By The New York Times (U.S.) | Created at 2024-09-30 16:38:04 | Updated at 2024-10-01 04:15:01
11 hours ago
The plea from the man accused of mounting an assassination attempt against former President Donald J. Trump came at a hearing that lasted less than five minutes.
Sept. 30, 2024, 12:33 p.m. ET
The man accused of mounting an assassination attempt against former President Donald J. Trump at one of his Florida golf courses pleaded not guilty on Monday, in a brief appearance in federal court.
The defendant, Ryan W. Routh, formally entered his plea through one of his lawyers. He spoke only when United States Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart of the Federal District Court in West Palm Beach, Fla., asked him if he understood the five charges against him.
“Yes, your honor,” Mr. Routh replied, clad in a beige jail uniform.
The most serious charge in the case, attempting to assassinate a political candidate, carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. Mr. Routh also faces charges of assaulting a federal officer and three firearms offenses.
Monday’s court proceedings lasted less than five minutes. At a much longer court hearing last week, prosecutors laid out evidence that Mr. Routh, an itinerant building contractor, had appeared to survey the grounds of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach for about a month before his arrest.
On Sept. 15, while Mr. Trump was playing the fifth hole of the course, a Secret Service agent scouting ahead saw a man’s face and the barrel of a semiautomatic rifle outside the fence near the sixth hole. The agent fired at the man, who fled, prosecutors said, adding that the man was later identified as Mr. Routh.
It was the second apparent assassination attempt against Mr. Trump since July.
As they investigated the episode, the authorities learned that Mr. Routh had left a box at a friend’s house in North Carolina months earlier, and that a note in the box read, “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you.”
Mr. Routh’s federal public defenders argued at the hearing last week that the apparent assassination attempt was unsophisticated and perhaps intended more to draw attention than to succeed.
The case was assigned to United States District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the same judge who presided last year over the federal prosecution of Mr. Trump involving the mishandling of classified documents and obstruction of the government’s attempts to retrieve them. Judge Cannon dismissed that case this summer, a decision the Justice Department has appealed.
