Officials with the U.S. Secret Service and FBI have confirmed that they discovered a hunting stand near Palm Beach International Airport that might have facilitated yet another assassination attempt on President Trump.
They discovered it Thursday during “advance security preparations” for Mr. Trump’s arrival the following day, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement.
During the sweep, which “included the use of technology and comprehensive physical sweeps,” agents identified “items of interest,” near the airport, Mr. Guglielmi said.
FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency was now overseeing the probe into how the stand came to be there and to whom it belonged.
“No individuals were located at the scene,” Mr. Patel told Fox News, which first reported on the hunting stand. “The FBI has since taken the investigatory lead, flying in resources to collect all evidence from the scene, and deploying our cell phone analytics capabilities.”
Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, himself a former Secret Service agent, offered additional details on Monday.
Mr. Patel “was directly involved right away” upon hearing about the security sweep, Mr. Bongino said on “Fox & Friends.”
“This hunting stand was appropriately dismantled, is being flown to our lab. I believe it’s there right now — and all of the forensic tools we have, from digital tools to biometric tools, they are all going to be applied to try to find out who put this up there and why,” he said.
Mr. Bongino also acknowledged that the Secret Service had been forced to make “a lot of modifications” in response to the uptick in political violence, including two notable attempts on Mr. Trump’s life and the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The expanded security perimeter sweeps implemented in response to prior attacks on Mr. Trump underscored that the president’s safety was a “zero-fail mission,” Mr. Bongino said.
“You can’t have a mistake here,” he said. “It’s just not — having been a Secret Service agent, and now an FBI agent, and with the NYPD, I could tell you this is one of those missions where there are no do-overs.”
One of the previous would-be assassins, North Carolina resident Ryan Routh, was convicted in September after his arrest a year prior.
Routh set up a sniper location just outside the fence of Mr. Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club on Sept. 15, 2024. Mr. Trump would have been just 130 feet from the sniper position when he reached that part of the course, had Secret Service not spotted the barrel of Routh’s rifle protruding through the bushes.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, a man was arrested earlier in August for parking a rental car in an employee parking lot at the Palm Beach airport with a loaded Smith & Wesson rifle and at least three magazines of ammunition.
Michael Jeffrey Rodrigues, 41, was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. There is no public information, however, linking him with the discovery of the hunting stand.
