Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, October 9, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
The unsettling behavior of both the Secret Service and FBI agents who questioned a medical doctor and witness to the attempted election year assassination of former President Donald Trump left him with "grave fears for Trump’s safety."
The New York Post's Miranda Devine interviewed a witness, who was sitting 10 feet from Trump when the gunman opened fire on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, who said the FBI told him Trump wasn't shot, but instead had hit his head on the podium.
Dr. Joseph Meyn, an obstetrician, "was sitting a few rows in front of (Corey) Comperatore, and about 10 feet from Trump, when the bullets started flying. He helped carry Comperatore’s body out of the bleachers and was among about three dozen witnesses detained by the Secret Service until past midnight," Devine reported on Sunday.
"Meyn, 51, had a perfect view of the hit on Trump, and recorded reams of video on his phone as the shots rang out. But the peculiar attitude of the Secret Service and FBI agents who questioned him that night has given him grave fears for Trump’s safety."
Meyn told Devine that a Secret Service agent who was leading him into the witness area took a call from what Meyn 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.
Meyn was then questioned by the FBI and said that an agent insisted Trump had not been shot.
“Yes, he was,” Meyn told the agent. “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.’ ”
Meyn said he heard another agent in the background say, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
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In the witness area later in the evening, Meyn said he noticed a “schism” develop between the FBI and Secret Service agents as he overheard parts of FBI phone conversations.
“It was like, ‘Uh-oh, clearly this is a problem … This is a massive screwup. This is all on the Secret Service … We’re just here to process the crime scene,’ ” Meyn said.
Despite a statement from Trump’s doctor saying his ear injury was caused by a bullet, and a New York Times video reconstruction of the scene showing that he had been struck by a bullet, FBI Director Chris Wray chose to cast doubt on that fact in congressional testimony two weeks later.
“There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray said, infuriating Trump, and forcing the FBI to issue a statement later confirming that it was indeed a bullet that had struck the former president’s ear.
Devine noted:
"The FBI and Secret Service denial of reality allowed left-leaning media to downplay the momentous news that Trump had nearly been assassinated and let a conspiracy theory take root on the left that the former president had staged the attack to boost his poll numbers.
"Either way, it was despicable and calls into question the motivations of the people entrusted to protect Trump in the remaining month of this vicious presidential campaign."
