Ronny Jackson Memory Holes His Nephew’s Injury
As I noted in real time, during a hearing on the Trump shooting yesterday, FBI Director Chris Wray suggested that the FBI is not sure whether the former President was hit by a bullet or shrapnel.
I’ve held off on posting about it, because I expect we’ll get further clarification from the FBI. But Josh Marshall and others have been focused closely on it since, which has set off some squirrelness among Trump’s boosters.
Propagandists have set Trump’s own narrative of the shooting to video.
Speaker Mike Johnson suggested Wray wasn’t credible — and that it wouldn’t matter anyway if Trump was falsely claiming he “took a bullet for democracy” if, in reality, he had taken shrapnel for fascism.
Johnson said he didn’t find Wray’s testimony credible.
“We’ve all seen the video, we’ve seen the analysis, we’ve heard it from multiple sources in different angles that a bullet went through his ear. I’m not sure it matters that much,” Johnson said.
He also said Wray “was not forthcoming with some of the information that we would expect.”
And then, finally, Ronny Jackson weighed in. First, he screamed that it was irresponsible for the FBI Director to suggest the evidence was not certainy.
More remarkably, he told CBS that, of course it was a bullet, because if it wasn’t, what would have hit him?
If it wasn’t a bullet wound, I ask you: ‘What was it’? Piece of glass? Where’d the glass come from? I’ve been told the teleprompters are completely intact. So what just mysteriously.. a piece of glass just appeared out of nowhere?
This is where things get really weird.
That’s because Ronny Jackson — I believe this was before he had yet seen Trump after the shooting — described that his nephew, who was sitting close to Trump, was injured when “something had grazed and cut his neck.”
Maybe, just maybe, the same kind of thing that hit his nephew also hit Trump, standing just a short distance away?
Again, I’m agnostic and don’t much care which it was. I care that Trump has refused to provide real medical transparency about the incident, and the press corp has — before Wray’s testimony — largely let that slide. If it was a bullet that damaged his ear, there are actually greater ongoing concerns about head injuries.
But this now smells like flopsweat.
Just release the medical records.
Also agnostic, but there is this photo of a bullet passing by Trump.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/politics/video/doug-mills-trump-rally-photo-src-digvid
IS that a photo of a bullet whizzing past Trump?
That isn’t some other projectile, or a piece of a projectile? It isn’t an artifact from image compression? Can you tell it’s traveling left to right in the image?
I can only speak for myself, but I would be unable to say with certainty that it is a photo of a bullet passing through the air. Or the wake left behind a bullet passing through the air. Or whatever. Muzzle velocity of a 5.56 round is like 3000 feet per second.
I can absolutely put a red circle around anything in an image and put a caption of whatever I want.
Yes. And I think the FBI has figured out exactly what that photo does show.
WRAY: [0:22] Um, as I said, I think with respect to ah former President Trump, um, there’s, some question about whether or not ah it’s a bullet or shrapnel that you know, that hit his ear. [0:33]
It may be worth noting that Director Wray mentioned shrapnel in response to questions from two different (Republican) Congressmen. When Rep. Kevin Kiley of California asked him, “To the best of your understanding, how close did the assassin’s bullet come to killing President Trump?”, Wray responded, “My understanding is either it or some shrapnel is what grazed his ear, so I don’t know that I have the actual distance.” (Kiley followed up with, “Very very close, you would agree.”, and Wray said, “Yes.”)
And then about an hour later came the other answer you cite, in response to Jim Jordan asking for an accounting of what each of the eight bullets fired had hit. After explaining that he didn’t have that information at hand, and then making the statement you quote, Wray went on: “It’s conceivable — I don’t know as I sit here right now — that, in addition to causing the grazing, could also have landed somewhere else”. I wonder how deliberate his choice of words was in “causing the grazing”. That allows for the possibility of a bullet striking something which broke loose and struck Trump’s ear even as the bullet went on to strike something else.
If that is a bullet, it does not appear that it could have possibly hit his right ear. It is too low. With a right handed shooter, firing rapidly, it is likely the next round would have gone higher and more to the shooters right.
There was an assassination attempt. Trump survived.
The only remaining interest for me is who else was the shooter helped by.
But I thoroughly enjoy Republicans fighting off rumors and wasting time, when they could just ask Trump to release the medical reports. This and the couch-coitus narratives are for odd reasons dominating the media.
Good, good.
They shooter didn’t need help. Don’t spread CT.
You know what, screw that. We are only taking Trump’s word, and this, well, who IS this guy anyway? He’s not a doctor any more, he’s barely a congressman, so why is he even weighing in on it? I don’t GAF that he was there, he’s a known liar, just like Trump is.
It’s goddamned revealing how evasive they are all being about it. But NOOOOO! let’s bash the head of FBI instead of listening to him tell the truth, mmkay Pastor Johnson?
“The only remaining interest for me is who else was the shooter helped by”. This question, in the form of a statement, assumes someone helped the shooter. Until there is some reason to believe there was you are encouraging CT.
I do recall a brief kerfuffle in 2016 when Trump compared avoiding STDs in the 60s with surviving Vietnam.
So Trump thinks never wearing a condom is tantamount to surviving a shooting war? LOL.
Ronny Jackson is worse at giving Trump cover than he was at being his WH physician. He completed his residency in emergency medicine. He supposedly examined the ear wound itself. He should have a better idea about what caused it than most people at the FBI. But all he has to support his contention that it was a grazing wound from a bullet is not his examination – or reports by the examining physicians who treated it – but a question, what else could it be? FFS.
Oddly enough, a shrapnel wound would better explain Jackson’s lack of concern about concussive damage to Trump’s hearing or brain. Shrapnel would travel at a fraction of the speed of an unimpeded rifle round, fired 150 yds away, substantially decreasing the potential for concussive damage.
An interesting question is whether examining physicians found trace evidence of other substances in the wound they treated: metal, glass, wood, fibers, etc. Perhaps another reason their reports are still in lock-up.
The FBI will be able to look at the data that is part of every photo a digital camera takes, determine shutter speed and calculate the velocity of the “projectile” in the photo.
Josh Marshall has been pushing hard for more than a week now for the media to dig into this question. His concern has been that, although he feels Donald Trump probably was grazed by a bullet, the media’s unwillingness to report on the uncertainty — their deference to Trump’s initial statement and Rep. Ronny Jackson’s letter — does not bode well for how they will act should Trump become president again.
And because the media has been treating the matter as settled, the public has followed suit. For an example, look at the Talk page for the Wikipedia entry on the shooting and note the great reluctance to even cite Christopher Wray’s testimony on this point because it contradicts what several Wiki editors on that locked article have understood to have been “proven.”
One last point: Marshall was one of the first national journalists to note a WPXI story (which after a week’s delay was cited in the Wikipedia article) which mentioned that four police officers positioned near Donald Trump when the shooting happened were injured by “debris”.
Ahhh… 1st I’ve heard of that. Thx.
Clear and obvious lie — from the very start — that Lard Ass was hit directly by an AR15 round fired from 150+ yards away. The amount of blood and disfigurement that would result from that would have been FAR greater. He recoils and puts his hand to ear as if he was BITTEN BY A MOSQUITO, not shot by a sniper.
Shrapnel from a bullet hitting something else that subsequently broke/splintered and happened to hit dum-dum.
I don’t even know it’s shrapnel. It’s possible he just clonked his head/ear on the podium on the way down.
Trump did reach up to his ear just before the first gunshot was heard (the bullet of course was flying at supersonic speed), apparently because he felt something strike it. (Although I suppose it’s possible that he did so because he heard something pass close to his ear.)
Are you using “dum-dum” to describe Trump, the bullet, or both?
Was ref to the former but funnier if both :)
There are also such things as frangible rounds for the .223 (and other sizes). These splinter on impact, rather than maintain their integrity and ricochet. But the small bits keep traveling for a few yards. That would produce damaging, but essentially non-lethal fragments within a few yards of initial impact.
Yep, flop sweat and fishy.
I think it’s possible that the truth is much more tragic and exploitative than people care to imagine. Trump has proven himself to be a hideous monster, time and again. I think this time is only different by degree of depravity. Far more detestable.
The only reason that Trump withholds information is that it does not fit the narrative he wants to propagate and/or raise funds off of.