Trump golf course suspect pleads not guilty

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The man accused of mounting an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at one of his Florida golf courses pleaded not guilty Monday in a brief appearance in federal court.

The defendant, Ryan Routh, formally entered his plea through one of his lawyers. He spoke only when U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart of the U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach, Florida, asked him if he understood the five charges against him.

“Yes, your honor,” said Routh, 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. 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 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 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 Routh.

It was the second apparent assassination attempt against Trump since July.

As they investigated the episode, authorities learned that 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.”

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 U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the same judge who presided last year over the federal prosecution of Trump involving the mishandling of classified documents and obstruction of the government’s attempts to retrieve them. Cannon dismissed that case this past summer, a decision the Justice Department has appealed.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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