with President Joe Biden were “uneventful and unremarkable”—insisting that the report written by Special Counsel Robert Hur, the Justice Department attorney assigned to investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified documents proved the opposite. Trump doubled down on this call on Thursday night.
Hur’s report called Biden a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” but said his actions did not warrant criminal charges.
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