The man suspected of planning to assassinate former President Donald Trump had been reported to U.S. federal officials long before he was arrested in Florida on Sunday, according to a news report published Tuesday.
In fact, a nurse who encountered Ryan Wesley Routh in Ukraine was so worried about his activities that she contacted the FBI in 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal.
And it wasn’t the first time his name had been brought to the bureau’s attention.
Routh is an outspoken leftist with a felony conviction from 2002 for possession of a fully automatic machine gun, according to the New York Post.
He was taken into custody after fleeing from Trump International Golf Course near West Palm Beach, where he’d apparently been frighted off by gunfire from a Secret Service agent.
Left behind at the scene were “a loaded SKS-style, 7.62×39 caliber rifle with a scope” with the serial number defaced, a backpack and a GoPro camera.
He faces 20 years in prison on weapons charges alone.
According to the Journal, Routh traveled to Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022, claiming he was organizing volunteer fighters from Afghanistan to fight in Europe.
He was apparently not impressive.
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A former CIA officer involved in organizing humanitarian and volunteer efforts in Ukraine, identified by the Journal as Sarah Adams, told the newspaper Routh was considered a “fraudster” and “kind of a whack job.”
Some suspected him of “engaging in human trafficking or immigration fraud,” the Journal reported.
“A lot of people were trying to get him to stop his activities, or at least prevent people from falling for his scams,” Adams said, according to the Journal.
And he was known to harbor bitter feelings against Trump.
“Ryan was very upset about the fact that Trump was trying to negotiate a deal with Putin instead of trying to really have Ukraine’s back,” one French man who’d met Routh in Ukraine in 2022 told the Journal. (The man was not identified.)
Chelsea Walsh, a West Palm Beach nurse who worked in Ukraine and met Routh there, told the Journal she was so suspicious of him that she reported him to Customs and Border Protection after returning to the United States.
According to the Journal, she told the CBP during an interview at Dulles International Airport in Washington that Routh “was among the most dangerous Americans she met during her month-and-a-half-long stint in Ukraine.”
Walsh took her concerns to the FBI later, according to the Journal, after “she heard in 2023 that Routh was attempting to recruit Syrian refugees to fight in Ukraine.”
She filed an online report with both the FBI and Interpol — the International Criminal Police Organization. She never heard back from either organization, the Journal reported.
After Sunday’s assassination attempt, according to the Journal, she called the FBI’s tip line and spoke to someone for more than 20 minutes.
At a news conference on Monday, an FBI special agent told reporters Routh had previously been reported to the FBI in 2019, when he was living in Hawaii. The bureau received a tip that Routh had a firearm, which would have been illegal considering his felony conviction.
The FBI didn’t ignore the information, said Special Agent in Charge Jeffrey Veltri, from the FBI’s Miami field office, according to the New York Post.
“In following up on the tip, the alleged complainant was interviewed and did not verify providing the initial information,” Veltri said.
He added: “The FBI passed that information to local law enforcement in Honolulu.”
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