Referring to the July rally Trump held in Butler County, Pennsylvania, where the former president narrowly escaped with his life and a rally-goer was killed, he said: “You and Biden should visit the injured people in the hospital from the Trump rally and attend the funeral of the murdered fireman.”
He added: “Trump will never do anything for them….show the world what compassion and humanity is all about.”
In another post from May 2022 he wrote: “Killing anywhere is extremely tragic.”
CNN said law enforcement officers were not only trying to ascertain a motive for the attempted killing, but how Mr Routh might have hoped to exploit it.
They are understood to be looking at the time he is said to have spent in Ukraine, and also the fact he was carrying a GoPro camera, suggesting he intended to film or stream any actions.
According to a report by Greensboro’s News and Record newspaper, in 2002 Mr Routh was convicted of “possessing a weapon of mass destruction”, according to online North Carolina Department of Adult Correction records. [Can we please double check whether he was convicted or just charged? It looks like the original 2002 article mentions the charging but I didn’t see anything about a conviction.]
The report said Mr Routh was pulled over during a traffic stop, put his hand on a firearm and later drove off to a roofing business, where he reportedly barricaded himself in.
He was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and possessing a weapon of mass destruction, understood to be a fully automatic machine gun.