Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Tuesday that it remains unclear what FBI leadership under the Biden administration did to protect President Trump in the weeks and months before the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania — comments that came just hours after Trump publicly accused former FBI Director Christopher Wray of mishandling the investigation.
According to The Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson, Blanche confirmed that “new information” about the shooter had been turned over to the Senate. He described the material as covering “the shooter and about his background, about his history, and that’s stuff that we didn’t know before.”
Trump’s Accusation Against Wray
“Everybody knows the Crooked Joe Biden FBI didn’t do what they should have with respect to the Lunatic who shot me in Butler, PA,” Trump said. “This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed. Dirty Cop Christopher Wray should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt, and certainly for the things he said.”
Trump also said “most of the information” from the Butler investigation “was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone,” a claim The Gateway Pundit characterized as a revelation that Wray had destroyed files.
Blanche: DOJ Doesn’t Punish
A reporter asked Blanche moments later to square Trump’s “Democratic plot” assertion with testimony from FBI Director Kash Patel — delivered the same day — that the shooter had not been communicating with anyone other than his parents, and to say whether the Justice Department was weighing charges against Wray.
Blanche pushed back first on the premise of the question. “So the Department of Justice doesn’t punish, by the way,” he said, before answering that the president’s ire is rooted in a period the attorney general says he personally witnessed.
He told reporters that he was with Trump before and after the attempt on his life, noting that the president was shot, an innocent man was killed, and others were seriously injured. Blanche said the new material was generated in response to Senate inquiries and was produced by the DOJ after being found in the course of the investigation.
On the broader question of the FBI’s posture before the shooting, Blanche said the agency’s leadership decisions were opaque. “It’s not really clear what the leadership of the FBI were doing in the weeks and months ahead of the attempted assassination to protect President Trump,” he said.
He added a pointed comparison: “That’s the same organization that was simultaneously trying to put him in prison till he dies. So, his frustration and concern about what the former director was doing is something that is not new.”
Patel’s Document Review
Blanche credited Patel, who now leads the FBI, with working through the investigation’s voluminous records to determine what may have been missed and to surface findings to the public. He described the effort as a “Herculean” one to go through all the documents and to provide anything that hadn’t previously come forward to the American people.
The attorney general did not say whether the DOJ believed the shooter acted alone, and he did not directly address the reporter’s request to reconcile Trump’s allegation of a Democratic plot with Patel’s testimony about the shooter’s limited communications. He also did not say whether the department was considering charges against Wray, responding instead that the DOJ does not “punish.”
Wray was appointed FBI director during Trump’s first term and led the bureau through the Butler investigation before the current leadership took over. The Butler shooting, in which a bystander was killed and Trump and two others were wounded, remains a subject of congressional scrutiny, with the Senate having sought records from the bureau.
Tuesday’s exchange marked the latest in a series of public statements by the president and his attorney general questioning how the FBI handled the run-up to the shooting. Little of the substance of the new information provided to the Senate has been disclosed publicly so far, beyond Blanche’s characterization of it as previously unknown detail about the shooter’s history.
Source: www.thegatewaypundit.com — https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/todd-blanche-says-its-not-clear-what-biden/