Donald Trump could have been hit by shrapnel rather than a bullet during his attempted assassination, the director of the FBI has suggested.
Thomas Crooks, 20, tried to assassinate the former president at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on 13 July.
Trump dropped to the floor after a bullet appeared to narrowly miss his head and graze his ear when the gunman opened fire – killing one person and wounding two others.
But at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, FBI director Christopher Wray suggested it was unclear whether he was hit by a bullet or something else.
“There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” he said.
“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.”
The FBI in a statement on Thursday, said it had been ‘consistent and clear that the shooting was an attempted assassination’.
A Trump campaign spokesperson, Jason Miller, called the idea that Trump was not hit by a bullet a ‘conspiracy,’ adding an expletive.
Representative Ronny Jackson, who was formerly Trump’s chief medical advisor, called Wray’s remarks “absolutely irresponsible” on social media.
He said they marked “another politically motivated move by the man that has repeatedly weaponized his office to tear down President Trump,” and added he had seen the wound.
Wray was nominated as FBI director by Trump in August 2017.
The FBI director also told the committee hearing that Crooks had searched for details on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the week leading up to the attempt.
Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, while the then-president was travelling in a motorcade.
Wray said the Google search “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy?”, thought to have been carried out on 6 July, was “significant” in terms of Crooks’s ‘state of mind’.
“That is the same day that it appears he registered” for the Trump rally, scheduled for 13 July, Wray added.
Crooks’s motive remains unknown, Wray said, adding: “A lot of the usual repositories of information have not yielded, anything notable in terms of motive or ideology.”
