The president has said that information about the 2024 shooting was “missing, altered, corrupted, or gone” when he returned to office
Published 16 Sep, 2026 19:50
FILE PHOTO: US President Donald Trump. © Global Look Press / CNP / AdMedia
US President Donald Trump has claimed that an FBI probe into his attempted assassination in July 2024 was deliberately mishandled as part of a “Democrat plot” to prevent him from winning a second term. He also referred to “new info” that supposedly appeared in the case, but provided no details.
In 2024, Trump, then the Republican presidential candidate, narrowly escaped death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a 20-year-old man fired shots from a rooftop, grazing Trump’s ear and killing one attendee and injuring two others.
Trump claimed at the time that President Joe Biden and his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, were partly to blame as they allegedly made it more difficult for the Secret Service to protect him, while peddling rhetoric that could have encouraged the shooter.
The would-be assassin, Thomas M. Crooks, was killed by the US Secret Service. An internal review released later that year concluded that the Secret Service made multiple mistakes ahead of the shooting.
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“Everybody knows the Crooked Joe Biden FBI didn’t do what they should have with respect to the Lunatic who shot me in Butler,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday.
He also claimed that “most of the information [on the case] was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone” by the time he took office in January 2025. “This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed,” the president stated, adding that some new information on the case had emerged recently, but provided no details.
Trump also blamed former FBI Director Christopher Wray for mishandling the probe and maintained he “should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt, and certainly for the things he said.”
Wray, who was nominated by Trump himself during his first term in office, stated that his agency did not find any accomplices of the shooter during testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. He also said it was unclear if Trump had been hit directly by a bullet or by shrapnel, provoking sharp criticism from Trump at the time. Wray resigned before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.
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The current FBI director, Kash Patel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that his agency looked into Crooks’ possible connection to any accomplices 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,” he said.
Attorney General Todd Blanche mentioned during the same hearing that new information related to the case had surfaced recently. “It is new information about the shooter and about his background, about his history and that’s stuff that we didn’t know before,” he said while refusing to elaborate.
Trump has been targeted in several assassination attempts. Two months after the July 2024 incident, a pro-Ukraine activist was arrested after being spotted with a rifle near Trump’s golf course in Florida. He was later found guilty of trying to assassinate Trump.
In April 2026, the president and First Lady Melania Trump were rushed from the Washington Hilton after gunfire broke out at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, was later charged with attempting to assassinate the president as well.
