WASHINGTON — Nearly two weeks after Donald Trump's near assassination, the FBI confirmed Friday that it was indeed a bullet that struck the former president's ear, moving to clear up conflicting accounts about what caused his injuries after a gunman opened fire at a Pennsylvania rally.
"What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject's rifle," the agency said in a statement.
The FBI statement marked the most definitive law enforcement account of Trump's injuries and followed ambiguous comments earlier in the week from Director Christopher Wray that appeared to cast doubt on whether Trump had been hit by a bullet.
Wray's comment drew fury from Trump and his allies and further stoked conspiracy theories that have flourished on both sides of the political aisle amid a lack of information following the July 13 attack.
Until now, federal law enforcement agents involved in the investigation, including the FBI and Secret Service, had repeatedly refused to provide information about what caused Trump's injuries. Trump's campaign has also declined to release medical records from the hospital where he was first treated or to make the doctors there available for questions.
Updates have instead come either from Trump himself or from Trump's former White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, a staunch ally who now represents Texas in Congress. Though Jackson has been treating Trump since the night of the attack, he has come 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 — along with the ire he and some supporters have directed at the bureau in the shooting's aftermath — has raised fresh tension between the Republican nominee and the nation's premier federal law enforcement agency, which he could soon exert control over again.
Questions persist
Questions about the extent and nature of Trump's wound began immediately after the attack, as his campaign and law enforcement officials declined to answer questions about his condition or the treatment he received after he narrowly escaped an attempted assassination by a gunman with a high-powered rifle.
Those questions have persisted despite photos showing the trace of a projectile speeding past Trump's head, photographs that show Trump's teleprompter glass intact after the shooting, and the account Trump himself gave in a Truth Social post within hours of the shooting saying he had been "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," he wrote.
Days later, in a speech accepting the nomination 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 whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard, on my right ear. I said to myself, 'Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet,'" he said.
But the first medical account of Trump's condition didn't come until a full week after the shooting, when Jackson released his first letter last Saturday evening. In that letter, he said the bullet that struck Trump had "produced a 2-cm-wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear." He also revealed that Trump had received a CT scan at the hospital.
But federal law enforcement involved in the investigation, including the FBI and Secret Service, had declined to confirm that account. And Wray's testimony offered apparently conflicting answers on the issue.
"There's some question about whether or not it's a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear," Wray testified, before he seemed to suggest it was indeed a bullet.
"I don't know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else," he said.
FBI clarification
The following day, the FBI sought to clarify matters with a statement affirming that the shooting was an "attempted assassination of former President Trump which resulted in his injury, as well as the death of a heroic father and the injuries of several other victims." The FBI also said Thursday that its Shooting Reconstruction Team continues to examine bullet fragments and other evidence from 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 Trump's ear was bloodied by anything other than a bullet was reckless.
In his letter Friday, Jackson insisted "there is absolutely no evidence" Trump was struck by anything other than a bullet and said it was "wrong and inappropriate to suggest anything else."
He wrote that at Butler Memorial Hospital, where the GOP nominee was rushed after the shooting, he was evaluated and treated for a "Gunshot Wound to the Right Ear."
The FBI declined to comment on the Jackson letters.
Asked if the campaign would release those hospital records or allow the doctors who treated him there to speak, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung blasted the media for asking.
