A witness of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, raised the alarm over the Secret Service and FBI’s handling of the incident and cast doubts on their ability to protect the former president after observing strange behavior from agents at the scene.
New York Post contributor Miranda Devine in an op-ed detailed the scene of Trump’s triumphant return to butler on Oct. 5, and included a curious account by Dr. Joseph Meyn, who was sitting a few rows in front of retired firefighter Corey Comperatore when he was shot and killed during the attempt on Trump’s life and who witnessed Trump’s ear getting shot.
Meyn also helped carry Comperatore’s body out of the bleachers and was one of several dozen witnesses who was questioned by the Secret Service and FBI over the incident.
Donald Trump and his supporters make a triumphant return to the scene of his first assassination attempt https://t.co/MOQVd5AnyZ pic.twitter.com/3caqFbLK1h
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) October 7, 2024
But Meyn said he was deeply disturbed by the Secret Service and FBI’s initial response to the assassination attempt, claiming they initially denied he was even shot and insisted his bleeding face was due to hitting his head on the podium while ducking to avoid the gunfire.
From Devine’s piece:
First, he says, a Secret Service agent who was leading him into the witness area took a call from what he assumed was her supervisor in which she downplayed the assassination attempt, saying only that “shots were fired,” there were “casualties in the crowd” and the “president was unharmed.”
Meyn could hear the voice on the other end ask, “The president was unharmed?,” so he leaned over toward the phone and said, “No, he was shot with a bullet in the right ear.”
The annoyed agent “moved the phone to her left ear and gave me a look,” he said.
Next, Meyn was questioned by the FBI and recalls that he got into a ridiculous debate with an agent who insisted Trump had not been shot.
“Yes, he was,” said Meyn. “He turned his head and the bullet clipped the very top of his right ear. I saw some blood and tissue squirt out into the ether.”
The agent told him, “Stop. President Trump wasn’t hit … You don’t understand that that podium is armored. When the Secret Service tackled President Trump [to protect him after the shots], he hit his head on the podium.”
According to Meyn, “I said, ‘The problem is I saw it. I have a photographic memory. This is what I saw, and I have it on video.’”
He says he heard another agent in the background say, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Meyn said he later “noticed a ‘schism’ develop between the FBI and Secret Service agents at the scene, as he overheard snatches of FBI phone conversations,” catching them admitting that “clearly this is a problem…This is a massive screwup.”
Soon after the shooting, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Trump’s injury was likely due to “shrapnel” that struck his ear, which allowed the mainstream media to argue that the former president wasn’t the target of an assassination attempt.
“There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray said, which prompted Trump himself to excoriate Wray on X, and later led to the FBI issuing a statement backtracking Wray’s remark and confirming Trump was indeed struck by a bullet.
Devine concluded that the messaging snafu by the FBI “was despicable and calls into question the motivations of the people entrusted to protect Trump in the remaining month of this vicious presidential campaign.”
Indeed, just weeks after the Secret Service failed to stop a would-be assassin from targeting Trump in Butler on July 13, another armed leftist targeting Trump was caught fleeing after breaching the security perimeter of his golf course in Palm Beach, Florida.
The two assassination attempts even prompted former First Lady Melania Trump to call into question the Secret Service’s leadership and ability to protect her husband.
“I think there is some holes, something is going on at the top level or it was when that shooting happened,” she told Fox News on Sunday. “I know some people changed the positions but let’s hope that will never happen again.”