Ryan Routh, duct tape assassin

OPINION:

The barrel protruding from trees at the sixth hole at Trump International Golf Club on Sept. 15 was mounted with an ad-lib attachment: a puttied, taped rifle scope.

Conducting surveillance, an alert Secret Service agent spotted the gun as presidential candidate Donald Trump was minutes away from reaching the sixth tee. The agent fired, sending Ryan Routh running to his Nissan Xterra and then into the handcuffs of pursuing sheriff’s deputies. An FBI agent said Mr. Routh had set up a base camp for an “easy shot,” according to a court filing reviewed by The Washington Times.

Mr. Trump survived Mr. Routh, the second man who tried to kill him last year, won the presidency and continued to make the political left insane. Mr. Routh sits in the Federal Detention Center, Miami, indicted on a charge of attempted assassination of a major political candidate in West Palm Beach, Florida.

That gun, a Chinese-manufactured, Soviet-designed SKS rifle, is the case’s most valuable possession as federal prosecutors move toward trial in U.S. District Court. Defense attorneys want their hands on the gun to conduct a test fire, but a Times case review shows that prosecutors told Judge Aileen M. Cannon, “No way.”

“When the rifle was collected at the golf course, it had a scope attached by a combination of black tape, metal brackets, and silicone/putty material with a wrapper taped around the ocular lens of the scope,” said Kristy Militello, one of Mr. Routh’s federal public defenders.

“Defense counsel does not know the exact circumstances surrounding the removal of these items from the scope,” she said in a court filing, “as those items were apparently boxed separately from the rifle and not made available for our evidence view. Due to the government disassembly of the firearm, the defense cannot inspect, measure, photograph, or test fire the firearm in its original state. Because such testing could have resulted in exculpatory material, the defense has been irreparably harmed.”

Was the gun, as seized by authorities, “attached in a wildly inaccurate or useless fashion” before being taken apart? Ms. Militello asked. Because “it may have been impossible for the defendant to commit the alleged crime if the firearm was defective, inaccurate, or had a limited range.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney John C. Shipley countered that there is no legal precedent for letting a defendant’s experts fire a gun to be used as trial evidence. He dismissed the whole argument that a broken gun somehow means Mr. Routh is exonerated on a charge of trying to kill Mr. Trump.

“The suggestion that this rifle may have been inoperable at the time Routh attempted to kill the President is astonishing,” Mr. Shipley said.

He noted that Mr. Routh loaded and test-fired the gun before selecting a sniper’s nest and waiting more than 12 hours to ambush golfer Mr. Trump.

“Impossibility, or a defendant’s inability to execute his plan, is not a defense to an attempted crime,” he said. “Simply put, there is no permissible defense based on factual impossibility — the notion that the defendant could not have killed President Trump, whether due to poor planning, mechanical gun defects, intervention by law enforcement, or otherwise. Those considerations have nothing to do with whether the defendant intended to kill President Trump.”

In April, Mr. Shipley filed a letter he had sent Ms. Militello detailing what an expert FBI witness would testify to in court about Mr. Routh’s assassin’s playbook. The aim was to blunt the argument that Mr. Routh couldn’t have killed Mr. Trump.

“This witness will testify regarding, among other things, the Defendant’s observation point, also known as the final firing point (FFP); Defendant’s reconnaissance, selection, measurement, and ‘up-armoring’ of the FFP,” the prosecutor said.

Mr. Routh conducted internet searches on how to measure distance and on targeting from his sniper’s nest, or final firing point.

“This witness will testify about methods employed to avoid detection and sustainment of Defendant’s FFP,” the filing said. “This witness will also define terms of art in this field.”

Had Mr. Trump walked onto the sixth green as Mr. Routh waited, he would have been an “easy target.”

“The position chosen by the defendant located outside the chain link fence and in line with a mostly unobstructed view of the 6th and 7th holes as a place to wait for President Trump to arrive was a good sniper ‘hide,’” the unidentified FBI expert will say. “The location chosen by Routh provided a relatively easy shot at President Trump on the 6th hole even without a ‘zeroed’ rifle scope or with iron sights because the cart path that the President would have driven on, as well as the 6th green and hole flag, were a close distance away from his location. The 6th hole was an optimal target location from Routh’s sniper hide.”

Mr. Routh, 59, spent time in Afghanistan trying to recruit Afghans to fight for Ukraine against invading Russia. He was certainly familiar with the SKS, whether in Afghanistan, Ukraine or back in his native North Carolina.

“The close location of the cart path and the green to the 6th hole, and the number of rounds in the magazine, meant that anyone with any degree of familiarity with this rifle could have hit a target at those locations, among others,” the prosecutor’s letter reads. “Routh would have been able to acquire his target and fire all of the [11] rounds in the magazine in a matter of seconds.”

In the end, Judge Cannon gave the Routh team permission to fire the gun, but only to see whether it was operational and not to determine whether it could hit a precise target at a certain range.

Assassination these days is a common topic among the left on social media. They want Mr. Trump to be killed by someone. They want the next Ryan Routh.

Mr. Routh lay in wait for Mr. Trump 65 days after Thomas Crooks lay on a sloped rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, and fired a rifle shot that split the future president’s right ear, inches from a location that would have made for a fatal wound. A Secret Service sharpshooter killed Crooks. In West Palm Beach, a Secret Service agent likely saved Mr. Trump’s life by spotting Mr. Routh and his gun barrel.

• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.