Authorities Were Warned About Suspected Trump Gunman Years Ago

Years before the gunman suspected of attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Sunday was seized by police, U.S. authorities had been alerted of the danger he posed.

The gunman was taken into custody on Sunday after ultimately being caught traveling northbound on Interstate 95. Secret Service had seen the barrel of his gun poking out between bushes at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. “The suspected gunman in Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump was hiding near the former president’s Florida golf course for roughly 12 hours before a Secret Service agent spotted him and opened fire, prosecutors said Monday,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

A nurse who met the suspected gunman several times in Kyiv in 2022 told The Wall Street Journal that she grew so concerned about his propensity to make violent threats that she informed a Customs and Border Protection officer. She provided a list of people she had met who had alarmed her while telling the officer the suspected gunman “should be number one.”

“She showed the officer a notebook listing more than a dozen names of Americans and others whose actions had alarmed her, she recounted. Under the heading ‘Overall Predatory Behavior (or antisocial traits)’ were four names. (The gunman’s) was at the top,” the Journal noted.

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The nurse also filed an online report with the FBI and Interpol in 2023 expressing her concern about the suspected gunman. However, she said neither Customs nor the FBI contacted her regarding the issue.

A French man told the Journal that when he met the suspected gunman in Kyiv in 2022, he was “very upset about the fact that Trump was trying to negotiate a deal with Putin instead of trying to really have Ukraine’s back.”

In 2019, the FBI received a tip that the suspected gunman had a firearm despite being a felon; the FBI alerted authorities in Honolulu, where he was then living, but then closed the investigation.

The suspected gunman reportedly issued social media posts that catalyzed aid groups to ban him from their Signal groups and alert the State Department, former CIA officer Sarah Adams, who ran groups aiding humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, said.