“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 FBI said in a statement Friday.
Former president Donald Trump was shot in the ear by a bullet or a bullet fragment during the assassination attempt at one of his campaign rallies, the FBI said Friday, responding to an outcry sparked when FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Wednesday that the former president and Republican nominee was wounded by either a bullet or shrapnel.
For nearly two weeks, there had been speculation about whether Trump had been grazed by a bullet (or fragments of one) or nicked by other debris during his July 13 campaign rally in which 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at Trump and into the crowd in Butler, Pa. Wray maintained in congressional testimony Wednesday that investigators hadn’t reached a definitive conclusion while Trump and his Republican allies insisted he had been shot.
The FBI on Friday said the Republican presidential nominee was hit with a bullet.
“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.
A analysis of photos and videos of the shooting found that former president Trump’s injury appears to be consistent with the attributes of a graze wound from a bullet and not that of bullet fragments, according to two trauma surgeons, Babak Sarani, director of trauma and acute care surgery at George Washington University Hospital, and Joseph Sakran, director of emergency general surgery at Johns Hopkins.
