Five “assassination teams” are currently attempting to kill former US President Donald Trump, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz has claimed, citing sources in the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaking to Breitbart News on Thursday, Gaetz condemned an apparent attempt on Trump’s life last weekend as “tragic” and “avoidable,” claiming that there is insufficient security around the former president to protect him from harm.
Gaetz went on to claim that he recently met with an official from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), who told him that there are “at least five teams in-country that are geared toward killing Trump.”
“Three of them that we know are foreign in nature. Two of them we know are domestic in nature, and that calls for a force protection that we do not have around the former president right now,” Gaetz continued, noting that the foreign teams are linked to Ukraine, Iran, and Pakistan.
These teams are able to walk around freely in the US, Gaetz claimed, because there is “insufficient scrutiny to stop them from doing so.”
Over the last two months, Trump has survived two assassination attempts. The former president and Republican presidential candidate narrowly avoided death at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July, when a bullet fired from around 150m away grazed his ear. The gunman fired from a rooftop that had inexplicably been left unprotected by the Secret Service, and managed to kill one rally goer and injure two others before he was shot dead by a sniper.
The second attempt took place at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday. A gunman aiming at Trump from behind bushes was spooked by Secret Service agents and arrested after he fled the scene. The suspect, identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, had unsuccessfully attempted to join the Ukrainian military in 2022, and afterwards embarked on a scheme to recruit former Afghan commandos to fight for Kiev.
Routh was questioned by US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents upon his return to the US later that year. According to Gaetz, the agents “thought his story was so suspicious that he was recruiting freedom fighters all over the world to go fight in Ukraine, and when they asked him how he was financing this, he said, ‘Oh, well, my wife is paying for it.’”
The CBP referred Routh to the DHS’ investigations unit, which “declined to even proceed with an investigation,” Gaetz continued. “They just stopped and let the guy in the country. And we’ve got a lot of questions about that.”
With two assassins able to come within firing range of Trump, Gaetz said that some of his Republican colleagues “have not ruled out a mole inside the Secret Service providing information about points of vulnerability.”
“I’ve not seen evidence of that,” the Florida Republican clarified, “but I’ve got colleagues that are very, very smart at this who say they can’t rule that out, given some of the anomalies and the fact pattern here.”