‘You can tell right away that he’s crazy, but I think people thought “Who cares, he’s supporting the right cause,”’ said one reporter who interviewed him.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look back at media coverage of Ryan Wesley Routh, before he became an alleged would-be presidential assassin, and cover more media misses.
‘You Can Tell Right Away That He’s Crazy’: Reporters Recall Previous Interactions with Would-Be Trump Shooter
Ryan Wesley Routh was charged on Monday with two federal gun crimes in connection with his alleged assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump one day earlier.
But Routh’s interactions with authorities — and reporters — began long before he was taken into custody on Sunday after the barrel of his rifle was spotted sticking out from a bush at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club.
Routh, who is likely to face additional charges as federal prosecutors seek an indictment, has a long history of run-ins with police.
But after years spent developing a rap sheet — that included involvement in an armed standoff with police after a traffic stop in 2002 and other lesser offenses — Routh rebranded himself as a Ukrainian resistance fighter who was taken seriously by reporters, sitting for interviews with several major media outlets the past two years, including the New York Times, Semafor, and Newsweek.
New York Times Ukraine correspondent Thomas Gibbons-Neff, who interviewed Routh for a piece last year about foreign fighters and volunteers in Ukraine, wrote for the Times on Sunday about his experience interviewing a would-be presidential assassin.
Gibbons-Neff says he was put in touch with Routh through a source from Kabul who had learned of Routh from his own source in Iran, a former Afghan special-operations soldier who was trying to get out of Iran and fight in Ukraine.
Routh was quoted in the piece, which was about people who are “not qualified to be allowed anywhere near the battlefield in a U.S.-led war and yet were fighting on the front against Russia, with access to weapons and military equipment.”
When the pair spoke, Routh said he was in Washington, D.C., to meet with some congressmen about Ukraine, though it was unclear if that meeting ever happened.
At the time, Routh was trying to recruit Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban to come fight for Ukraine. But Ukraine turned down requests to transfer the recruits from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine.
Though Routh reportedly spent time in Ukraine, he never fought there himself as he was too old and had no military experience, Gibbons-Neff explains.
Yet Routh claimed on social media that he visited Kyiv to fight.
In a February 2022 tweet, he wrote, “I am ready to go to Ukraine and fight and die for the kids and families of Ukraine, we all cannot sit around and do nothing. We need to flood Ukraine with citizens from around the globe for a massive civilian army. Someone respond to me and let’s do it.”
Gibbons-Neff wrote Sunday that by the time he ended his phone call with Routh, “it was clear he was in way over his head.”
“He talked of buying off corrupt officials, forging passports and doing whatever it took to get his Afghan cadre to Ukraine, but he had no real way to accomplish his goals. At one point he mentioned arranging a U.S. military transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees willing to fight,” the correspondent added.
Meanwhile, Tanya Lukyanova, who interviewed Routh in March 2023 for a video she produced for Semafor, tells her now-employer, the Free Press, that he was a “zealous guy, an American who really wanted to volunteer to help Ukraine.”
“Ukraine is very often hard to work with,” he told Lukyanova at the time. “Many foreign soldiers leave after a week in Ukraine or must move from unit to unit to find a place they are respected and appreciated.”
The pair spoke for roughly 20 minutes over video. Routh was seated outside the U.S. Capitol during the call.
“You can tell right away that he’s crazy, but I think people thought ‘Who cares, he’s supporting the right cause,’” Lukyanova said. “Everyone knew him as a little zealous, a bit much. But nobody really cared about that ‘too much’ because he was on the side of good. He was helping Ukraine.”
Back then “he was just a harmless loon, who didn’t do anything too crazy,” she added.
However, his aforementioned rap sheet includes not only the standoff with police —for which he was charged with carrying a concealed weapon, possessing a weapon of mass destruction in the form of a fully automatic machine gun, driving with a revoked license, and resisting, delaying, and obstructing a police officer — but also lesser offenses, including dozens of citations dating back to the early 1980s for driving without a license, driving with expired or revoked tags, and operating a motor vehicle without insurance.
He has also been charged several times with passing worthless checks, possession of stolen goods, and possession of a stolen vehicle.
“He reminds me of Brad Pitt in Burn after Reading, if I am completely honest,” Lukyanova told the Free Press. “A guy who is overzealous and goes a little overboard on the conspiratorial side of things. But until he does something terribly wrong, nobody quite thinks of him that way.”
“Ryan Routh wasn’t a story, until he allegedly went to Trump’s golf course with a gun,” she added.
Routh also participated in a June 2022 interview with Newsweek Romania, in which he claimed that he recruited volunteers for the International Legion Defense of Ukraine, a unit of Ukraine’s Ground Forces.
“The question as far as why I’m here . . . to me, a lot of the other conflicts are grey, but this conflict is definitely black and white. This is about good versus evil. This is a storybook, you know, any movie we’ve ever watched, this is definitely evil against good,” eh said in the interview.
However, a former administrator and recruiter for the International Legion Defense of Ukraine told Newsweek on Monday that Routh is “delusional and a liar.”
U.S. citizen Evelyn Aschenbrenner, who worked for the International Legion from March 2022 to June, warned earlier this year on social media that Routh is “not, and never has been, associated with the International Legion or the Ukrainian Armed Forces at all.”
She told Newsweek that Routh messaged her repeatedly over the course of two years, sending details of potential recruits, including a list of some 6,000 Afghani citizens. When asked to stop sending this information, he would become “hostile” and “manipulative,” she reportedly told the outlet.
Newsweek did not respond to a request for comment.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Seattle Times apparently thinks Antifa rioters taking over six city blocks for nearly a month does not constitute a “big” portion of the city of Seattle. The outlet published a fact-check of claims Trump made at his first debate against Vice President Kamala Harris last week: “Trump falsely claims CHOP protesters took over a big part of Seattle.”
Trump brought up the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) during the debate last week to call out the hypocrisy of his critics who condemn January 6 rioters but not far-left rioters who destroyed cities in the summer of 2020. “When are the people that burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted or in Seattle? They went into Seattle, they took over a big percentage of the city of Seattle. When are those people going to be prosecuted?” he asked.
The Seattle Times took issue with Trump’s characterization of the riot. “Former President Donald Trump referenced Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest during the presidential debate Tuesday night, falsely claiming protesters took over a big portion of the city.”
“The zone’s size fluctuated, but it essentially occupied about six city blocks surrounding the Seattle Police Department East Precinct building and Cal Anderson Park, extending east to 12th Avenue, west to Broadway, south to East Pine Street and north to East Denny Way,” the “fact-check” said.
Media Misses
- News anchors seemingly failed to learn their lesson after their embarrassing reporting on Trump’s first assassination attempt. Once again, several journalists are pointing the finger at Trump’s own rhetoric when reporting on the most recent thwarted attempt on his life. For example, NBC’s Lester Holt said, “Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance, continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town.”
- Time magazine was forced to issue a correction last week after it wrongly fact-checked Trump’s statement accusing Harris of supporting “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” The correction reads: “The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump’s statement accusing Kamala Harris of supporting ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison’ As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.”
- Washington Post fashion writer Rachel Tashjian claims Trump’s signature red tie is “an unmistakably phallic symbol.” Tashjian makes her claim in a column about how Harris and Trump dressed at the debate, “The pussy bow vs. the big red tie.” “There was Trump’s big red tie, an accessory nearly as famous as his red ‘Make America Great Again’ hat. But if the hat is an aggressive smirk, the tie is like a silk hammer: glowing, long and, let’s face it, an unmistakably phallic symbol,” she wrote.