Attorney General Todd Blanche stood at the White House Tuesday and said what millions of Americans already knew in their bones. The same FBI that spent years trying to bury Donald Trump in prison failed to protect him when a gunman opened fire in Butler.
Blanche was there. Before the shots. After the shots. Through the investigation that followed.
“I was with President Trump during the time period before and after the attempted assassination attempt on his life, and he was shot, he was a victim. There was an innocent man killed, there were other people who were very seriously injured when that happened.”
“What President Trump said today about the new information—and this new information is information that we found, that the FBI found, that they produced to the Senate in response to inquiries that they had—it is new information about the shooter and about his background, about his history, and that’s stuff that we didn’t know before. So that’s the new information.”
Blanche did not sugarcoat the Bureau’s performance in the weeks and months leading up to Butler.
“As far as the President’s frustration with the FBI, I was there with him, I lived it. I mean, you have a situation where it’s not really clear what the leadership of the FBI were doing in the weeks and months ahead of the attempted assassination to protect President Trump. That’s the same organization that was simultaneously trying to put him in prison till he dies. So his frustration and concern about what the former director was doing is something that is not new. He said that for a very long time.”
That is the indictment. One agency. Two missions. Lock him up, and somehow miss the kid on the roof with a rifle.
Director Kash Patel, Blanche said, is now doing the work that should have been done from day one.
“I was with him during the investigation and trying, you know, before he was elected President, trying to understand what happened and why. And Director Patel has undertaken a Herculean effort to go through all the documents and understand what was missed, if anything, and to provide anything that hadn’t come forward to the American people, to the American people. And that’s what he’s done.”