Well, if you needed something else to undermine your faith in the FBI, you have it now.
During testimony before Congress on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray couldn't even confirm whether former President Donald Trump was hit by a bullet or just a piece of shrapnel during the attempted assassination.
Despite hours of questioning, Wray claimed twice that the FBI still hasn't figured out what exactly grazed Trump's ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He told Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), "My understanding is that either it [a bullet] or some shrapnel is what grazed his ear." Seems like the FBI is still fumbling around with the basics.
Later during the hearing, Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked Wray if investigators knew where all eight bullets fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks ended up after the shooting.
“There is some question about whether or not it was a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear, so it is conceivable, as I sit here right now, I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else,” Wray testified.
Jordan did not follow up with any questions about the shrapnel.
Speaking at the Republican National Convention just days after the assassination attempt, Trump said the bullet “came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life.”
“I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard on my right ear,” the former president described the scene.
Trump’s former White House physician, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), later told a conservative talk show that he examined the wound in the days immediately after the shooting. “It [the bullet] was far enough away from his head that there was no concussive effect from the bullet, and it just took the top of his ear off.”
If that is the FBI's position, we have a problem.
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Even the left-wing fact-checking site Snopes has debunked the rumors that Trump was struck by broken glass.
Immediately following the attempted assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, skepticism over the notion that Trump had actually been hit by a bullet was fueled by anonymously sourced reports that he was "not struck by a bullet, but hit by glass fragments" from a teleprompter that had been hit by a bullet.
Reporters from both Newsmax and Axios reported on a source making this claim, which was then amplified by other outlets including Raw Story. Some went so far as to call the purported disclosure evidence of a "stunt."
There was, however, no evidence to suggest anything other than a bullet caused the wound to Trump's ear, and these early reports to the contrary have largely been walked back.
The assertion that glass, not a bullet, caused the injury is undercut by the fact that photographs show no damage to the teleprompters allegedly hit to produce the broken glass, by a New York Times photograph capturing a bullet passing by Trump's ear, and by the fact that Trump later stated, on Truth Social, that a bullet had, in fact, pierced his ear:
I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin.
Trump's description of his wound matches photographs of his ear after he was hit, prior to being removed from stage.
Why is it that Snopes can figure out that Trump was, indeed, struck by a bullet, but the FBI can't? Is the FBI run by an anti-Trump conspiracy theorist?
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