The attempted assassination of former President Trump could help the FBI accomplish something it has struggled to do for years: repair its poisonous relationship with Washington’s GOP political establishment.
It might even curtail the law enforcement agency’s role as one of Trump’s favorite punching bags. The FBI is leading the investigation while much of the blame for the security breach that led to the attempted assassination has fallen on the Secret Service. “We weren’t involved in the problem. We’re investigating what happened afterwards, which hopefully will give the bureau the chance to do what it does best: throw resources, the best technology and skills at an important investigation and solve it and shed light on it,” a former senior FBI official told Politico. "We’re not always in that situation.”
The FBI — which said Monday that it gained access to the suspected shooter’s phone — has much ground to make up. Less than two months ago, Trump was accusing agents of trying to kill him when they raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, carrying out a court-issued warrant to retrieve classified documents. The former president’s denunciations of the FBI were the latest installment in a history of Trump-FBI animosity that dates back more than seven years to his firing of then-Director James Comey in 2017. The abrupt dismissal jolted the agency and left many agents and staff dismayed. Trump’s attacks on the bureau intensified after reports from the Justice Department’s inspector general faulted the FBI’s handling of an application for a surveillance warrant for a foreign policy adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Republican lawmakers picked up the fight in a series of contentious hearings where the man Trump picked to replace Comey, Christopher Wray, acknowledged errors and vowed reforms. After Republicans won control of the House in 2022, they formed a subcommittee focused on the “weaponization” of the federal government — a term that typically signifies the notion that the FBI has been politicized by Democrats or Trump opponents.