WASHINGTON – Wisconsin Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson this week speculated without evidence that the federal government could have been involved in the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump in July. 

Speaking on the Federalist Radio Hour podcast Thursday, Johnson derided the government’s investigation into the July 13 shooting during which Trump was grazed by a bullet as “almost completely opaque.” He said there is a “grotesque level of corruption” in the federal government and referenced Richard Nixon and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

“When you don’t know the federal government involvement in the JFK assassination, when you really don’t know what happened with Nixon … that might’ve been the second coup,” Johnson said. “The first coup is you take out Kennedy, the second coup you take out Nixon, and then you take out Trump.”

“To what extent has the federal government been involved in these things?” Johnson said. “We’ll probably never know because there’s a reason you call it the deep state. It’s very deep. It’s very pervasive.” 

The comments from the Oshkosh Republican are the latest in a string of fringe theories that the “deep state” was behind the shooting that wounded Trump and killed a rally attendee. There is no evidence the government was involved in the shooting, and the FBI has said the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, acted alone before he was shot and killed moments after he fired on Trump.

Investigators have said Crooks had searched online for events from both President Joe Biden and Trump and said he saw the Trump rally in Pennsylvania as a “target of opportunity.” Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service director who resigned in the aftermath of the shooting, called the security failures that day the agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.

Johnson, the ranking member on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the interview did not provide evidence to back up the speculation. He instead suggested the lack of transparency from federal investigators, from whom he said he’s been unable to get information, has raised questions about the incident. 

“If you were to design an investigation that was specifically wanted (sic) to create suspicion and drive conspiracy theories, you’d go about it exactly the way the FBI and Secret Service and Department of Justice are going about this,” Johnson said.

When directly asked in the interview if he believed the assassination attempt was an “inside job,” Johnson again referenced the security failures, including how Crooks was able to get onto a nearby roof, and Johnson’s inability to get information on the incident. “It was such a spectacular failure that you kind of scratch your head and go, ‘how could that possibly happen?'” he said.

Johnson, who was reelected in 2022 to his third term in the Senate, has espoused similar theories in the past. Last year, Johnson said it was “certainly possible” government agencies were involved in the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and in the same interview called the jail death of the sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein “fishy.”

Asked to clarify Johnson’s remarks this week, a spokeswoman for the senator told the Journal Sentinel Johnson was “saying that the federal government has consistently lied to the American people and kept information hidden from them.”

“They give us very little reason to trust them,” the spokeswoman, Kiersten Pels, said. 

Johnson, Pels said, was not ruling out the possibility federal agencies were involved in the July assassination attempt.