Representative Eli Crane and his fringe views on recent assassination attempts have been given a wider audience thanks to Republican efforts.
Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

As Lawmaker Claims Trump’s Shooting Was Inside Job, G.O.P. Indulges Him

Representative Eli Crane, a first-term Arizona Republican, has emerged as the chief right-wing voice pushing conspiracy theories about the Trump assassination attempts.

by · NY Times

He posits that there is a mole within Donald J. Trump’s Secret Service detail and warns that the former president should bolster his private security to “watch the watchers.”

He says he is skeptical that the F.B.I. will “get to the bottom” of the first attempted assassination against Mr. Trump — and even if it does, he declares, “I don’t believe that they would give us the truth.”

He has repeatedly raised the possibility that the shooter who tried to assassinate Mr. Trump in July at an open-air rally in Butler, Pa., did not act alone, and that the gunman who was arrested last month in what the F.B.I. described as a second assassination attempt at his Florida golf course was an “asset” of a foreign adversary who was being “handled.”

Representative Eli Crane, a first-term Republican from Arizona, has been everywhere that will have him, promoting conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts against Mr. Trump, despite all evidence that such theories are false. And far from sidelining or attempting to silence him, Republican leaders have given him a prominent platform to air his outlandish claims at the highest levels, lending credence to the conspiracy theories spread by him and others on the far right.

Though he was left off a bipartisan House task force investigating the shooting, the Republican leaders of the panel invited him and Representative Cory Mills of Florida, another right-wing lawmaker who has embraced conspiracy theories about the first assassination attempt, to testify at their first public hearing. Mr. Mills is among the Republicans accompanying Mr. Trump to a rally in Butler on Saturday.

The G.O.P.’s continued embrace of their claims underscores once again how deeply misinformation and conspiratorial thinking have captivated the Republican Party’s base, and how willing even mainstream members of the party are to indulge it — either for political gain or to avoid political punishment.

Mr. Crane, a tattooed former member of the Navy SEALs and a onetime contender on “Shark Tank,” now is part of a different type of reality show. As a new member of Congress from a rural district in northeastern Arizona, Mr. Crane made a splash on Capitol Hill last year as the lone newly elected congressman to vote against Kevin McCarthy for speaker through all 15 rounds it took him to win the gavel.

He has since established a reputation for extreme language and tactics. On the House floor last summer, he referred to Black Americans as “colored people,” words that Democrats immediately requested be stricken from the record. (He later said he “misspoke.”) A couple of months later, Mr. Crane said an upcoming visit to the Capitol by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was reason enough for him to cheer for a government shutdown. And he has consistently been a part of a core group of hard-right House members who have blocked their party’s own messaging bills from coming to the floor.

But in the months since that first assassination attempt, Mr. Crane appears to have landed on his animating issue, airing his Trump assassination conspiracy theories in regular appearances on right-wing podcasts, cable programs and events live-streamed on the video platform Rumble. He has dismissed the work of the bipartisan task force investigating the attempts as a toothless political prop.

“I don’t put it past some of the people in our government to do anything necessary to hold on to power,” Mr. Crane told Glenn Beck in July, discussing the shooting.

When it was revealed that the body of Thomas Crooks, the gunman at the Butler rally, had been released to his family 10 days after the shooting, Mr. Crane hinted that federal law enforcement had disposed of the body in order to obstruct the investigation, a charge the agency quickly denied.

“One of the most alarming things in this case for a lot of people is the fact that the F.B.I. sent the shooter’s body for cremation 10 days after the shooting happened,” he said on One America News Network. “I know there’s a lot of speculation out there as far as, ‘Is there a cover-up going on?’”

Jonathan Nez, a Democrat and the former president of the Navajo Nation who is challenging Mr. Crane’s re-election bid, said the Republican’s extreme claims have left him vulnerable even in a red-leaning district.

“There is a lot of distrust now that he has a record, and this conspiracy theory that he has only adds to the distrust for him,” Mr. Nez said in an interview.

But he conceded that there was also a lot of financial upside to Mr. Crane’s rhetoric. In today’s Republican Party, he noted, taking wild positions gets national attention that translates into campaign contributions.

Mr. Crane, for instance, often campaigns with Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a hard-right lawmaker with a growing national profile.

“He is feeding the far-right audience what they want to hear, and fund-raising off that,” Mr. Nez said.

As he mounts his alternative theories, Mr. Crane has also complained that Speaker Mike Johnson did not select him to serve on the official task force, and plunged ahead with his own “parallel” investigation. Mr. Johnson has not done anything to dissuade that effort.

On the day that the official task force was visiting Butler, Pa., to scrutinize the scene, Mr. Crane and his cohorts staged an unauthorized hearing at the Heritage Foundation, in Washington, calling their own witnesses including Erik Prince, the former head of the security contractor Blackwater and a prominent Trump supporter who has also elevated conspiracy theories in the past, and Dan Bongino, a right-wing commentator. Mr. Crane and Mr. Mills also took their own trip to Butler.

Mr. Crane’s efforts have received a major boost from the right-wing media echo chamber, making him all but impossible for the Republicans on the official task force to ignore. So instead of trying to quiet him, House Republicans have accommodated him.

At the hearing last week, Mr. Crane encouraged lawmakers to explore the possibility that a second gunman was working with Mr. Crooks. Democrats walked out.

“I don’t want to be any part of spreading conspiracies,” Representative Madeleine Dean, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said after she left the room.

Mr. Crane disagrees.

“I think they’re theories, and if you want to classify them as conspiracy theories I’m OK with that,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “What usually happens in this country when catastrophic things like this tend to occur, there’s a mainstream narrative and anyone who veers is called a conspiracy theorist or a kook.”

He added, “I represent a lot of people who don’t believe the mainstream narrative, not just in my own district but across the country.”

Like many purveyors of misinformation, Mr. Crane often says there is no danger in just posing questions.

“I haven’t said there’s a second shooter,” he said. “I have been very careful. I’ve said we need to look at all possibilities.”

Mr. Crane has been pushing an anti-government worldview for years. In 2019, before he was in Congress, he wrote in the conservative outlet Breitbart that civilians needed AR-15s because “we the people” might “need such firepower to fend off a tyrannical, freedom-snatching government.”

In a blog he used to write for his bottle-opener company, Bottle Breacher, he wrote in 2016: “My favorite assault rifle is my AR-15. Many present-day Americans live in an idealistic utopia and believe that our government could not possibly overreach and abuse their liberties.”

There, he also asserted in 2018 that gun safety advocates like David Hogg, who survived the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, wouldn’t have people like himself to protect them if the day came when “overreach of our government becomes so great that a second revolution is necessary.”

His latest focus on the assassination attempts fits into his long line of distrusting institutions and official accounts.

In the interview, he said, “I would not say that I have definitive proof or evidence” of the second shooter theory.

But he compared it to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the questions surrounding the event.

“A lot of Americans are very suspicious and don’t believe the official narrative that was put out on J.F.K.’s assassination,” he said. “I don’t either.”

Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.

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