On September 15, Ryan Routh (pictured above) lay in wait for former President Donald Trump with a long gun for nearly 12 hours behind a chain link fence at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Before he could get a shot off, a Secret Service agent spotted Routh and opened fire. Routh ran but was captured shortly thereafter by law enforcement officers.
It was the second unsuccessful assassination attempt on Trump in as many months – and Randy Sutton of The Wounded Blue says it was a massive failure on the part of the Secret Service … again.
"How [someone with a weapon] got into the inner perimeter and within rifle range of the president a second time is really concerning. There's no other way to put this other than this was a failure," Sutton tells AFN.
Routh left a note with what police are calling "a witness" months before the attempt, saying he was sorry he failed and offering $150,000 for anyone who would finish the job. Sutton says there was no chance the money – if it even existed – could be passed on to another assassin, but it doesn't really matter.
"The problem is that you have so many people suffering from the Trump Derangement Syndrome that it's like throwing up a red flag in front of a bull," he describes. "This just gives another little incentive for them."
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It's clear to Sutton that the Secret Service still has made no substantive changes to the way it protects former President Trump – and that greatly concerns him. "I pray that Trump makes it November 5th [Election Day]. If someone actually succeeds in in killing President Trump, I don't know what this nation will do," he warns.
Prosecutors have said Routh left behind that note detailing his plans to kill the former president and kept in his car a handwritten list of dates and venues where Trump was to appear. The note describing Routh's plans was placed in a box that he dropped off months earlier at the home of an unidentified person who did not open it until after Routh's arrest, prosecutors said.
Florida or the feds … who's in charge here?
Trump's former attorney general, William Barr, told Fox Digital it was reckless for the Biden Department of Justice to release the letter, adding that it "served no purpose other than to risk inciting further violence." Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and the founder of the private military contractor Blackwater, couldn't agree more.
"It's amazing that they issued the [entire] letter, unredacted … with the bounty amount," Prince said Tuesday morning on American Family Radio. "It's unprecedented, but I guess it speaks to where their concerns are – and it's certainly not the safety of the former president."
He argued, however, that this is "consistent behavior" from the DOJ – and that's why he admits he's glad the state of Florida has opened a parallel investigation into this assassination attempt.
"Because I don't believe the FBI field office in Miami – the same one that raided Mar-a-Lago [Trump's Florida estate] on a bogus documents case – is going to do an honest job of investigating this now-acknowledged assassin," he explained.
In fact, the Republican state attorney general of Florida, Ashley Moody, yesterday challenged the FBI's assertion of control over the investigation. In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Moody suggested federal law enforcement agencies cannot be trusted to provide an impartial investigation.
"Given all the public scrutiny on the FBI, DOJ, and the Secret Service," reads the letter, "one would think that having Florida conduct its own investigation alongside federal agencies would mitigate public concern regarding the credibility and reliability of these institutions and would be welcome by the federal government."
Moody's letter asks Wray to clarify whether the federal government will allow Florida law enforcement to conduct its own, concurrent investigation or deny the state access to evidence and witnesses. She has requested the FBI and the Southern District of Florida respond to her concerns by Friday.
