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 his 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 shot.
Wray’s comment sparked fury among Trump and his allies and further fueled conspiracy theories that have flourished on both sides of the political spectrum due to the lack 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 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 — has sparked new tensions between the Republican nominee and the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency, over which he may soon regain control.
Questions persist
Questions about the extent and nature of Trump’s injury began to mount immediately after the attack, as his campaign and law enforcement officials declined to answer questions about his condition or the treatment he received after narrowly escaping 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 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 has to be a bullet,'” he 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.
FBI Details
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.
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 after the shooting, he was evaluated and treated for a “gunshot wound to the right ear.”
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.
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