Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna went further than any sitting member of Congress has gone publicly, calling the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally "an inside job" that she believes the Biden administration orchestrated through deliberate security failures. Luna made the claim Wednesday on the Pod Force One podcast hosted by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine.
The allegation is explosive, and Luna, who sits in the House and questioned former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle directly, grounded it in specific claims about whistleblower testimony, staffing decisions, and the speed with which the crime scene was processed. Whether those claims ultimately hold up under scrutiny, they arrive at a moment when official investigations have confirmed a cascade of security breakdowns that remain difficult to explain as mere incompetence.
Luna told Devine that the Butler shooting bore "all the marks of intelligence." She cited Secret Service whistleblowers who came forward to say they were "not present or told to stand down" on the day of the rally. She described a coordinated sniper group arranged by local law enforcement that "just so happened to not show up."
"I was one of the individuals to actually ask questions of the former Secret Service Director [Kimberly Cheatle]. We actually had whistleblowers from within the Secret Service that came out, that stated that, you know, they were basically not present or told to stand down at the actual, there was a group of snipers that were actually met that day, that was coordinated by the local law enforcement, and they just so happened to not show up."
She also pointed to the Biden administration's decision to provide Trump, then a former president and active presidential candidate, with limited Secret Service staffing. And she flagged the rapid cleanup of the crime scene, noting that within hours of 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks being killed by agents, "the entire scene was done."
Luna raised unresolved questions about Crooks's personal effects, asking what happened to his video game console and why the FBI never followed up on reports of burner phones found in connection with the shooter. She questioned why a so-called "lone shooter" would have needed burner phones at all.
"What happened to his video game console? I mean, there's a lot outstanding, and I've actually shared this before. To me, this has all the marks of intelligence, and I believe, an inside job."
Luna also took aim at the FBI's broader credibility, noting the bureau was unable to "locate who actually owned that bag of cocaine that was found in the White House" and accused the agency of "destroying the evidence" in that case. The investigation into the Butler shooting, she emphasized, was conducted under the Biden administration and an FBI led by then-Director Christopher Wray.
Luna's claims are her own, and the "inside job" label goes well beyond what any official investigation has concluded. But the documented failures surrounding Butler are severe enough to make the question uncomfortable for anyone defending the agencies involved.
A Government Accountability Office report found that the Secret Service received a warning about a possible attempt on Trump's life ten days before the July 13 rally, and failed to share it with local law enforcement or key advance personnel responsible for site security. The Washington Examiner reported that the GAO attributed this failure to the Secret Service's "siloed practice for sharing classified threat information." The report also identified misallocation of resources, lack of training, poor communication, and unclear accountability over who was in charge at the event.
Luna herself responded to that report by saying the negligence was not accidental but intentional, and that the angle from which Trump was shot "was actually left, in my opinion, open."
Separately, newly released FBI records obtained through a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit revealed that law enforcement had flagged an "unknown male acting suspiciously" on the day of the shooting. An FBI FD-302 report dated July 16, 2024, described radio warnings about the individual, including one report noting the unknown male was looking at a law enforcement sniper position. Just The News reported that these warnings were communicated over radio "to Command, to the Secret Service, to Pennsylvania State Police, to 'everybody.'"
The warnings went out. Crooks still fired.
On July 13, Crooks positioned himself on a rooftop roughly 400 feet from the stage and fired eight shots from an AR-15-style rifle. One bullet grazed Trump's right ear. Another killed Corey Comperatore, a former Buffalo Township Fire Company chief who was shielding his family. Two other rally attendees, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, were hospitalized. Secret Service agents killed Crooks on the roof.
In February, the Secret Service confirmed that six agents assigned to Trump's protection at the Butler rally were suspended over security failures. Fox News reported that Luna called the suspensions "the absolute bare minimum," while Sen. Mike Lee wrote that "the Deep State is deliberately slow" in holding anyone accountable.
The Butler shooting was not an isolated incident. Ryan Routh, 59, carried out a separate assassination attempt on Trump in Florida later in 2024 and was recently sentenced to life in prison. And just last weekend, 31-year-old Cole Thomas Allen allegedly stormed the White House Correspondents' Dinner at the Washington Hilton, firing shots at the hotel in what marked the third attempt on Trump's life since Butler.
Allen reportedly called himself the "Friendly Federal Assassin" in a manifesto and sent anti-Trump writing to family members just ten minutes before he opened fire. Video posted by Trump on Truth Social showed Allen wearing all black and sprinting inside the hotel with a gun. Police said he carried a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. A senior U.S. official told CBS News that Allen was part of a group called The Wide Awakes and had attended a No Kings protest in California.
The shooting at the correspondents' dinner rattled Washington and drew immediate scrutiny over how Allen gained access to the hotel perimeter while armed.
Allen's manifesto, portions of which were published by the New York Post, included language attempting to justify violence against Trump and those attending the dinner. A U.S. official said Allen's writing was given to police by a relative. His alleged targets included administration officials but notably excluded FBI Director Kash Patel.
Trump addressed the escalating threats at a press conference hours after the dinner on April 25. He told reporters that the repeated attempts on his life were because he was making an impact on the world. The president had also returned to Butler in October 2024, twelve weeks after the shooting, and spoke to the crowd there.
"I must tell you the most impactful people, the people that do the most, you take a look at the people, Abraham Lincoln, I mean, you go through the people that have gone through this where they got 'em, but the people that do the most and the people that make the biggest impact are the ones that they go after."
At that October rally, Trump also said: "I will never quit, I will never bend, I will never break, I will never yield, not even in the face of death itself."
Luna said the full truth about Butler may now be "actually under the purview of release by President Trump himself." That suggests she believes classified or restricted documents exist that could shed light on what happened, and who, if anyone, allowed it to happen.
The broader security environment around Trump continues to raise alarm. The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over what prosecutors described as a threat against Trump underscores how seriously law enforcement is now treating even indirect menace aimed at the president.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to press his legislative agenda on multiple fronts, from pushing Senate Republicans to end the filibuster to navigating complex international standoffs. The political stakes around him have never been higher, and neither have the physical dangers.
No official investigation has concluded that the Butler shooting was an inside job. But the GAO findings, the FBI records, the whistleblower accounts Luna described, and the suspension of six Secret Service agents all point to a security apparatus that either failed catastrophically, or was allowed to fail. Those are not the same thing, and the American public deserves to know which one it was.
When the people charged with protecting a president can't explain how a 20-year-old with a rifle ended up on a rooftop 400 feet away, after warnings went out to everyone, the questions aren't going to stop. And they shouldn't.