On Tuesday, a jury found Ryan Routh guilty of trying to kill Donald Trump near the president’s Florida golf course, Pam Bondi announced on social networks.
Routh, 59, was convicted of having the intention of killing Trump, then a republican presidential candidate, when he pointed a rifle through a fence at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach while Trump was playing golf.
According to Reuters, he was also convicted of four other positions, including the impedance of a federal agent and weapons crimes. He faces a maximum life imprisonment.
According to the witness testimony, an agent of the secret service that patrolled before Trump saw Routh with the rifle and opened fire, which led him to flee without shooting a shot.
“This plot was carefully elaborate and deadly,” said prosecutor John Shipley, adding that without the agent’s intervention, “Donald Trump would not be alive.”
The 12 -day trial in Fort Pierce, Florida, occurred in the midst of the main concerns about political violence in the United States, after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Trump himself survived two murder attempts during his 2024 campaign, one of which left him injured in his ear before his return to the White House.
“Today’s guilt verdict against Trump’s possible murderer, Ryan Routh, illustrates the commitment of the Department of Justice to punish those who participate in political violence,” Bondi said in a statement about X.
“This murder attempt was not only an attack against our president, but an affront to our own nation.”
Democrats have also been recent victims of violence. In April, a incendiary set fire to the residence of the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, while his family was inside. In June, an armed man disguised when a police officer killed the legislator of the state of Minnesota, Melissa Hortman and her husband, and shot the state senator John Hoffman and his wife.
Routh declared himself innocent, but dismissed his lawyers and represented himself. He said he was gentle and not violent, although the judge interrupted his opening statement. The prosecutors presented testimony of the law agents and the evidence that Routh had tracked Trump’s schedule and used false identities.
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Routh, who lived more recently in Hawaii, had worked as a roofing contractor and participated in prodemocratic movements in Taiwan and Ukraine. His daughter Sara told Reuters that she spent 10 months in Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, sleeping in a kyiv tent and helping to recruit volunteers and supplies of origin. “They were about to fight a war. They had nothing to fight with,” he said. “I felt I could make a difference.”
Prosecutors said Routh arrived in southern Florida approximately one month before the incident of September 15, 2024, stayed at a truck stop and monitoring Trump’s movements. On the day of the incident, he allegedly waited almost 10 hours in shrubs with a view to Sexth Hole Green. The researchers recovered a SKS style rifle, bags containing body armor plates and a small video camera directed to the course.
Trump was a few hundred meters away in the fifth hole when Routh was seen. He was arrested later that afternoon after being arrested by the police on a Florida road.
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