WASHINGTON – Rep. Ronny Jackson said Friday that FBI Director Christopher Wray was “wrong” to question whether former President Donald Trump was struck by “a bullet, shrapnel, or glass” when he was almost assassinated on July 13.
“There is absolutely no evidence that it was anything other than a bullet,” Jackson (R-Texas) declared in a memo posted to his X account.
“Congress should correct the record as confirmed by both the hospital and myself,” he urged. “Director Wray is wrong.”
As Trump’s former physician in the White House, Jackson said he had “continued to monitor his health and well-being” since the shooting at the campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
“The would-be assassin fired multiple rounds from a relatively close distance using a high-powered rifle, with one bullet striking the former President, and now the Republican Nominee for president, in his right ear,” he wrote in the memo.
The congressman made the assessment based off a review of the Butler Memorial Hospital intake records, which treated Trump for a “Gunshot Wound to the Right Ear,” the memo reads, as well as his experience as a Navy doctor who saw combat in the Iraq war.
“I have treated many gunshot wounds in my career,” he said.
Jackson, who served under Trump and former President Barack Obama, had also been at the rally and revealed shortly after that his nephew’s neck was grazed by one of the eight bullets that gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks fired toward the main stage to assassinate Trump.
Father and volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore was killed in the shooting, and two others, James Copenhaver and David Dutch, were critically wounded.
Wray in a Wednesday House Judiciary Committee hearing had said: “With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
Trump tore into Wray on Thursday for raising questions about what projectile hit his ear and drew blood.
“FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress yesterday that he wasn’t sure if I was hit by shrapnel, glass, or a bullet (the FBI never even checked!), but he was sure that Crooked Joe Biden was physically and cognitively ‘uneventful’ – Wrong!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday.
“There was no glass, there was no shrapnel. The hospital called it a ‘bullet wound to the ear,’ and that is what it was,” he added, before dismissing Wray in an aside for knowing “nothing about the terrorists and other criminals pouring into our Country at record levels.”
“No wonder the once storied FBI has lost the confidence of America!” Trump vented.
In an interview with The Post one day after the shooting, the former president said that the Butler doctor who treated him “said he never saw anything like this.”
“He called it a miracle,” the 45th president said. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead.”
The day of the near-assassination, Trump also vividly recounted in another Truth Social post the “whizzing sound” of the bullet coming before the “shots” and then the feeling of “the bullet ripping through the skin.”
Six seconds after Crooks opened fire, Secret Service counter-snipers killed the 20-year-old gunman.
Crooks’ digital records have since revealed he took great interest in President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, immediately before registering to attend the Trump campaign event outside of Pittsburgh.
An “avid shooting hobbyist,” Crooks had searched on a laptop that the FBI investigation tied to him: “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?”
The FBI and reps for Butler Memorial Hospital did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
