In the early afternoon on Sunday, a suspected gunman got within several hundred yards of former President Donald Trump at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. The suspect was shot at by a Secret Service agent, fled the scene in a black SUV, and was quickly apprehended by police. Over the next 24 hours, Trump and his allies unleashed a deluge of blame against Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats for what the FBI said was being investigated as an assassination attempt against Trump, the second in just over two months.

As of Monday, the motive of the suspect, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, remained unclear. His social media history indicated that he voted for Trump in 2016 but turned against him later. Routh was critical of Trump’s Putin-friendly policy on Ukraine; in 2022, he’d gone on an unsuccessful quest to help recruit foreign fighters to join the battle against the Kremlin’s invasion. He also donated to a Democratic PAC in the 2020 election cycle. On Monday, authorities announced two federal gun charges against Routh, with additional charges possibly to come.

Whatever Routh’s motive may have been for allegedly targeting Trump with an AK-47-style rifle, law enforcement authorities have cited no evidence that his actions were connected to or caused by the rhetoric of top Democrats, who have long emphasized the rejection of political violence. But that has not stopped Trump and his allies from moving immediately to exploit the disturbing near-miss in Florida for political gain—just as they did after a gunman wounded Trump in a horrific attack at his July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Shortly after the news broke about the danger on Sunday, the Trump campaign sent out an email to supporters with a statement from Trump linking to his fundraising page and saying he was safe and well. “But there are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us,” the Republican presidential candidate said in the statement. “I will Never Surrender!”

On Monday morning, Trump declared in an interview with Fox News Digital that Routh’s alleged actions were caused by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his 2024 opponent for the White House.

“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said, providing no evidence to support that claim. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country—both from the inside and out.” Trump added that Biden and Harris are “the enemy from within,” according to Fox News Digital. “They are the real threat.”

Biden and Harris both put out statements on Sunday expressing relief that Trump was unharmed and denouncing political violence. Biden also said that he had directed his team “to continue to ensure” adequate protection for Trump from the Secret Service.

Trump added to his partisan blame with a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday: “The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”

Top surrogates piled on the partisan attack. Trump’s son, Donald Jr., railed on social media about telling “my 5 young children about [a] radical leftist trying to kill their grandfather.”

“The incitement to hatred and violence against President Trump by the media and leading Democrats needs to stop,” posted billionaire supporter Elon Musk, in response to Don Jr.’s comments.

Longtime Trump advisor and right-wing media commentator Steve Cortes called his former boss “the most persecuted public figure in American history” and said that the danger to Trump’s life both in Pennsylvania and Florida was caused to a great extent by “the corporate media” disparaging the ex-president.

The deluge of partisan messaging adds a whole new layer to an ongoing effort to cast unfounded blame for violence on Biden, Harris and the Democrats. As I’ve been documenting in the two-plus months since the Trump shooting in Pennsylvania, the ex-president and his allies have carried out a sustained, coordinated effort to promote baseless conspiracy theories and smear Trump’s political opponents with such blame. Participants have included Trump’s running mate, JD Vance; his sons, Don Jr. and Eric Trump; his wife, Melania Trump; and a multitude of Republican congressional members, including Cory Mills, Eli Crane, Ryan Zinke, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Mike Collins.

This propaganda effort, as I first reported in early September, now also involves backers of Project 2025.

During the presidential debate on ABC News on Sept. 10, watched by 67 million people, Trump reiterated baseless blame for the shooting at his rally in Butler.  “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he inveighed, pointing at Harris. “They talk about democracy, I’m a threat to democracy—they’re the threat to democracy.”

These efforts may be intended in part to distract from Trump’s own incitement of violence. He has used the tactics of stochastic terrorism, as national security experts call the method, for many years. This has continued apace with his incessant demagoguery on the campaign trail against migrant “invaders.” Most recently that has included the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio—falsely smeared by Trump, Vance, and their allies for supposedly stealing and eating other residents’ pets. Schools and government offices in Springfield have since been under siege with bomb scares and other threats of violence.

Several threat assessment and law enforcement leaders have told me since this summer that Trump’s incitement is a top concern when it comes to potential political violence during the election season. According to these sources, the rhetoric from Trump and his allies about the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania—and now with the apparent close call in Florida—is deepening that danger.

The FBI is investigating what officials believe is another attempted assassination of former President Trump, and a “potential suspect” is in custody.

Shots were fired near Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the president was golfing, at about 1:30 p.m. The Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said in a statement Sunday afternoon that Trump “is safe following gunshots in his vicinity.”

Secret Service personnel who were walking ahead of Trump on the golf course opened fire after seeing a rifle barrel sticking out of a fence, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told reporters Sunday afternoon. The suspect—who Bradshaw said was 300 to 500 yards from Trump, around the length of three to four football fields—fled on foot before getting in a car, Bradshaw said. As of Sunday afternoon, it was unclear whether the suspect had fired any shots back at the Secret Service. A witness provided a photo and details of the license plate, which allowed the Martin County Sheriff’s office to identify the vehicle and detain the suspect soon after on the I-95 freeway, authorities said.

Law enforcement found an AK-47 assault rifle with a scope—a device used to improve aim—two backpacks, and a GoPro camera in the shrubbery where the victim fled from. “With a rifle and a scope like that,” Bradshaw said, the shooter was “not a long distance” from the former president.

A male is in custody, Bradshaw said. The FBI is leading the federal investigation, according to Jeffrey Veltri, special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, who added that the public should avoid the area around the golf course and contact officials if they have information on the shooting.

The news marks a stunning development, coming just about two months after the shooting that killed a spectator and injured Trump and two others at a Pennsylvania rally. That shooting remains the subject of a federal investigation, and the Secret Service has been criticized for the massive security failures that allowed it to unfold. On Sunday, though, officials lauded their response: “The Secret Service did exactly what they should have done,” Bradshaw said. “They provided exactly what the protection should have been and their agent did a fantastic job.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, Trump seemed to be in good spirits. “Nothing will slow me down,” he wrote in a fundraising email just hours later. “I will NEVER SURRENDER!”

In a post on X, Vice President Kamala Harris said she was briefed on the incident, adding, “I am glad he is safe. Violence has no place in America.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

The FBI is investigating what officials believe is another attempted assassination of former President Trump, and a “potential suspect” is in custody.

Shots were fired near Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the president was golfing, at about 1:30 p.m. The Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said in a statement Sunday afternoon that Trump “is safe following gunshots in his vicinity.”

Secret Service personnel who were walking ahead of Trump on the golf course opened fire after seeing a rifle barrel sticking out of a fence, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told reporters Sunday afternoon. The suspect—who Bradshaw said was 300 to 500 yards from Trump, around the length of three to four football fields—fled on foot before getting in a car, Bradshaw said. As of Sunday afternoon, it was unclear whether the suspect had fired any shots back at the Secret Service. A witness provided a photo and details of the license plate, which allowed the Martin County Sheriff’s office to identify the vehicle and detain the suspect soon after on the I-95 freeway, authorities said.

Law enforcement found an AK-47 assault rifle with a scope—a device used to improve aim—two backpacks, and a GoPro camera in the shrubbery where the victim fled from. “With a rifle and a scope like that,” Bradshaw said, the shooter was “not a long distance” from the former president.

A male is in custody, Bradshaw said. The FBI is leading the federal investigation, according to Jeffrey Veltri, special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, who added that the public should avoid the area around the golf course and contact officials if they have information on the shooting.

The news marks a stunning development, coming just about two months after the shooting that killed a spectator and injured Trump and two others at a Pennsylvania rally. That shooting remains the subject of a federal investigation, and the Secret Service has been criticized for the massive security failures that allowed it to unfold. On Sunday, though, officials lauded their response: “The Secret Service did exactly what they should have done,” Bradshaw said. “They provided exactly what the protection should have been and their agent did a fantastic job.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, Trump seemed to be in good spirits. “Nothing will slow me down,” he wrote in a fundraising email just hours later. “I will NEVER SURRENDER!”

In a post on X, Vice President Kamala Harris said she was briefed on the incident, adding, “I am glad he is safe. Violence has no place in America.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Melania Trump broke her months-long silence on the assassination attempt against her husband with a video that amplified unproven conspiracy theories about the July shooting before swiftly turning to promote her forthcoming memoir.

The video—which, in my opinion, resembles a deep fake overlaid with a Kris Jenner filter— was posted to X on Tuesday morning, and featured Melania standing before a black backdrop while ominous music plays in the background. “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she says, addressing the camera. “Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?”

“There is definitely more to the story,” she adds, “and we need to uncover the truth.” A visual of the cover of her eponymous book then flashes on the screen, along with a message encouraging followers to order the book at her website. It’s unclear what, if any, connection the memoir, slated for release in early October according to the publisher, will have to her husband’s shooting. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions.

The rare video appearance makes Melania now one of many people in Trump’s orbit who has conspiratorially suggested that nefarious forces enabled the shooting. As my colleague Mark Follman has covered, two of Trump’s sons, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and Republicans in Congress have cast blame on Democrats for the shooting—all without evidence. (As Mark reported, the motive of the shooter—who was a registered Republican—remains unknown.) Trump himself has also taken part in the narrative, telling television psychologist Dr. Phil in a late August interview, “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety.”

“They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump added in that interview. “They would say that, that was [a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”

Experts warn that such unfounded allegations can give rise to retaliatory violence from Trump-loving extremists.

This continuing vilification adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources have told me is a paramount risk headed toward the election: potential bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, including his message that he is supposedly the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by his political opponents. That core Trump narrative has now been supercharged by the assassination attempt, in which three attendees also were shot, one fatally.

As Melania mentions in her video, questions do remain about the catastrophic security failures that allowed the shooter to scale a roof without law enforcement intervening sooner. But those questions are the subjects of ongoing federal investigations—which will not be led or solved by Melania or anyone else in MAGA-world.

Melania Trump broke her months-long silence on the assassination attempt against her husband with a video that amplified unproven conspiracy theories about the July shooting before swiftly turning to promote her forthcoming memoir.

The video—which, in my opinion, resembles a deep fake overlaid with a Kris Jenner filter— was posted to X on Tuesday morning, and featured Melania standing before a black backdrop while ominous music plays in the background. “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she says, addressing the camera. “Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?”

“There is definitely more to the story,” she adds, “and we need to uncover the truth.” A visual of the cover of her eponymous book then flashes on the screen, along with a message encouraging followers to order the book at her website. It’s unclear what, if any, connection the memoir, slated for release in early October according to the publisher, will have to her husband’s shooting. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions.

The rare video appearance makes Melania now one of many people in Trump’s orbit who has conspiratorially suggested that nefarious forces enabled the shooting. As my colleague Mark Follman has covered, two of Trump’s sons, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and Republicans in Congress have cast blame on Democrats for the shooting—all without evidence. (As Mark reported, the motive of the shooter—who was a registered Republican—remains unknown.) Trump himself has also taken part in the narrative, telling television psychologist Dr. Phil in a late August interview, “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety.”

“They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump added in that interview. “They would say that, that was [a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”

Experts warn that such unfounded allegations can give rise to retaliatory violence from Trump-loving extremists.

This continuing vilification adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources have told me is a paramount risk headed toward the election: potential bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, including his message that he is supposedly the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by his political opponents. That core Trump narrative has now been supercharged by the assassination attempt, in which three attendees also were shot, one fatally.

As Melania mentions in her video, questions do remain about the catastrophic security failures that allowed the shooter to scale a roof without law enforcement intervening sooner. But those questions are the subjects of ongoing federal investigations—which will not be led or solved by Melania or anyone else in MAGA-world.

Enlarge / A man helps a boy look at a handgun during the National Rifle Association's Annual Meetings & Exhibits at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis on April 16, 2023. (credit: Getty | Jeremy Hogan)

Gun-owning parents who teach their kids how to responsibly handle and shoot a gun are less likely to store those deadly weapons safely, according to a survey-based study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics.

The study, conducted by gun violence researchers at Rutgers University, analyzed survey responses from 870 gun-owning parents. Of those, the parents who responded that they demonstrated proper handling to their child or teen, had their kid practice safe handling under supervision, and/or taught their kid how to shoot a firearm were more likely than other gun-owning parents to keep at least one gun unsecured—that is, unlocked and loaded. In fact, each of the three responses carried at least double the odds of the parent having an unlocked, loaded gun around, the study found.

The survey responses may seem like a paradox for parents who value safe and responsible gun handling. Previous studies have suggested that safe storage of firearms can reduce the risk of injuries and deaths among children and teens. A 2005 JAMA study, for instance, found lower risks of firearm injuries among children and teens when parents securely store their firearms—meaning they kept them locked, unloaded, and stored separately from locked ammunition. And as of 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death among children and teens in the US.

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In the aftermath of the bloodshed on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, state authorities arrested Colin Gray, whose 14-year-old son, Colt Gray, allegedly shot four people to death and injured nine others before surrendering to police. The father is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, eight counts of cruelty to children—and, most significantly, two counts of second-degree murder.

The murder charges are unprecedented, the most severe ever filed against the parent of a school shooter. Late Thursday, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said at a news conference that the charges against Colin Gray are “directly connected with the actions of his son” and that the father “knowingly allowed him to possess the weapon.”

Authorities have not provided further details about evidence they may have, but according to news reports, Colin Gray owned the type of AR-15 that his son allegedly used in the attack. And Colt Gray had been “begging for months” for mental health help but had received none, according to an aunt of his who spoke to the Washington Post. (Colt Gray has been charged with four counts of murder and will be tried as an adult, authorities said.)

For more than a decade, I’ve studied and reported on the American epidemic of mass shootings. Over the past several years, and particularly since early 2024, a dramatic shift has taken shape: a reckoning for the parents of school shooters. Today, with more than 400 million guns and a lack of political will to regulate them more effectively nationwide, it may be that America has begun to find another route—a legal end-run of sorts—to bring accountability for these events of catastrophic gun violence.

The arrest of the school shooter’s father in Georgia comes just seven months after James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of a 15-year-old school shooter in Michigan, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter—also a first. What is publicly alleged so far about the role of Colin Gray appears to echo the case of the Crumbleys, who were found to have ignored their son’s mental health crisis and supplied him with the gun he used to commit his attack at Oxford High School, where four died and seven were injured.

It is a near certainty that in the days and weeks ahead, more details will emerge about warning signs given off by the school shooter in Georgia, one of 20 states now requiring plans for violence prevention in public schools. School shootings are almost always preceded by such warning signs. Significant questions also loom about what may have been done regarding concerns about Colt Gray by law enforcement or the school district, after anonymous tips about threats posted online put him on the radar of the FBI and local authorities in 2023.

Another parental role—starkly different—came into public view this spring, when we published my two-year investigation, “Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother,” in Mother Jones and aired a companion audio investigation on our radio show Reveal. These chronicle the experience of Chin Rodger, whose son Elliot Rodger committed mass murder in the California college town of Isla Vista in 2014. Chin Rodger hadn’t been able to recognize her deeply troubled son’s suicidal and homicidal warning behaviors, but she had gone to great lengths to get him help and care before his attack. Years later she began working with violence prevention experts at the FBI and beyond, sharing myriad details about her son’s life with them—and eventually with the public—in hopes of raising awareness about warning signs and helping avert future violence.

As I wrote in the story: “The public rarely hears from parents of mass shooters apart from brief statements of sorrow in the aftermath. The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included. But that theme no longer holds, especially in light of a recent tragedy that could remake the legal landscape.”

There I was referring to the new criminal precedent established with the Crumbleys—one with the potential to expand, it now appears, with the case in Georgia. The recurring mass murder of school kids and their teachers drives intense public calls for finding culpability among parents (and others), which may well be warranted in some cases. But this nascent trend of criminalizing parents is not without possible pitfalls, including, legal experts have said, for mothers and fathers of minority children exposed disproportionately to gun violence.

Another notable development in the past several years has been a trend of civil liability for gun manufacturers who market their AR-15s and other firearms aggressively to America’s youth. In early 2022, Remington, the company that made the AR-15 used in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, agreed to a landmark $73 million civil settlement with victims’ families. In late 2022, the family of a 10-year-old victim in Uvalde, Texas, filed suit against Daniel Defense, the maker of the AR-15 used in the massacre at Robb Elementary School, accusing the company of using militaristic marketing appeals to target “young male consumers.”

The devastation in Georgia this week is far from the first to involve a shockingly young perpetrator. The shooter at Oxford High School in 2021 was only one year older, just 15 at the time. Other cases going back in time, documented in our mass shootings database and in my book on prevention, Trigger Points, have involved shooters as young as 13 and 11 years old.

In January 2023, a 6-year-old child brought a pistol to school in Virginia and shot his first grade teacher—a case in which the mother was later imprisoned for gun-related federal crimes. (The child used the mother’s unsecured firearm; her prosecution involved drug use and lying related to the gun purchase.)

What happened in Georgia this week serves as a particularly stark reminder: In America, a teenager can easily get his hands on a military-grade rifle and use it to gun down his classmates and teachers. Why we have this problem—and tens of millions of AR-15s in civilian hands—is complicated and arises from a recent history that many Americans know relatively little about.

Another reminder about this problem worth repeating is that, despite popular opinion, it is not an unsolvable one. Now, deterrence for gun-owning parents may be a growing part of a broader solution.

Just hours after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, high-profile allies of the ex-president began promoting unfounded conspiracy theories and blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats, without evidence, for causing the horrific attack. Trump and his surrogates have continued nonstop ever since with this coordinated messaging, which security experts have told me could provoke retaliatory violence from pro-Trump extremists. In late August, backers of Project 2025 joined the effort pushing this dangerous propaganda.

On Aug. 29, podcast host Monica Crowley interviewed Trump and proposed without evidence that he may have been targeted for murder from within the Biden administration.

“The more we see what happened that day, the more suspicious it all looks,” said Crowley, a former Trump administration spokesperson and a credited contributor on the Project 2025 policy tome detailing a hard-right agenda for a second Trump presidency. “Does it look increasingly to you like this was a suspicious—maybe even inside job?”

“Well, it’s strange,” Trump replied. Then he speculated about the deceased gunman’s father hiring “the most expensive lawyer” and suggested a partisan conspiracy involving former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann and Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. Weissmann quickly denounced Trump’s comments as false on social media. A spokesperson for Elias Law Group told me that no one from the firm has had any involvement in any aspect of the case.

Trump further claimed in the podcast interview, first reported by Media Matters for America, that the FBI had failed to gather evidence from the gunman’s cellphone. That’s untrue: FBI Director Christopher Wray and other FBI officials have spoken publicly about the bureau’s extensive investigation into the gunman’s background and activity, including his various digital communications.

Trump and Crowley then riffed about the JFK assassination, with Crowley reiterating the baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Trump: “You were shot five or six weeks ago, and the imperial media, the regime, they’ve all buried it. They don’t want anybody talking about it, which also lends credence to this idea that this is very suspicious and could have been an inside job.”

“Yeah, true,” Trump interjected. “They don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Tells you bad things,” Trump said, starting to draw a connection with the broader conspiracy theory at the core of his campaign.

“It raises big suspicions,” Crowley agreed.

“Well they didn’t want to talk about the election of 2020 either,” Trump said. “They just don’t want to talk about it because they know they’re guilty as hell. And the only way you can stop it—it’s amazing. People that want to have a fair election are indicted. The people that cheated on the election are allowed to keep cheating.”

Three days prior, on Aug. 26, the Heritage Foundation—home of Project 2025—hosted the “J 13 Forum,” a faux congressional hearing on the assassination attempt. Billed as an “independent” investigation, it was led by Reps. Cory Mills of Florida and Eli Crane of Arizona and framed as a necessary circumvention of ongoing federal investigations, including a bipartisan congressional task force on the shooting convened by Republican Speaker Mike Johnson. In his opening remarks, Mills stated that he and his MAGA colleagues from the House were certain to uncover not just “criminal gross negligence” but “purposeful intent” attributable to the Biden administration.

Participants in the testimony-style interviews included former Secret Service agent and right-wing media personality Dan Bongino, and former Blackwater CEO and Trump political operative Erik Prince. Attacks on DEI policy and its alleged role in the catastrophic security failure on July 13 were a focal point, also teed up by Mills from the outset. The hearing at Heritage, he said, “is a message to all of Congress, that if we are not selecting people based on meritocracy, that independent investigations such as this will continue to move forward.”

Project 2025 includes detailed plans to purge the US government of DEI policies. Midway through the hearing, Bongino went off on DEI as having supposedly led to unqualified agents working for the Secret Service. Citing unnamed whistleblower sources, he claimed that deficient personnel included trainees who had failed shooting tests and had filed “nuisance” employment complaints—and who were then given high-stakes jobs. “Many are out on protective assignments now,” Bongino said, without providing any evidence to support his claims.

“So what you’re saying is that DEI plays a major role, not meritocracy with regards to the current culture,” Mills said.

“No, the major role,” Bongino emphasized. “The Secret Service right now is dominated by DEI.”

Mills replied: “I think everyone’s heard me say before, ‘DEI equals DIE.’”

Project 2025 also calls for the mission of the Secret Service to be narrowed to protective operations only, and to have all of its criminal financial investigations moved under other law enforcement agencies—an argument Bongino also made in his remarks. Agents should be able to focus on protective work, Bongino said, “without running out cheap $20 counterfeit notes at Seven Eleven on a Friday night while the president is getting shot in the head.”

At the closing, Mills reiterated his takeaways, including on federal hiring policy. “Again, I think that we’re understanding that we’ve investigated the culture of the Secret Service and what needs to change, and why DEI is not healthy for our military, for our security services or otherwise.”

In his own closing remarks, Rep. Crane thanked the “witnesses” for participating, including a SWAT operator who had offered what he described as “secondhand” information about some of the tactical failures on July 13. “Any time you’re in law enforcement and you take the risk to come and testify before Congress,” Crane said to the small audience in the Heritage Foundation conference room, “it takes a lot of courage.”

Just hours after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, high-profile allies of the ex-president began promoting unfounded conspiracy theories and blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats, without evidence, for causing the horrific attack. Trump and his surrogates have continued nonstop ever since with this coordinated messaging, which security experts have told me could provoke retaliatory violence from pro-Trump extremists. In late August, backers of Project 2025 joined the effort pushing this dangerous propaganda.

On Aug. 29, podcast host Monica Crowley interviewed Trump and proposed without evidence that he may have been targeted for murder from within the Biden administration.

“The more we see what happened that day, the more suspicious it all looks,” said Crowley, a former Trump administration spokesperson and a credited contributor on the Project 2025 policy tome detailing a hard-right agenda for a second Trump presidency. “Does it look increasingly to you like this was a suspicious—maybe even inside job?”

“Well, it’s strange,” Trump replied. Then he speculated about the deceased gunman’s father hiring “the most expensive lawyer” and suggested a partisan conspiracy involving former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann and Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. Weissmann quickly denounced Trump’s comments as false on social media. A spokesperson for Elias Law Group told me that no one from the firm has had any involvement in any aspect of the case.

Trump further claimed in the podcast interview, first reported by Media Matters for America, that the FBI had failed to gather evidence from the gunman’s cellphone. That’s untrue: FBI Director Christopher Wray and other FBI officials have spoken publicly about the bureau’s extensive investigation into the gunman’s background and activity, including his various digital communications.

Trump and Crowley then riffed about the JFK assassination, with Crowley reiterating the baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Trump: “You were shot five or six weeks ago, and the imperial media, the regime, they’ve all buried it. They don’t want anybody talking about it, which also lends credence to this idea that this is very suspicious and could have been an inside job.”

“Yeah, true,” Trump interjected. “They don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Tells you bad things,” Trump said, starting to draw a connection with the broader conspiracy theory at the core of his campaign.

“It raises big suspicions,” Crowley agreed.

“Well they didn’t want to talk about the election of 2020 either,” Trump said. “They just don’t want to talk about it because they know they’re guilty as hell. And the only way you can stop it—it’s amazing. People that want to have a fair election are indicted. The people that cheated on the election are allowed to keep cheating.”

Three days prior, on Aug. 26, the Heritage Foundation—home of Project 2025—hosted the “J 13 Forum,” a faux congressional hearing on the assassination attempt. Billed as an “independent” investigation, it was led by Reps. Cory Mills of Florida and Eli Crane of Arizona and framed as a necessary circumvention of ongoing federal investigations, including a bipartisan congressional task force on the shooting convened by Republican Speaker Mike Johnson. In his opening remarks, Mills stated that he and his MAGA colleagues from the House were certain to uncover not just “criminal gross negligence” but “purposeful intent” attributable to the Biden administration.

Participants in the testimony-style interviews included former Secret Service agent and right-wing media personality Dan Bongino, and former Blackwater CEO and Trump political operative Erik Prince. Attacks on DEI policy and its alleged role in the catastrophic security failure on July 13 were a focal point, also teed up by Mills from the outset. The hearing at Heritage, he said, “is a message to all of Congress, that if we are not selecting people based on meritocracy, that independent investigations such as this will continue to move forward.”

Project 2025 includes detailed plans to purge the US government of DEI policies. Midway through the hearing, Bongino went off on DEI as having supposedly led to unqualified agents working for the Secret Service. Citing unnamed whistleblower sources, he claimed that deficient personnel included trainees who had failed shooting tests and had filed “nuisance” employment complaints—and who were then given high-stakes jobs. “Many are out on protective assignments now,” Bongino said, without providing any evidence to support his claims.

“So what you’re saying is that DEI plays a major role, not meritocracy with regards to the current culture,” Mills said.

“No, the major role,” Bongino emphasized. “The Secret Service right now is dominated by DEI.”

Mills replied: “I think everyone’s heard me say before, ‘DEI equals DIE.’”

Project 2025 also calls for the mission of the Secret Service to be narrowed to protective operations only, and to have all of its criminal financial investigations moved under other law enforcement agencies—an argument Bongino also made in his remarks. Agents should be able to focus on protective work, Bongino said, “without running out cheap $20 counterfeit notes at Seven Eleven on a Friday night while the president is getting shot in the head.”

At the closing, Mills reiterated his takeaways, including on federal hiring policy. “Again, I think that we’re understanding that we’ve investigated the culture of the Secret Service and what needs to change, and why DEI is not healthy for our military, for our security services or otherwise.”

In his own closing remarks, Rep. Crane thanked the “witnesses” for participating, including a SWAT operator who had offered what he described as “secondhand” information about some of the tactical failures on July 13. “Any time you’re in law enforcement and you take the risk to come and testify before Congress,” Crane said to the small audience in the Heritage Foundation conference room, “it takes a lot of courage.”

Ever since the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump, the former president and his allies have promoted unfounded conspiracy theories and blamed Democrats directly for the violence. The effort appears highly coordinated: From JD Vance to Trump’s sons and MAGA Republicans in Congress, many have used the same rhetoric to declare that Trump’s political opponents sought to have him murdered at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. No one has furnished any evidence to support that claim. And while Trump himself was relatively quiet in this regard during the initial aftermath, he has since been pouring fuel on the fire, starting with a campaign speech on Aug. 5 in Atlanta, where Vance introduced him by emphasizing that Trump’s opponents had “even tried to kill him.”

Trump took the narrative to the next level in a softball interview with TV host Dr. Phil that aired this week. The first quarter of the hour-long conversation focused on Trump’s brush with death as a divine miracle, which was a major theme of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee just days after the attack. “It has to be God,” Trump said to Dr. Phil about surviving the shooting. He went on to claim that the assassination attempt could’ve ended up like the 2017 massacre on the Las Vegas Strip, where hundreds of people were gunned down.

Later in the interview, Trump returned to the shooting unprompted, focusing blame on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety,” he claimed without evidence. He further suggested that they played a role in undermining his security: “They were making it very difficult to have proper staffing in terms of Secret Service.”

“I’m not saying they wanted you to get shot,” Dr. Phil said, “but do you think it was OK with them if you did?”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot of hatred.” (Biden, Harris, and other Democratic leaders condemned the shooting in the aftermath and Biden phoned Trump to offer prayers and support—a call Trump said was “very nice” in a leaked conversation with RFK Jr.)

Trump then reiterated the same claim he made in his Aug. 5 speech: “They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” he told Dr. Phil. “They would say that, that was [a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”

The deceased 20-year-old gunman was a registered Republican voter, as noted throughout national media coverage—and as I reported in the days and weeks after the attack, there appears to be no solid evidence that he was driven by partisanship or ideology. A sweeping FBI investigation, including analysis of his digital devices and interviews with more than 450 people, has found no clear motive, according to congressional testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI officials reiterated those findings on Wednesday in a call with reporters. They suggested that the gunman, who also considered attacking a Biden event, was seeking infamy and selected the Trump rally as a “target of opportunity.” (I reported five days after the attack about the emerging indicators of this behavioral profile—a common one among political assassins, as I documented in my book, Trigger Points.)

The provocative rhetoric from Trump and his allies isn’t just unfounded but also carries a disturbing risk: Threat assessment and law enforcement leaders have told me that the messaging is fueling the danger of political violence headed into the election. Sources also told me that Trump’s political incitement more broadly—increasingly focused on a supposed grand conspiracy to steal the election from him—has made potential violence from MAGA extremists a top concern. As one source put it, “they’re piling on the idea that the opposition is so out to get Trump that they even tried to kill him, and therefore retaliation is justified.” Another described how conspiracy theories about the Trump shooting give extremist groups “a really big plot point” for retaliatory violence.

The blame narrative from Trump and his allies also expanded this week when Republican Reps. Cory Mills of Florida and Eli Crane of Arizona convened an “independent” hearing they called the “J 13 Forum” at the Heritage Foundation (home of Project 2025). They and several colleagues conducted congressional testimony-style interviews with participants including former Secret Service agent and right-wing media personality Dan Bongino, and former Blackwater CEO and Trump political operative Erik Prince. Many key questions indeed still loom about the catastrophic security failure that occurred in Pennsylvania; ongoing investigations by the FBI, Homeland Security, and a bipartisan congressional task force will last many months, if not years. Nonetheless, the “J 13 Forum” leaned into speculation and innuendo about what could explain the disaster, with Mills suggesting from the outset that a nefarious plot would inevitably be uncovered.

“You will see at this stage, where I think that criminal gross negligence and purposeful intent will be indistinguishable,” he said.

The faux congressional hearing included various unsubstantiated claims about the tactical response to the gunman in Butler and heated rhetoric from Bongino about the alleged role of DEI policy at the Secret Service. At one point, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida prompted Prince to highlight the risk of a foreign terrorist team carrying out such an assassination attempt on US soil. “I’m very concerned,” Prince responded. “I don’t think they have any idea what’s coming at them.”

Notably, Mills has been involved in the blame narrative from the start—he was among the Trump allies using the same attack lines in the initial aftermath. “What about the rhetoric said by President Biden, when he said it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye?” Mills asked on Fox’s Varney & Co. five days after the shooting. (Biden went on to apologize for that previous word choice, despite the fact that it clearly was taken out of context by Mills and others in the aftermath.) With that setup, Mills landed his allegation: “They tried to silence him. They tried to imprison him. And now they’ve tried to kill him.”

Rep. Maxwell Frost is the youngest US congressman—and every headline and article about him (including ours!) never fails to mention it. Hailed as the first and only (for now) Gen Z Representative, Frost rose from the ranks of activism as the national organizing director for March for Our Lives to Congress, when he was elected to represent central Florida nearly two years ago. He instantly aligned with several big progressive causes, especially ending gun violence, and joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He also became an outspoken defender of and campaigner for President Joe Biden. That’s come at a cost. More recently, critics singled him out for having betrayed his activist roots, accusing him of not being outspoken enough about the war in Gaza.

Having just won his primary this week, Frost is facing reelection in November and I had the chance to catch up with him in one of the DNC’s fancy “creator” spaces on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. During our sit-down interview, we talked about what he’s learned in his short time in Congress (it’s dysfunctional!), how to navigate big, contentious issues (it’s hard!), and what he wants to see from the Harris campaign in terms of policy (he’s very excited about housing! Not surprising when you recall his apartment-hunting headaches when he arrived in DC.)

Watch the video, and below there’s a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Okay, so what have you learned? What has been most surprising for you as a Congressman? And, I wanna know how you’ve changed.

Honestly, what’s been really surprising for me, is we know there’s so much dysfunction in Congress. And oftentimes, we just blame the people there for that dysfunction, so I’m gonna give them 60 percent of the blame. Forty percent, or a good chunk, actually has to do with the institution itself. I’ll give you a very small example. Orientation, when the new members first get to know each other, before we start arguing, we’re just all humans, new people to Congress. You don’t really get a lot of time to spend time with the other side of the aisle. The only time I’m with the Republicans is during the classes, and what are you supposed to do in class? Listen. The last half of the day, the social aspect, is all separated by party. So it makes sense why there’s so much dysfunction here.

Here at the DNC, we are looking forward. We have about 75, or so, days until the election. What is it that you wanna see? What kind of policies? What do you want the Harris campaign to bring forward?

I’m really excited about the housing platform that Vice President Harris has put forth. Honestly, it’s one of the first times, I think, the Democratic party has put together a housing platform that’s really exciting. What else? I’m excited to see the Vice President continue to talk about her plans around preventing the climate crisis. Obviously, the Biden-Harris administration made history and dedicated the most resources and money towards defeating the climate crisis. Not in the history of our country, but the history of the world.

The Vice President has been very vocal on gun control—an issue that’s very near and dear to you and your work. What are you hoping to see around that? And what role would you play?

I’m proud that the first bill I introduced in Congress was to create a federal office of gun violence prevention. The President took that legislation with Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and used it as the foundation for an executive order. And he created the White House Office of Violence Prevention. Who’s its leader? Vice President Kamala Harris. So, I’m excited to see her expand that office, and what I wanna see is for us to put more money toward CVI, Community Violence Intervention. These are programs, community-based, that work at identifying people most likely to be shot, and the people most likely to shoot someone. And then, they intervene at the community level. We had this program in Orlando, and gun violence has gone down in the blocks it’s operating in. And how did we get the program started? Federal money. First from the American Rescue Plan, and then from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

So, let’s get a personal question in here. How do you grow as a politician and a leader with all of the complex issues here that we face in this country.

Yeah, there’s so much to learn. I have 10 meetings in a day about completely different subjects. I’m gonna be honest, number one, it’s a team effort. I have a great staff that really helps educate me. There’s a lot of resources that are available to us. There’s actually something called the Congressional Research Service. I can go to my staff and say, “I want an in-depth briefing on the situation in the Congo.” And they will get our government experts to come in and give me an in-depth briefing. That information, is always the basis for me to do more research, and speak to other outside groups, as well. So we have a lot of resources we can take advantage of to educate ourselves. We’re not gonna be experts on every issue. But we should definitely try our best to educate ourselves on every issue. That way we can legislate in a better way.

We have so many issues like, why is this important? What makes it more important than something else? And it all leads us to, why is this election important?

This election is important because if we elect Donald Trump again, it’s not a pause in progress, it’s a rollback. And there are communities that won’t survive. That word “survival” means something different for everyone. More people will die of gun violence. He wants mass deportations of certain communities. Nothing will be done about the climate crisis. People will literally die. We’re experiencing extreme heat right now that’s killing more people than ever before. So, lives are at stake. And from the gun violence movement, my work, and my organizing has always been about saving lives. So, we gotta make sure we don’t let that guy anywhere near the White House. Kamala Harris is gonna save lives.

Congressman Frost, thank you so much for your time.

Appreciate it man.

Campaigning in Atlanta on Saturday, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance blamed Democrats without any evidence for the recent assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

In his brief remarks introducing the former president at a Georgia State University arena, Vance told the crowd: “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison.” Then, gesturing emphatically, Vance declared: “They even tried to kill him.”

After three weeks of intensive FBI investigation, no evidence has emerged supporting that claim. The motive of the deceased 20-year-old gunman, who was registered as a Republican voter but appears not to have been driven by partisanship or political ideology, remains unknown.   

As I’ve reported in the weeks since the horrific shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, top Trump allies repeatedly have promoted unfounded conspiracy theories and blamed Trump’s political opponents without evidence. Multiple threat assessment and law enforcement leaders have told me that this rhetoric is fueling already heightened concerns about political violence heading into the November election. Those concerns, they said, stem foremost from domestic far-right extremist groups and Trump’s MAGA movement.

As one threat expert put it regarding the rhetoric from Trump world since the assassination attempt: “Now they’re piling on the idea that the opposition is so out to get Trump that they even tried to kill him, and therefore retaliation is justified. Only a small number of people might take violent action on this, but you don’t need much for things to get worse.”

This has been a clear pattern of incitement from high-profile supporters of the former president. Trump backers pushing baseless narratives about the shooting have included congressional members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins of Georgia, Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, a former Trump cabinet official. Vance’s rhetoric on Saturday echoed comments that Don Jr. made during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where he declared that Democrats had targeted his father: “They’re now trying to kill him.” Vance has participated in this messaging since the first hours after the shooting, when he posted on social media that Biden campaign rhetoric focusing on Trump as a threat to democracy “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Trump himself made that claim during his speech in Atlanta on Saturday: “Remember the words they use, ‘they are a threat to democracy,’” he said. “They’ve been saying that about me for seven years. I think I got shot because of that, OK.”

Two days after the assassination attempt, Vance was officially nominated for the ticket at the RNC, where Trump’s brush with death led to his being hailed repeatedly as a divine political martyr. Trump had long made violence a more accepted part of Republican politics, and now he was at the center of showcasing it in a stark new context.

Campaigning in Atlanta on Saturday, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance blamed Democrats without any evidence for the recent assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

In his brief remarks introducing the former president at a Georgia State University arena, Vance told the crowd: “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison.” Then, gesturing emphatically, Vance declared: “They even tried to kill him.”

After three weeks of intensive FBI investigation, no evidence has emerged supporting that claim. The motive of the deceased 20-year-old gunman, who was registered as a Republican voter but appears not to have been driven by partisanship or political ideology, remains unknown.   

As I’ve reported in the weeks since the horrific shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, top Trump allies repeatedly have promoted unfounded conspiracy theories and blamed Trump’s political opponents without evidence. Multiple threat assessment and law enforcement leaders have told me that this rhetoric is fueling already heightened concerns about political violence heading into the November election. Those concerns, they said, stem foremost from domestic far-right extremist groups and Trump’s MAGA movement.

As one threat expert put it regarding the rhetoric from Trump world since the assassination attempt: “Now they’re piling on the idea that the opposition is so out to get Trump that they even tried to kill him, and therefore retaliation is justified. Only a small number of people might take violent action on this, but you don’t need much for things to get worse.”

Trump backers pushing baseless narratives about the shooting have included congressional members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins of Georgia, Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, a former Trump cabinet official. Vance himself has participated since the first hours after the shooting, when he posted on social media that Biden campaign rhetoric focusing on Trump as a threat to democracy “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Two days later, Vance was officially nominated for the ticket at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where Trump’s brush with death led to his being hailed repeatedly as a divine political martyr. Trump had long made violence a more accepted part of Republican politics, and now he was at the center of showcasing it in a stark new context.

In the two-plus weeks since a gunman opened fire at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, some details have emerged about the catastrophic security failure. The 20-year-old perpetrator, who wounded the former president and three people in the crowd, killing one, was on authorities’ radar for more than 90 minutes before he attacked. He eluded law enforcement agents at the rally site, eventually reaching an unsecured rooftop about 150 yards from where Trump spoke. He fired at least eight rounds from an AR-15 before being killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper.

Major questions remain about the disaster as three federal investigations move forward. In the meantime, Trump allies continue trying to exploit the assassination attempt politically, whether by raising unfounded conspiracy theories about the Biden administration or attacking FBI leaders, as Trump himself long has done.

Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, a former Secretary of the Interior under Trump, suggested on Fox News on Monday that the security failure may have resulted from some sort of government plot. “We know there was incompetence,” he said, “but was this incompetence willful and knowing? Did you willingly and knowing [sic] put the president in a position by atrophying the security and allowing this to happen?” Zinke gave no evidence, but speculated emphatically, “that brings it from assassination attempt into the area of a plot—big difference between an attempt and a plot.”

Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted the FBI over its investigation of the shooting. Fox host Maria Bartiromo set him up by insisting that FBI Director Christopher Wray had “tried to throw doubt” on Trump being shot when Wray testified before Congress last week that investigators were still determining whether the ex-president had been hit on his ear by a bullet or shrapnel. (The FBI soon clarified that it was either a bullet or a fragment of one.)

“I think these agencies have lost the trust of the American people,” DeSantis responded. “Go back to the Las Vegas shooter: We never learned a thing about him.” (Hundreds of pages of FBI documents and a lengthy investigative report on the case are publicly available.) He continued: “Now you have the FBI director casting doubt what we saw on TV live, that President Trump was shot in his ear. These agencies are failing the American people. They lack the credibility.”

Conspiracy theories from both the political right and left have run rampant since the horrific shooting on July 13. But while some Democratic voters have baselessly speculated that the violence was somehow staged to benefit Trump, few if any leaders on the left have gone there. (The closest was an aide to major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman who later apologized.)

Numerous high-profile Trump allies, however, immediately began accusing Democrats—without any evidence—of orchestrating the shooting. They included Congress members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins of Georgia, and Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric. Bartiromo also played host to Eric Trump when he claimed that Democrats “would stop at absolutely nothing” and had intended to have his father murdered: “I’ve said on this show before I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried something even worse, alluding to exactly what happened, and I was right.” (And it was on the radio show of a former Fox host, Megyn Kelly, where Don Jr. said Trump’s political foes were “now trying to kill him.”)

During the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which began just two days after the shooting, various speakers used Trump’s brush with death to declare his survival and candidacy nothing short of a divine miracle. The sweeping visual backdrop for Trump’s acceptance speech played to the theme of martyrdom, showcasing the iconic news photo of Trump bloodied and defiant in the moments after the attack.   

Threat assessment and law enforcement leaders told me after the assassination attempt that partisan exploitation of the bloodshed will fuel political violence—already a serious concern ahead of the election—by exacerbating “a really big plot point” for extremist groups.

On Monday, the FBI announced that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had begun buying gun-related items and bomb-making materials more than a year before the attack. He took firearms training courses and did online research into mass shootings, assassination attempts, and various potential targets. He planned carefully and “made significant efforts to conceal his activities,” said Kevin Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge in Pittsburgh.

According to the Wall Street Journal, FBI investigators have interviewed more than 450 people, including dozens of Crooks’ coworkers, family members, and former classmates. The FBI reiterated that it has found no evidence indicating he was driven by partisanship or political ideology. As I reported five days after the attack, barring some extraordinary revelation to come, Crooks is more likely to fit a different pattern of motive, a murkier one shared by many of his predecessors.

Top image: clockwise from top: Donald Trump, Jr., Ron DeSantis, Ryan Zinke, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Eric Trump, Maria Bartiromo and Mike Collins. Credits: Mother Jones illustration; James Manning/PA Wire/ZUMA; Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/ZUMA; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ ZUMA (3); Pat A. Robinson/ZUMA; Prensa Internacional/ZUMA

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.

For decades, McLean Bible Church has served as the place of worship for many of DC’s Republican elite. The sprawling evangelical megachurch in Vienna, Virginia, boasts a roster of former parishioners that includes everyone from Ken Starr to Mike Pence. It’s where Donald Trump once dropped in for a brief prayer after a round of golf.

McLean Bible is also where, in November 2017, a senior pastor named Dale Sutherland formed a nonprofit called Act2Impact. In those days, the organization was described in state records as an “auxiliary” of the church, with a mission to “preach the gospel” and “conduct evangelistic and humanitarian outreach.”

But that mission was short-lived.

Two years later, Sutherland—who had once been an undercover narcotics officer in DC—left McLean Bible and filed papers to rename Act2Impact. It became the Constitutional Defense Fund (CDF), which would “promote and secure” constitutional rights. “We aim to defend and strengthen those rights through methods that will include litigation and other means,” the filing stated. New directors joined, replacing church elders. One was Joseph Abdalla, a former cop who’d been Sutherland’s partner.

Around this time, Sutherland also leaned into a new persona, adopting the Undercover Pastor as his brand and moniker. “Buying cocaine and preaching Jesus. A weird combo,” notes his website, which touted a newsletter—“get biblical wisdom delivered to your inbox”—and YouTube channel. “I used to lock people up,” he likes to say, “now I’m trying to set people free.”

Sutherland is much less public about the CDF, which in the half-decade since its rechristening has evolved from spreading the good news to facilitating a far-reaching, multimillion-dollar legal campaign to dismantle America’s gun laws. From 2020 to 2022, the CDF collected $12 million in cash and funneled nearly $10 million to two connected gun rights groups and a DC law firm, Cooper & Kirk, which together have filed at least 21 lawsuits since 2020 that challenged gun restrictions. These lawsuits, aimed at getting an eventual Supreme Court hearing, concern bans on AR-15-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, as well as restrictions on young adults buying and carrying handguns. During its next term, which begins in October, the court will hear one of the suits, a challenge to the government’s ability to check the spread of home-produced, unserialized “ghost guns.”

The CDF paid Cooper & Kirk more than $8 million between 2020 and 2022. The fund also made payments to the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Foundation (an offshoot of the Firearms Policy Coalition), which are the plaintiffs, individually or together, in every one of the 21 lawsuits the operation is behind.

The CDF’s money came via Donors Trust, a pass-through fund founded in 1999 with the aim of “safeguarding the intent of libertarian and conservative” philanthropists who seek to channel their wealth into right-wing causes. The trust has more than $1 billion in assets and is not legally required to identify its donors.

In short: An anonymous funder or funders is bankrolling a legal attack aimed at providing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court an opportunity to wipe out America’s firearms laws. It’s akin to the Christian right’s abortion playbook but for guns.

“It’s about as far from a bottom-up, grassroots operation as possible,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and vice president of Giffords Law Center, who has spent a decade tangling in court with gun rights interests. Skaggs said that in terms of its ambition and scale, the dark money operation is unlike any litigation funding arrangement he’s seen.

The motives of many of the players in this drama—gun rights advocates and the conservative lawyers who work for them—are obvious. But Sutherland is more of a mystery. People who have known him for years say they’ve never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or state a position on the gun debate.

Over the past two years, I have tried to piece together this network and chart its workings. It’s an effort that has involved reading many thousands of pages of financial filings, depositions, and court records. I’ve done dozens of interviews and knocked on the same doors again and again, trying to figure out how an undercover pastor became the unlikely middleman for a covertly funded operation to abolish gun laws. Here’s what I’ve learned.

The Firm

In August 2019, before he stepped on a podium in Colonial Williamsburg, Charles Cooper was introduced as a “legend” of the conservative legal world. He began by warming up the crowd at the Convention of States Project leadership summit, which brings together people who want to amend the Constitution to eliminate what they consider ambiguous language that has enabled liberal advances. “Are there any freedom-loving, anti-communist patriots in this room?” The audience clapped and cheered. “Do any of you cling to your Bibles and your guns?”

The day before, Cooper had lost his decades-long gig as the National Rifle Association’s outside counsel. As details of financial abuses became public many had rallied around then-CEO Wayne LaPierre. Cooper did not and was purged.

Before representing the NRA, Cooper led the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and executive agencies. Cooper’s Reagan-era DOJ opinions—for instance, one finding that employers could refuse to hire those with AIDS—burnished his reputation as a polished champion of a strident conservatism. Cooper tapped Samuel Alito to be his deputy and, two decades later, would guide him through the Supreme Court confirmation process. By then, Cooper had founded Cooper & Kirk, which became known as the conservative movement’s prestige advocate. It hired hard-right zealots from elite law schools, including Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Noel Francisco, who would become Trump’s solicitor general. Cooper defended Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage, and represented fellow Alabaman Jeff Sessions when the then-attorney general was under scrutiny for his contacts with Russian officials in 2016.

Cooper’s Williamsburg speech was titled, “The Real Threat to the Second Amendment.” He described how his work had contributed to split circuit court rulings on whether people have a right to carry guns outside the home for self-defense. A case that would resolve that question, he noted, was before the Supreme Court.

Cooper was referring to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which challenged a New York law that required applicants for concealed carry permits to demonstrate a heightened need for protection. At the time, Cooper & Kirk was representing the Bruen plaintiffs. Although the firm did not argue the case before the Supreme Court—that was handed off to star SCOTUS advocate Paul Clement—invoices show that in April 2021, the month the justices agreed to hear Bruen, Cooper & Kirk managing partner David H. Thompson conferred with lead attorneys on the case about an “amicus panel,” a body of subject experts that advises on litigation strategy.

CDF money went to attorneys and advocacy groups that filed friend of the court briefs backing the plaintiffs. Such filings, known as amicus briefs, are integral to legal strategy in appellate litigation and are often cited by higher courts in decisions. Thompson filed an amicus brief in Bruen on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation. And another partner at the firm, John D. Ohlendorf, did so on behalf of J. Joel Alicea, himself a Cooper & Kirk attorney identified in the brief only as a professor at Catholic University. The CDF-funded Firearms Policy Foundation filed an amicus brief as well. So did the archconservative Claremont Institute, which got a $105,000 CDF grant in 2021 to support gun rights. John C. Eastman—the lawyer who helped rally Trump’s faithful before they stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and is now under indictment in Georgia and Arizona for attempting to subvert the 2020 election—wrote the Claremont brief. (Eastman’s law license has been temporarily suspended in California and DC.)

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Bruen was momentous. Conservative justices not only struck down New York’s law, but also established a new test for the constitutionality of all gun restrictions. No longer should courts weigh the government’s interest in reducing violence or promoting public safety against the right to bear arms, the majority said. Rather, the constitutionality of gun laws should depend on whether they’re similar enough to restrictions in place when the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, or when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, points at which the original meaning and public understanding of the Second Amendment are best discerned.

Lower courts have since seen a surge in challenges to firearms restrictions, ruling on an average of one a day in the year after the decision, according to an analysis by Jacob D. Charles, a scholar at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. Although courts have diverged when applying the standard, thanks to Bruen, gun laws are being struck down at an unprecedented clip. “We are more excited than ever about the future,” Brandon Combs, director of the Firearms Policy Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, declared after the Bruen ruling. “Indeed, FPC is already working with the exceptional litigators at Cooper & Kirk—truly the best in the space—on the largest Second Amendment litigation program in the country.”

The Plaintiff

Of course, before Cooper & Kirk can get involved, a plaintiff is needed. That’s where the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition come in. They not only act as plaintiffs, but they also recruit individual plaintiffs, someone who can claim standing—a direct injury from the law that’s being challenged.

The Second Amendment Foundation has always been involved in litigation, and in 2013, it helped create the Firearms Policy Coalition, which is similarly focused on challenging gun laws in court. Since Trump appointees have made the composition of the Supreme Court so favorable and the foundation began to receive CDF funds in 2020, the groups have become juggernauts. In the three years prior to 2020, a public database of federal lawsuits identifies them, alone or together, as plaintiffs in 28 actions; in the three subsequent years, that number jumps to 89. “We want to get a case before the Supreme Court,” Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb told journalist Stephen Gutowski last year. “And the quicker these cases move, the better for gun ownership and for gun rights.”

Gottlieb created the Second Amendment Foundation and another group at the vanguard of conservative crusades, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, back in the early 1970s. He is known for direct-mail and marketing savvy, and for cashing in on right-wing causes through private companies that have business arrangements with his advocacy groups. In 1984, he pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud and was sentenced to a year in prison, which he served largely on work release. (More recently, the attorney general of Washington state investigated Gottlieb, who filed a lawsuit against the office alleging the inquiry into his activities was politically motivated.)

Gottlieb first gained public notice in the late 1980s as an architect of the Wise Use movement, which championed the exploitation of natural resources and an end to environmentalism. Backlash to federal control of land in Western states and encroachment of environmental regulation fueled a groundswell. “I’ve never seen anything pay out as quickly as this whole Wise Use thing has done,” Gottlieb said back then. “It touches the same kind of anger as the gun stuff, and not only generates a higher rate of return, but also a higher average dollar donation. My gun stuff runs about $18. The Wise Use stuff breaks $40.” When news stories linked Wise Use to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Gottlieb described them as “overplayed.” In 2023, he headlined the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an event hosted by the Rod of Iron Ministries, which is led by a son of Moon. The MAGA-allied church glorifies AR-15-style rifles—the type of gun used in the recent attempt to assassinate Trump—seeing in them the biblical “rod of iron,” Christ’s prophesied instrument of dominion at Armageddon.

In November 2022, two years after the CDF operation began, Gottlieb gave a deposition as part of a challenge to an Illinois law that prohibits young adults from carrying a gun in public. When I first read the deposition in early 2023, many questions I’d had were answered. In it, Gottlieb testified that an anonymous funder was supporting the case by paying his counsel, Cooper & Kirk. He said the firm had given him a statement outlining how much money the person had spent on what he estimated to be a dozen foundation lawsuits underway in 2021. (Court records confirm his assessment.)

When asked whether he knew who was paying Cooper & Kirk, Gottlieb testified, “I wish I did.”

That remark alarms some legal ethicists, who argue that rules of professional responsibility should be interpreted as requiring that a client know who is paying their counsel before consenting to representation. “He’s either just lying or the firm is delinquent in getting informed consent,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who specializes in legal ethics and firearms regulation.

In response to written questions, Gottlieb said that his answers in the deposition were “accurate” and that “our attorneys did not fail to get our informed consent, it was given.” Outside funding arrangements can raise questions about whether the financial backer or plaintiff is really in charge, but Gottlieb said, “merely because a third-party may have paid for some services rendered, SAF retains control over all legal direction, strategy, and settlement authority, which is wholly ethical.”   

Gottlieb is not the operation’s only beneficiary who seems to be unaware of the source of the largesse. In 2021, the CDF paid Gary Kleck, a professor emeritus of criminology at Florida State University whose work has been touted by gun interests for decades, $6,900, according to an IRS filing. When I emailed him, Kleck said the money was a consulting fee from Cooper & Kirk for work he’d done on Bruen. “I have no idea what the Constitutional Defense Fund is,” he said, “and had never heard of it before you contacted me.”

The Professor

Even when they go before a court inclined to overturn gun laws, the lawyers and plaintiffs need research to bolster their case. Enter Georgetown assistant professor William English, who in 2021 received a $58,750 CDF grant and the same year filed a key brief supporting the Bruen plaintiffs.

Before arriving at Georgetown in 2016, English, a political economist, was research director at Harvard University’s Edward J. Safra Center for Ethics. (While at Harvard, he also founded the Abigail Adams Institute, whose mission is “reviving traditional humanities education”—i.e., the Western canon. In 2022, the CDF gave the institute a $23,000 grant for “constitutional research.”)

In June, the New York Times ran a profile of English in which the existence of a dark money drive to strike down gun laws being run through the CDF was first revealed. The Times detailed how English’s Bruen brief was filed jointly with the Center for Human Liberty—another part of Gottlieb’s operation that was incorporated in Nevada two months before English filed his brief. In it, English argued that, based on his own research that had not been peer-reviewed, there was no connection between right-to-carry laws, increased numbers of gun carry permits, and violent crime. The brief was prepared by a Manhattan attorney, Edward Paltzik, whose firm received $80,000 from the CDF in 2021.

English’s work suited the needs of the Bruen plaintiffs perfectly. Their counsel cited it during oral arguments, and Charles Cooper’s pal, Alito, did so in a concurring opinion. An update English later published concluded that AR-15-style rifles are in “common use,” a finding central to the gun movement’s legal advocacy post-Bruen. Since the ruling, gun interests have cited English’s work in dozens of motions and pleadings in cases nationwide.

Academics on both sides of the gun debate have found defects in English’s work. In a January 2023 deposition in an Oregon case, Kleck, the Florida State professor, said English’s survey can’t be relied on. “He’s vague about exactly how he developed his sample,” Kleck said. “And there is nothing in his report to contradict the assumption that what he had was a self-selected sample.”

I’d been trying to get English and Georgetown to respond to questions about his research since the Bruen ruling came down. In December 2022, I paid a visit to the gated community where Georgetown President John DeGioia lived. After that, the university’s communications office finally responded by email, stating: “Georgetown respects and supports academic freedom, including the right of its faculty members to conduct independent research. The University’s Institutional Review Board reviewed this study before the survey began, and the survey costs were supported by an external grant that did not flow through the University.”

The tax ID number that the CDF reported to the IRS in conjunction with English’s grant is Georgetown’s. Asked recently to clarify the meaning of “did not flow through the university” and whether it had a position on English’s failure to divulge who funded his work, a Georgetown spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the university is “unable to identify any record of Constitutional Defense Fund funds flowing through Georgetown and is uncertain why the University’s tax identification number appears in CDF’s records. Georgetown faculty members have academic freedom to conduct independent research projects. The views of faculty members are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Georgetown University.”

On June 26, English published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he defended his work, bashed the New York Times, and characterized attempts by me and other reporters to get answers from him as “harassment.” English wrote that the Times “and other outlets are signaling that they will cancel academics who state inconvenient facts…Those of us who want to foster an evidence-based public-policy discourse should reject these tactics, and courts should take note of them.”

The Middleman

Lawyers and academics all need to be paid, which brings us back to the Undercover Pastor.

Sutherland likes to tout his time with the DC police, but not all of his undercover work ended smoothly. In one early 1990s case, Sutherland and Abdalla—now on the board of the CDF—handled an informant named Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was shot 16 times and killed. When federal prosecutors tried members of the drug crew suspected in the killing, it emerged that Williams had been allowed to continue making street buys for Sutherland, who was posing as a Georgetown University construction worker seeking crack, despite the presence of the “white guy” causing dealers unease, according to court transcripts. At trial, evidence went missing, including a pager in Sutherland’s possession that defense attorneys argued could shed light on the killing and related crimes. “I am going to get the chief of police and the United States attorney in here and read them the riot act,” the judge said at one point. “To lose evidence of various kinds day after day is just not satisfactory.” Prosecutors dropped the murder charge but obtained drug conspiracy convictions against the defendants.

After Sutherland left the DC police force in 2013, his role at McLean Bible, where he’d long held staff positions, grew. In 2016, he began talks with the Southern Baptist Convention on a partnership to “plant” churches in the DC region. Sutherland founded an entity called New City Network, an arm of McLean Bible, to carry out the work. Concerned that the partnership violated McLean’s constitution, which requires the church to remain unaffiliated with denominations, a group of members filed suit against McLean in 2022.

The legal battle revealed a complex series of money transfers totaling more than $7 million between McLean, the convention, and New City Network. The plaintiffs felt that records and testimony produced in their suit demonstrated that the partnership had indeed violated McLean’s constitution and dropped their case last year. In a letter summarizing the litigation, however, their attorney made clear that questions remain: “Current and former church leaders deposed could not explain the reasons for this unorthodox payment structure, or state with confidence where the money went specifically.” A church webpage allows that “financial transactions for the church planting were sometimes confusing,” but says an independent audit accounted for the money spent. 

Sutherland was among those deposed. He said that he’d left McLean Bible and his role leading New City Network in May 2019. He was unable to name any churches the network had started, save for one in Falls Church, Virginia, where he and his son-in-law now preach. “For Heaven’s sake,” Sutherland said. “I can picture all the pastors in my head. I just can’t think of the names they gave their churches. Boy oh boy.”

One of the plaintiffs in that suit, Jeremiah Burke, said Sutherland’s limited recall was an act. “He repeatedly recounts, in his podcast and on his Instagram page, in vivid detail, events from 20 and 30 years ago with absolute precision, events in which he is the hero,” Burke said. “However, in his deposition, having sworn under oath to tell the truth, Dale somehow couldn’t call to mind details of significant events from the recent past.”

One name that Sutherland could not recall in his September 2023 deposition was Veritas Church in DC’s Georgetown neighborhood, which had gotten New City funds. Sutherland became interim pastor of Veritas in 2020 and renamed the church City Light, the same name used by the church in Virginia that he and his son-in-law lead. In 2020 and 2021, IRS disclosures for the CDF listed City Light’s Georgetown location as the CDF address. When I visited last year, I found a largely vacant office building, save for one floor occupied by the Embassy of the Republic of South Sudan, and no sign of a church or the CDF.

A former McLean Bible elder, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal church matters, described Sutherland as “kind-hearted” and a “warrior for the Lord,” but also “deceptive.” During the church planting drive, he said, Sutherland “did things the way he wanted to, he just kind of ran rogue.” The elder said Sutherland “is a pretty good talker, he can sell pretty well,” and would “cuddle up next to” the congregation’s big donors.

As Sutherland left McLean Bible and established the CDF, he began to collect more money from his array of nonprofits, including Code 3 Association, whose stated goal is better relations between police and the public. (Abdalla is a director there, too.) In 2020, these nonprofits—the CDF, Code 3, and Boost Others, Inc.—paid Sutherland and his private company, Code 3 Consulting, more than $200,000. Over the next two years, Sutherland collected more than $700,000 from his nonprofits. He also began flipping DC properties, which he sometimes bought from the estates of the recently deceased or those in bankruptcy. From 2020 through early 2023, records show, he bought at least a dozen properties valued at $7 million and sold them for more than $11 million.

In short, Sutherland has been awash in cash since he filed paperwork to create the CDF. In one sense, he’s an odd middleman. People who know him can’t recall Sutherland expressing support for scuttling gun laws. “I never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or gun rights,” said the former McLean elder. “I never did, nope, and I was with him a lot.”

But there are connections that lead back to McLean Bible. In a 2023 interview, Thompson, the Cooper & Kirk managing partner who has overseen much of the firm’s Second Amendment work, praised the church that was his spiritual home for two decades. “I grew up Episcopalian,” said Thompson, who did not respond to written questions for this story, “and about 20 years ago, I became a born-again Christian and went to McLean Bible Church.”

Twice in the last year, I knocked on the door of Sutherland’s home. I got no response and left a business card. Attempts to reach him by phone failed. Then, in mid-June, he answered. I asked him to explain how he’d come to be running money through the CDF to Cooper & Kirk. “Sir, I am in the car with my grandson,” Sutherland said, “and I am not talking.”

The Dark Money

In July 2016, a young man in Washington state, angry and jealous after a break-up, bought an AR-15-style rifle and a 30-round magazine. A week later, he bought another 30-round magazine, then shot and killed three people, including his ex-girlfriend, at a house party. He later blamed his actions in part on easy access to guns. The killings prompted the state legislature to enact a ban on high-capacity magazines and AR-15-style rifles. The Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, as co-plaintiffs, filed suits in 2022 and 2023 to strike down the bans. Cooper & Kirk is their counsel in the case targeting the magazine capacity ban. English’s survey findings were cited by the plaintiffs in both cases. (As the Times reported, however, the plaintiffs subsequently agreed not to rely on English’s work “in any respect” after the state sought to subpoena information from English in the AR-15 case regarding the development of his survey.) Both cases are pending in federal district court in Washington state.

Autumn Snider’s son, 19-year-old Jake Long, was the first to be shot and killed at the party. Snider said those with the means to fund litigation meant to impact public policy should be free to do so—as long as they do so openly. “You have the obligation to reveal who you are and should have the confidence to provide transparency to the public,” Snider said. “If you can’t be forthcoming with who you are, that is a red flag.”

Defenders of using dark money to support litigation liken the practice to anonymous political speech, which enjoys First Amendment protection. But such arguments have limits, said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA School of Law who has written a book on the gun debate. “First Amendment rights are mitigated by the need to ensure the integrity of the judicial system,” Winkler said. “We generally don’t allow parties in a case to be anonymous.”

Anonymous funding arrangements, which are not uncommon in the realm of impact litigation, effectively allow an “end run” around judicial ethics safeguards. “How do you know whether there is any impropriety, any influence peddling?” Winkler said. “It’s fundamentally problematic.”

Seth Endo, an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law, said the debate over disclosing the identity of anonymous funders involves fundamental questions about the role of courts. If courts are neutral arbiters of the rights and responsibilities of disputing parties, as many who work in them like to contend, then it’s easy to argue that disclosure is irrelevant. However, if courts are not detached umpires but are themselves political agents that drive social change, then the public has a strong interest in knowing who’s enabling litigation, Endo said.

Given Cooper & Kirk’s ties to deep-pocketed conservatives who specialize in waging ideological battles through courts, there are any number of suspects who may be routing millions of dollars through Donors Trust to Sutherland’s CDF—and on to the advocacy groups and their lawyers.

Donors Trust is a pass-through that effectively conceals the identities of individuals and advocacy groups backing right-wing causes. (On the political left, organizations like the Tides Foundation do the same.) Those who give to Donors Trust can say how they’d like their money to be spent, but they don’t have the final word. In exchange for giving up that control, they get up-front tax benefits. Prominent funders and architects of the modern conservative movement, including the Kochs, the Bradley Foundation, and hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer, have all moved money through Donors Trust. 

In 2013 and 2014, Mercer’s foundation gave a total of $800,000 to Gottlieb’s Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which was at its zenith when Gottlieb was pushing his Wise Use agenda. Mercer is a gun lover and Trump devotee. From 2020 to 2022, Mercer’s foundation gave more than $56 million to Donors Trust. Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, who has spearheaded her family’s philanthropic and political efforts, did not respond to emailed questions.

By the end of 2022, the last year for which IRS filings are public, Sutherland’s fund had $1.6 million on hand. The pastor has recently formed other nonprofits with similar names, including an outfit called the Constitutional Freedom Fund, incorporated in Virginia in 2022, and the Foundation for Constitutional Freedom, established in Utah in December 2023. Details on their activities have yet to be disclosed.

Recently, a French film director named David André unveiled a documentary series on Sutherland called Dale L’Infiltré, or Dale Undercover. A blurb on a promotional video reads, “Dale Sutherland, a young pastor-police officer, will become a master in the art of infiltration, filming criminals without their knowledge and using fictitious identities: Italian mafia boss, pimp, drug trafficker, rap producer.” Sutherland also recently started a new podcast: Cops, Criminals, and Christ.

In the fall, Cooper & Kirk is slated to represent the Firearms Policy Coalition, which is joined by the Second Amendment Foundation before the Supreme Court in the ghost gun case. Given the court’s current political lean, the gun rights advocates might well prevail. Other cases, which could result in AR-15-style rifle and high-capacity magazine bans being ruled unconstitutional, are wending their way through lower courts, though the funding source for this entire dark money operation remains shrouded from the public.

Update, July 30: This story has been updated to further detail Alan Gottlieb’s involvement with the criminal justice system.

One certainty about the assassination attempt two weeks ago on former President Donald Trump is that rampant conspiracy theories about it will endure—probably forever. The fascination with spectacular, if highly improbable explanations long predates social media. Yet it resonates now with the Trump shooter’s documented search for information about the JFK assassination, which has sustained a cottage industry of books, movies, and other content for more than half a century.

Wild claims about everything from Trump staging the attack to the Biden White House orchestrating it began spreading online just hours after the fateful campaign rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Gunfire from a rooftop approximately 150 yards from the stage wounded Trump and three supporters in the crowd, one fatally. The tectonic event shook the 2024 presidential race and is the focus of sweeping investigations by the FBI, Homeland Security, and Congress, and has already prompted the resignation of the Secret Service director. But setting aside any outlandish assertions from both the political right and left about what happened, some key questions continue to loom since the horrific attack.

Was Trump actually hit by a bullet?

Unclear. The ex-president and his top allies maintain that he was, but when FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress on Wednesday about the ongoing investigation, he responded to one inquiry saying, “With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.” [Update, July 26, 9 p.m. ET: The FBI said in a statement late Friday that it determined Trump was struck by “a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces.”]

The attack is no less consequential either way, but this is a signifcant detail and not just another baseless conspiracy theory, even if GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson insists otherwise. As national security expert Juliette Kayyem noted, “Wray, known for exact phrasing and being careful, didn’t say this on accident.” The specificity of how Trump was wounded is important for public transparency and a full forensic accounting of the attack, relevant to rigorous assessment of the security failures (more on that below), the protective response by Secret Service agents, and the nature of Trump’s injury and his recovery.

It also pertains to how the Trump campaign has used the assassination attempt politically. When Trump was nominated at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee five days later, his brush with death was a major theme. Large images of the iconic news photo of him being pulled from the rally stage, his fist in the air and face streaked with blood, provided a backdrop on the main stage. Multiple speakers referred to his survival as the result of divine intervention. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and others lionized Trump, literally, and declared his survival and candidacy nothing short of a holy miracle.

In his acceptance speech, Trump, his right ear still bandaged, gave a dramatic, graphic account. “I said to myself, ‘Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.’” He said he brought his hand down from his ear “covered with blood, just absolutely blood all over the place.” He then emphasized, “There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side.”

Trump has released no official medical records from after the shooting, nor has there been any public account from the doctors who first treated him at Butler Memorial Hospital. Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas, a Trump ally who served as his White House physician, released a memo a week after the shooting describing a bullet wound, but Jackson’s strident partisan role and track record as a doctor raise questions about his credibility.

An analysis published Thursday by the New York Times suggests that Trump’s ear was indeed grazed by a bullet, the first of eight reportedly fired by the gunman. The Times also reported that FBI investigators are seeking to interview Trump directly. Given the swirl of confusion and speculation about his injury, it seems all the more curious that he and his campaign haven’t provided further information.

Is there any clearer picture yet of the shooter’s motive?

No. Wray this week again reiterated the lack of any clear motive, even after extensive FBI investigation. That could still change, but it would be extraordinary, to say the least, to go from no indication of a motive two weeks after an event of this magnitude to a clear one. As I reported last week, the deceased perpetrator, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, appears to have left behind little indication of any political views or his mindset ahead of the attack, according to the FBI and a flurry of media reporting. He was a registered Republican voter, but also made a small donation to a liberal political group and came from a mixed political household.

This lack of a motive is particularly important in light of all the conspiracy theories and partisan exploitation that have filled the void. Indeed, there is a distinct possibility we may never have a clear picture of what drove Crooks, who also searched online, according to investigators, for information about President Biden’s appearances, the Democratic National Convention, and “major depression disorder.”

Ultimately, a thorough investigation of this case may show, as with many assassination attempts in modern history, that political ideology was not a driving factor. It is quite plausible that Crooks was suicidal and wanted to go out in a blaze of infamy, an act that has grown more common among disturbed and desperate young men, as I discussed with threat assessment experts last week. (For more on this: my book on preventing mass shootings, Trigger Points, examines the history and complexity of motives among many perpetrators, including those who target high-profile public figures.)

What explains the catastrophic failures with security?

The public has very little idea thus far. The shooting stands as a disaster of stunning proportions for the Secret Service, whose director, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned this week under intense bipartisan pressure.

The overarching question of the security failure already encompasses a long and troubling list of specific issues: How could the Secret Service not secure a rooftop that was within shooting range and had clear sight lines to Trump? How could the attacker have flown a drone over the rally location just two hours before Trump took the stage? Why was Trump allowed to keep speaking at the podium even after the Secret Service and its law enforcement partners were aware of Crooks’ suspicious behavior, and then even after counter-snipers had him in their sights?

Those are just scratching the surface.

“I’m not going to get into specifics of the day,” Cheatle said during a congressional hearing this week, citing an ongoing investigation. “There was a plan in place to provide overwatch, and we are still looking into responsibilities.”

Voluminous official tomes and many books are sure to be written in the months and years ahead on this epic fiasco.

Will Trump world continue to weaponize the shooting politically?

Almost as surely as the sun rises in the east. In the immediate aftermath, many Trump allies fired off partisan blame—without any evidence—and they haven’t stopped since. The rhetoric has come from Trump supporters in Congress including Rep. Mike Collins (“Joe Biden sent the orders”) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (“They tried to murder President Trump”), and from Trump’s sons Eric (“I said that the Democrats would stop at absolutely nothing”) and Don Jr. (“They’re now trying to kill him”). Not to mention from the man who would become Trump’s running mate two days later, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who said Biden’s campaign rhetoric “led directly” to the attack.

But they absolutely should stop. This stewing narrative is not only false but seriously dangerous: Threat assessment and law enforcement leaders told me it is fueling potential violence, already a heightened concern heading into the November election. As one source told me, “They’re piling on the idea that the opposition is so out to get Trump that they even tried to kill him, and therefore retaliation is justified. Only a small number of people might take violent action on this, but you don’t need much for things to get worse.” As another put it: “Extremist groups will take advantage of anything that fits into their narrative and this is a really big plot point for them.”

It is an accelerant on Trump’s continuing campaign of political incitement, aimed at migrants, the FBI and DOJ, judges, prosecutors, Democratic officials, journalists, and the many others he has long targeted. The fundamental premise of it all is that he is the alleged victim of a grand political conspiracy to take him down and steal the presidency from him, which is framed as a supposed Democratic or “deep state” plot. It is now being weaponized to whip up outrage by the same folks who are behind Project 2025. And in Trump’s telling, the ultimate target is not him but rather the Americans who support him: “They’re coming after you,” as he ominously puts it.

Meanwhile, Trump has kept up the steady incitement in recent weeks, including in his long, demagogic RNC speech—although this grim dimension of his campaign has gotten far less media attention than it deserves. As I wrote just a couple of weeks before the assassination attempt: “The question now isn’t about whether Trump will continue to stoke political violence in this way through the election. It’s about when and to what extremes he might do so, and how much more that will boost the odds of further violence to come.”

Since a 20-year-old gunman opened fire more than a week ago at former President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI has conducted hundreds of interviews and scrutinized the deceased perpetrator’s background and activity—only to find that his motive for the attack thus far remains a mystery. He was a registered Republican voter, but as threat assessment experts confirmed to me, the shooting likely was not driven by partisanship or political ideology. (That’s the case with many assassination attempts in modern history, as I chronicled in my book on threat assessment.) The experts I spoke with also warned that partisan exploitation of the assassination attempt is fueling rising danger for political violence.

None of that has stopped Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. from fanning the flames. Speaking on Fox News on Sunday, Eric Trump reiterated the partisan blame leveled by various MAGA supporters—without any evidence—immediately after the shooting. “I said that the Democrats would stop at absolutely nothing,” he told Maria Bartiromo, angrily reciting a litany of alleged political persecutions against his father. “I’ve said on this show before I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried something even worse, alluding to exactly what happened, and I was right.”

Donald Trump Jr. has also continued to push this narrative. “They’re trying to jail their political opponents. They’re now trying to kill him,” he said on the Megyn Kelly Show during the Republican National Convention, rattling off grievances similar to those from his brother. (In the interview, Don Jr. also said repeatedly that his father, whose ear was grazed by a bullet, was “shot in the face.”)

This continuing vilification adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources have told me is a paramount risk headed toward the election: potential bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, including his message that he is supposedly the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by his political opponents. That core Trump narrative has now been supercharged by the assassination attempt, in which three attendees also were shot, one fatally. As I reported last week:

“Trump people were already mobilizing around the phony message of ‘we’re going to get screwed again by a rigged election,’” one threat expert told me, “and now they’re piling on the idea that the opposition is so out to get Trump that they even tried to kill him, and therefore retaliation is justified. Only a small number of people might take violent action on this, but you don’t need much for things to get worse.”

“Extremist groups will take advantage of anything that fits into their narrative and this is a really big plot point for them,” said another threat assessment expert. An intelligence bulletin from the FBI and DHS sent earlier this week to law enforcement throughout the country warned of potential “follow-on or retaliatory attacks.”

Notably, Don Jr. has participated in his father’s long-running political incitement also by spreading provocative memes and conspiracy theories on social media, and by mocking violence against Trump’s political adversaries. These tactics are part of the method of stochastic terrorism long used by Trump as president and after he left office, as I’ve documented ever since the runup to the January 6 insurrection.

Perhaps most infamously, Don Jr. ridiculed the home invasion and vicious attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, right before the 2022 midterm elections. Among other memes, he shared a photo of a “Halloween costume” that featured men’s underwear and a hammer, references to a baseless gay-sex conspiracy theory about the intruder and the weapon he used to bash Paul Pelosi’s skull. Since the assassination attempt, Don Jr. has posted a derisive meme targeting Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and another appearing to suggest that the shooter was related to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.  

Demonizing partisan rhetoric and rampant conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt—the latter also from the political left—are feeding into a volatile atmosphere that former President Trump himself has done much to foment. His continuing broadsides against the Justice Department and FBI have led to further menace and violent plots from his extremist supporters. A grand jury this month indicted a Georgia man for allegedly posting threats to murder FBI Director Christopher Wray. Also this month, an Arizona man was charged for allegedly threatening on a MAGA website to shoot FBI agents indiscriminately. Investigators found he had an AR-15, a pistol, a pump-action shotgun, and more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition.

Trump’s relentless talk of a migrant “invasion” also has heightened concerns about political violence among security experts. In recent weeks, the ex-president has continued his theme of disparaging migrants as “terrorists” and “mental patients,” declaring again that they are “poisoning our country.”

This demagoguery marked the finale of the GOP convention last week when Trump gave a rambling, grievance-laden speech that lasted more than an hour and a half. He depicted an America under siege from bloodthirsty rapists and murderers “pouring into our country,” likening these alleged hordes to the fictional cannibalistic serial killer, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” In case his renewed message of American carnage wasn’t clear enough, he warned: “Bad things are going to happen.”

It took seven long years to pry one staggering number from the hands of the federal government: that 52,529 weapons once owned by police were recovered at crime scenes across the country from 2006 to 2021. In that period, an average of nine cop guns were recovered each day. The public didn’t know it.

This statistic was the missing piece in a yearslong reporting effort by Reveal, the Trace, and CBS News into how weapons sold by police departments were getting into the hands of criminals. Reveal first sought this information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—the keystone law centered on government transparency. But it wouldn’t be that easy. As Reveal’s court battles demonstrate, there is resistance to such transparency. 

These types of legal battles over FOIA requests are becoming more commonplace. According to a 2020 study by the FOIA Project, a Syracuse University-based research effort, media outlets filed more FOIA lawsuits to disclose government records during Donald Trump’s four-year presidential term than in the 16 years spanning Barack Obama and George W. Bush’s administrations. 

The origins of the police weapons FOIA case date back to 2008, when Alain Stephens, then a police recruit, purchased a Glock handgun in a Texas parking lot that turned out to have come from a New Jersey police department. It got him thinking: How often do police guns end up in the hands of criminals? This question grew into a larger project once Stephens became a reporter and started the fight for this number as a fellow at Reveal. After his FOIA request was denied based on an argument that firearms trace data is confidential, the Reveal legal team sued—but it took seven years to claim victory. 

Five of those years were court battles that rose all the way to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The case stalled further after another federal court interpreted the exemption differently and generated an opposing precedent, creating uncertainty.

The last two years were spent waiting for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to cough up that one statistic. Armed with that number—52,529 former law enforcement weapons recovered at crime scenes—teams at the Trace, CBS News, and Reveal found that many of these guns had been traded in or sold back to gun manufacturers, a cost-saving measure that has sent thousands of guns back onto the streets to be used in violent crimes.

I spoke with D. Victoria Baranetsky—general counsel for the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), which houses Mother Jones and Reveal—about the battle over transparency on cop guns and the state of FOIA today. She’s led several other FOIA lawsuits for Reveal that have forced more transparency from the federal government: The rate of worker injuries at Amazon warehouses and most other American employers is no longer confidential, and the government now has to disclose the diversity of contractors it hires. She recently filed a case against OpenAI and Microsoft for using CIR’s content without permission or compensation. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.

How did this case with the ATF start?

It started with Alain [Stephens] calling me up and being like, “Does this law say what I think it says?” 

Alain was explaining to me that he was trying to get data from the ATF, but he was denied. There was this statute called the Tiahrt Amendment that did not allow for gun data to be disclosed. But there were exceptions—and the third exception under the law was for statistical aggregate data. 

And he said, “I’m asking for just the number of guns that law enforcement have given back and put back into the marketplace.” And I said, “Yeah, I think that’s statistical aggregate data.” 

So we sued.

What arguments did the ATF give for withholding data about police guns used in crimes?

They were saying that that exception was not meant for reporters. It was meant for only law enforcement and other folks that were supposed to be getting access to this data, not the general public. 

And then there was a whole new issue entirely. They said that making them search for this number through their database would be the creation of a new record, and agencies are not required to create new records. They’re only required to produce what they have. And so they said, “Listen, you make us plug in this analysis and spew out a number for you, that’s going to be a new record that wouldn’t have existed prior, and so we’re not obligated to disclose this.” 

The court shut that down immediately.

That kind of analysis would essentially destroy all kinds of data searches that governments have in their capacity today, because we’re living in the modern world and databases are the way that information is held. So if you limited searching a database as the creation of a new record, you’d essentially cut off access to tons of information that the public should have the right to know. 

Unfortunately, this is not the only case where we have come across that argument. 

So has that become a new tactic of how the government tries to restrict access to data?

Yes, it has worked in some locations. There’s a smattering of cases across the country leaning in either direction, but there’s no prevailing outcome yet as this is still being deliberated on across the country. 

That is one of the reasons why this case was actually a huge win completely outside the realm of the ATF…this was something that would apply to all cases involving databases.

What does a seven-year FOIA legal battle look like? 

A lot of emails. 

This was actually the longest case I dealt with while I’ve been at this job. It’s just stages of a lot of intense work and then waiting. So writing the brief, which takes, like, three months, and you’re kind of in this tunnel vision of how to perfectly describe this argument to the court, and you submit it, you file it at midnight, and then you wait. You just wait for months and months and then get an argument date, and you prep for that for months and months. And then you wait. 

Why is data transparency important for democracy?

In the United States, FOIA is actually one of the very few laws committed to transparency. And constitutionally, there are actually fewer and fewer protections for transparency.

There has been a sharp rise in the number of Exemption 3 statutes. Those are the statutes that Congress has been lobbied to pass to stop information from being disclosed under FOIA.

In fact, the Tiahrt Amendment, and the center of this case with Alain, was one of those statutes. The NRA [National Rifle Association] lobbied for that law to be passed, and I think they very intelligently did so, because I think its impact was actually huge. When you don’t have access to information, the public doesn’t really know what it thinks about an issue, because it can’t really get to the facts of the matter. So, I think, in general, facts help people make choices that can help them then make choices about who they elect into power. 

But I think there’s also an even more disturbing reason for transparency today, which is more and more information is being created than ever before—and more is being collected than ever before by large corporate and government powers. There’s a massive imbalance as to who has access to that data; it’s all corporations and governments. For the public to not have a countervailing pressure or countervailing force to have access to that is deeply problematic. More and more decisions are having an impact in our life that corporations and governments are involved in, and they’re making those decisions based on data that we have no access to. If you have no access to that, there’s no accountability as to how those decisions are being made.

Reveal faced a SLAPP lawsuit in 2016 from Planet Aid that was eventually thrown out by a federal court in 2021. What does the legal battle with Planet Aid have in common with the lawsuit for gun trace data? 

A SLAPP is a strategic lawsuit against public participation, something that’s supposed to quash First Amendment free speech activity. And anti-SLAPP statutes were created to quickly go into court. It’s not, theoretically, supposed to take more than a year or so at most. That [SLAPP] case went on for years—this incredible process of delay, delay, delay, eat up your resources, eat up your resources, eat up your resources, for something that was especially made to be answered quickly and efficiently. It dragged out for so long that it almost bankrupted our organization. You see tactics of this being used all over our system. 

I think that’s the greatest parallel to this case with Alain. There’s no end in sight, right? Like, you filed a lawsuit. You go through seven years. You win. And then you still have to file another lawsuit to actually enforce it. To get to finality, it just takes too long now, much longer than it ever should have taken. 

And there’s an added problem with FOIA where at some point, that information is stale. It doesn’t matter in the same way it would have mattered if it had been disclosed years prior. 

Most smaller newsrooms and freelance journalists don’t have the luxury of legal support on staff like Mother Jones and Reveal do. Knowing that, what does this mean for journalism? 

Most newsrooms, most journalists, most academics, protesters, citizens just don’t have the legal support to execute this. And that is really unfortunate and depressing. There was a paper written more than five years ago about how corporations are actually the ones that use FOIA the most to find out information about their competitors. So FOIA, drafted for the public and reporters, is not really being used by that sect of people. It’s being used often by corporate stakeholders who want to find information and that’ll give them a competitive advantage.

I still think [FOIA] does a lot, but I think the problem is how agencies choose to comply. The pressure put on them to comply is very minimal, and I think that greatly impacts journalism, because you know that if you actually did have access to this information, it would be helpful. 

In looking at FOIAs, does the presidential administration make a difference in how they’re treated? Did you see differences between our fights under Trump and Biden’s administrations? 

Honestly, I don’t think any administration is ever forthright in giving information. I think if you ask most people who live in the land of FOIA lawsuits, they’ll tell you that every administration kind of acts with a similarly hostile manner. The truth is power wants to hide problems. Power chooses to evade accountability, and that’s the whole point of FOIA. I think anyone who’s really in that position doesn’t necessarily want to share information. And our government, especially since 9/11, has just become a secrecy-obsessed state.

Thinking forward, what do you think the future holds for FOIA requests? 

There are all these specific areas that are going under a lot of different splits or interpretations. One of them is about whether data searching a database is the production of a new record. That’s like one little spot. I think that there are a few other hot-button areas. One is like the exemption “Glomar,” where an agency gives the response, “Can’t confirm or deny that the records even exist.” Now we’re seeing that Glomar is applied even in cases where Glomar can’t be applied, or just the expansion of Glomar. 

There was a decision that came out in 2019 that changed the test for what was confidential business information, which is exempt. And the Supreme Court changed it to be more friendly toward corporations. Previously, confidential business information was things that only would substantially hurt a corporation if disclosed—like you have an ingredient list for Coca-Cola. But the court changed it to whatever a company says is customarily or actually secret. As long as they give it a rubber stamp and say it’s so, it is so. I think that area of law already has had a lot of litigation, but that’ll be really interesting. 

Transparency has actually always been a bipartisan issue. In some ways, all administrations hate it and all administrations love it because it equally hurts both sides or helps both sides. So that’s why legislation on FOIA has been able to pass over the past decade. That being said, the courts have been much more pro-corporate and pro-law enforcement in a way that I do worry will further stifle the charge of FOIA.

It took seven long years to pry one staggering number from the hands of the federal government: that 52,529 weapons once owned by police were recovered at crime scenes across the country from 2006 to 2021. In that period, an average of nine cop guns were recovered each day. The public didn’t know it.

This statistic was the missing piece in a yearslong reporting effort by Reveal, the Trace, and CBS News into how weapons sold by police departments were getting into the hands of criminals. Reveal first sought this information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—the keystone law centered on government transparency. But it wouldn’t be that easy. As Reveal’s court battles demonstrate, there is resistance to such transparency. 

These types of legal battles over FOIA requests are becoming more commonplace. According to a 2020 study by the FOIA Project, a Syracuse University-based research effort, media outlets filed more FOIA lawsuits to disclose government records during Donald Trump’s four-year presidential term than in the 16 years spanning Barack Obama and George W. Bush’s administrations. 

The origins of the police weapons FOIA case date back to 2008, when Alain Stephens, then a police recruit, purchased a Glock handgun in a Texas parking lot that turned out to have come from a New Jersey police department. It got him thinking: How often do police guns end up in the hands of criminals? This question grew into a larger project once Stephens became a reporter and started the fight for this number as a fellow at Reveal. After his FOIA request was denied based on an argument that firearms trace data is confidential, the Reveal legal team sued—but it took seven years to claim victory. 

Five of those years were court battles that rose all the way to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The case stalled further after another federal court interpreted the exemption differently and generated an opposing precedent, creating uncertainty.

The last two years were spent waiting for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to cough up that one statistic. Armed with that number—52,529 former law enforcement weapons recovered at crime scenes—teams at the Trace, CBS News, and Reveal found that many of these guns had been traded in or sold back to gun manufacturers, a cost-saving measure that has sent thousands of guns back onto the streets to be used in violent crimes.

I spoke with D. Victoria Baranetsky—general counsel for the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), which houses Mother Jones and Reveal—about the battle over transparency on cop guns and the state of FOIA today. She’s led several other FOIA lawsuits for Reveal that have forced more transparency from the federal government: The rate of worker injuries at Amazon warehouses and most other American employers is no longer confidential, and the government now has to disclose the diversity of contractors it hires. She recently filed a case against OpenAI and Microsoft for using CIR’s content without permission or compensation. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.

How did this case with the ATF start?

It started with Alain [Stephens] calling me up and being like, “Does this law say what I think it says?” 

Alain was explaining to me that he was trying to get data from the ATF, but he was denied. There was this statute called the Tiahrt Amendment that did not allow for gun data to be disclosed. But there were exceptions—and the third exception under the law was for statistical aggregate data. 

And he said, “I’m asking for just the number of guns that law enforcement have given back and put back into the marketplace.” And I said, “Yeah, I think that’s statistical aggregate data.” 

So we sued.

What arguments did the ATF give for withholding data about police guns used in crimes?

They were saying that that exception was not meant for reporters. It was meant for only law enforcement and other folks that were supposed to be getting access to this data, not the general public. 

And then there was a whole new issue entirely. They said that making them search for this number through their database would be the creation of a new record, and agencies are not required to create new records. They’re only required to produce what they have. And so they said, “Listen, you make us plug in this analysis and spew out a number for you, that’s going to be a new record that wouldn’t have existed prior, and so we’re not obligated to disclose this.” 

The court shut that down immediately.

That kind of analysis would essentially destroy all kinds of data searches that governments have in their capacity today, because we’re living in the modern world and databases are the way that information is held. So if you limited searching a database as the creation of a new record, you’d essentially cut off access to tons of information that the public should have the right to know. 

Unfortunately, this is not the only case where we have come across that argument. 

So has that become a new tactic of how the government tries to restrict access to data?

Yes, it has worked in some locations. There’s a smattering of cases across the country leaning in either direction, but there’s no prevailing outcome yet as this is still being deliberated on across the country. 

That is one of the reasons why this case was actually a huge win completely outside the realm of the ATF…this was something that would apply to all cases involving databases.

What does a seven-year FOIA legal battle look like? 

A lot of emails. 

This was actually the longest case I dealt with while I’ve been at this job. It’s just stages of a lot of intense work and then waiting. So writing the brief, which takes, like, three months, and you’re kind of in this tunnel vision of how to perfectly describe this argument to the court, and you submit it, you file it at midnight, and then you wait. You just wait for months and months and then get an argument date, and you prep for that for months and months. And then you wait. 

Why is data transparency important for democracy?

In the United States, FOIA is actually one of the very few laws committed to transparency. And constitutionally, there are actually fewer and fewer protections for transparency.

There has been a sharp rise in the number of Exemption 3 statutes. Those are the statutes that Congress has been lobbied to pass to stop information from being disclosed under FOIA.

In fact, the Tiahrt Amendment, and the center of this case with Alain, was one of those statutes. The NRA [National Rifle Association] lobbied for that law to be passed, and I think they very intelligently did so, because I think its impact was actually huge. When you don’t have access to information, the public doesn’t really know what it thinks about an issue, because it can’t really get to the facts of the matter. So, I think, in general, facts help people make choices that can help them then make choices about who they elect into power. 

But I think there’s also an even more disturbing reason for transparency today, which is more and more information is being created than ever before—and more is being collected than ever before by large corporate and government powers. There’s a massive imbalance as to who has access to that data; it’s all corporations and governments. For the public to not have a countervailing pressure or countervailing force to have access to that is deeply problematic. More and more decisions are having an impact in our life that corporations and governments are involved in, and they’re making those decisions based on data that we have no access to. If you have no access to that, there’s no accountability as to how those decisions are being made.

Reveal faced a SLAPP lawsuit in 2016 from Planet Aid that was eventually thrown out by a federal court in 2021. What does the legal battle with Planet Aid have in common with the lawsuit for gun trace data? 

A SLAPP is a strategic lawsuit against public participation, something that’s supposed to quash First Amendment free speech activity. And anti-SLAPP statutes were created to quickly go into court. It’s not, theoretically, supposed to take more than a year or so at most. That [SLAPP] case went on for years—this incredible process of delay, delay, delay, eat up your resources, eat up your resources, eat up your resources, for something that was especially made to be answered quickly and efficiently. It dragged out for so long that it almost bankrupted our organization. You see tactics of this being used all over our system. 

I think that’s the greatest parallel to this case with Alain. There’s no end in sight, right? Like, you filed a lawsuit. You go through seven years. You win. And then you still have to file another lawsuit to actually enforce it. To get to finality, it just takes too long now, much longer than it ever should have taken. 

And there’s an added problem with FOIA where at some point, that information is stale. It doesn’t matter in the same way it would have mattered if it had been disclosed years prior. 

Most smaller newsrooms and freelance journalists don’t have the luxury of legal support on staff like Mother Jones and Reveal do. Knowing that, what does this mean for journalism? 

Most newsrooms, most journalists, most academics, protesters, citizens just don’t have the legal support to execute this. And that is really unfortunate and depressing. There was a paper written more than five years ago about how corporations are actually the ones that use FOIA the most to find out information about their competitors. So FOIA, drafted for the public and reporters, is not really being used by that sect of people. It’s being used often by corporate stakeholders who want to find information and that’ll give them a competitive advantage.

I still think [FOIA] does a lot, but I think the problem is how agencies choose to comply. The pressure put on them to comply is very minimal, and I think that greatly impacts journalism, because you know that if you actually did have access to this information, it would be helpful. 

In looking at FOIAs, does the presidential administration make a difference in how they’re treated? Did you see differences between our fights under Trump and Biden’s administrations? 

Honestly, I don’t think any administration is ever forthright in giving information. I think if you ask most people who live in the land of FOIA lawsuits, they’ll tell you that every administration kind of acts with a similarly hostile manner. The truth is power wants to hide problems. Power chooses to evade accountability, and that’s the whole point of FOIA. I think anyone who’s really in that position doesn’t necessarily want to share information. And our government, especially since 9/11, has just become a secrecy-obsessed state.

Thinking forward, what do you think the future holds for FOIA requests? 

There are all these specific areas that are going under a lot of different splits or interpretations. One of them is about whether data searching a database is the production of a new record. That’s like one little spot. I think that there are a few other hot-button areas. One is like the exemption “Glomar,” where an agency gives the response, “Can’t confirm or deny that the records even exist.” Now we’re seeing that Glomar is applied even in cases where Glomar can’t be applied, or just the expansion of Glomar. 

There was a decision that came out in 2019 that changed the test for what was confidential business information, which is exempt. And the Supreme Court changed it to be more friendly toward corporations. Previously, confidential business information was things that only would substantially hurt a corporation if disclosed—like you have an ingredient list for Coca-Cola. But the court changed it to whatever a company says is customarily or actually secret. As long as they give it a rubber stamp and say it’s so, it is so. I think that area of law already has had a lot of litigation, but that’ll be really interesting. 

Transparency has actually always been a bipartisan issue. In some ways, all administrations hate it and all administrations love it because it equally hurts both sides or helps both sides. So that’s why legislation on FOIA has been able to pass over the past decade. That being said, the courts have been much more pro-corporate and pro-law enforcement in a way that I do worry will further stifle the charge of FOIA.