The FBI is investigating what it describes as an apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump at his Florida golf club on Sunday. This marks the second apparent attempt on the former president’s life in just two months.
Trump is safe and was not harmed in the incident, his campaign said. Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said during a Sunday news conference that his office was informed at 1:30 p.m. ET of shots fired by the Secret Service, when agents fired at a man who had a rifle in the bushes along the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club.
Trump had been playing golf at the time, moving between holes five and six, a source briefed on the matter told CNN.
A Secret Service agent spotted a rifle barrel with a scope sticking out of the fence of the golf course and “immediately engaged” with the person, Bradshaw said. The agent who spotted the rifle, Bradshaw said, is part of a team that stays a hole or two ahead of Trump on the course. The person was 300 to 500 yards away from Trump, an official said.
The person fled the scene in a car and was spotted by a witness, which ultimately helped law enforcement officials locate the vehicle driving north on I-95 in Martin County, one county to the north of Palm Beach.
“We are able to catch a witness that came to us and said, ‘Hey, I saw the guy running out of the bushes, he jumped into a black Nissan and I took a picture of the vehicle and the tag,’ which was great,” Bradshaw said.
Authorities alerted the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, which detained the person. The witness was able to then identify the man.
David Aronberg, State Attorney for Palm Beach County, Florida, said the suspect said nothing as he was detained.
“He knew enough to stay silent,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Sunday evening. “He did not apparently speak to officers, he was calm. So, it looked like a person who has done this before, not necessarily this crime, but someone who has had repeated interactions with law enforcement.”
The person in custody in connection with the apparent attempted assassination is Ryan Wesley Routh, according to three law enforcement sources. The self-employed affordable housing builder in Hawaii went on social media to weigh in on politics and current events, at times criticizing the former president, and expressed strong support for Ukraine.
Routh traveled to Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor more than two years ago, according to video and images geolocated by CNN to Kyiv’s Independence Square.
Video shows Routh attended a rally at the square in support of Ukrainian troops on May 1, 2022 and visited the same location about six weeks later, where a photo shows him standing beside a Ukraine flag emblazoned with an appeal for international volunteers to support the war effort.
The FBI’s investigation has gone global as officials work to flesh out his background, a law enforcement source told CNN. Some of Routh’s suspected online activity also involved the use of platforms headquartered outside the United States, the source said, which will involve working with international partners to identify everything the FBI possibly can about the detained individual.
Officials said an AK-47-style rifle with a scope; two backpacks that were hung on the fence and had ceramic tile in them; and a GoPro camera were recovered at the scene.
The holes Trump was playing when the incident occurred are on the eastern edge of the golf course.
Trump had no public events on his schedule for Sunday, and his golf game was a last-minute addition to his itinerary, two sources familiar with the matter said.
The apparent assassination attempt at Trump’s golf course in Florida comes two months after an assassination attempt against the former president at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally that sparked scrutiny of the US Secret Service.
“Former President Donald Trump is safe and unharmed following a possible attempted assassination shortly before 2 p.m. Sunday at Trump International Golf Club at West Palm Beach. US Secret Service personnel opened fire on a gunman located near the property line,”
Rafael Barros, the Secret Service special agent in charge of the Miami field office, said in a statement.
Ronald Rowe, acting director of the US Secret Service, is traveling to Florida in the wake of the incident, a law enforcement source familiar with the matter told CNN.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday that his state would conduct its own investigation of the apparent thwarted assassination attempt. And the congressional task force that’s investigating the first attempted assassination of the former president is requesting a briefing with the Secret Service following Sunday’s incident.
