Trump claims Butler assassination attempt was a 'Democrat Plot' without showing evidence
President Donald Trump alleged on Tuesday that the 2024 assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania -- which killed one person and wounded two others -- was a "Democratic Plot" aimed at removing him from the election.
The president blasted the FBI under former President Joe Biden and said former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who Trump nominated during his first term, "should pay a price" for the investigation.
Trump lashed out at his FBI director after he testified two weeks after the shooting that it was still unclear at that point whether Trump was hit with a bullet or something else.
Wray resigned as director before Trump was inaugurated for his second term because he feared that Trump firing him could cause turmoil within the department. He did not reply immediately to ABC News' request for comment.
Trump did not offer any evidence to back up his extraordinary claim of the assassination attempt being part of a broader plot. He claimed that "most of the information" on the investigation was missing when he took office but new documents had recently been found, without elaborating.
"Why wasn't it seen long ago?" Trump asked.
"This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed. Dirty Cop Christopher Wray should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt, and certainly for the things he said," Trump posted.
Asked in a Senate Oversight Committee hearing on Tuesday what his agency had learned about suspected shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks since the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel said that his agency looked for connections between Crooks and others, but found none.
"We found no evidence that that individual was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents, who he resided with," Patel testified.
Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to offer any evidence of the alleged plot, saying only that the “new information” Trump alluded to today was produced by the FBI in response to a Senate inquiry.
“It is new information about the shooter and about his background, about his history and that's stuff that we didn't know before,” Blanche said when pressed on what the information was.
Asked whether the Department of Justice would “punish” anyone after Trump saying Wray should "pay a price" for the investigation into the shooting, Blanche replied, “The Department of Justice doesn't punish,” Blanche said.
“As far as the president's frustration with the FBI, I was there with him. I lived it. I mean, you have a situation where, where it's not really clear what the leadership of the FBI were doing in the weeks and months ahead of the attempted assassination to protect President Trump,” the attorney general said. “That's the same organization that was simultaneously trying to put him in prison till he dies.”
Blanche said Patel "has undertaken a Herculean effort to go through all the documents and understand what was missed, if anything" and provide it to the public.
Reports from Fox News and The New York Post on Tuesday said that they had reviewed federal documents related to the assassination attempt, which purportedly show that suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks used the alias "Bob Dole" to order suspicious packages. Fox and the Post also reported that Crooks' body was cremated in the wake of the shooting, a service reportedly paid for by an anonymous donor but did not report evidence of a conspiracy behind the shooting.
ABC News has not independently reviewed those documents.
Trump was struck in the ear by a bullet the Secret Service said came from Crooks' rifle as he fired from the roof of a nearby building at a campaign rally on July 13, 2024.
