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Eleven days after an assassination attempt against Donald Trump last year, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in front of lawmakers who were hungry for information.

But he was circumspect. Yes, the shooter targeted Trump, but Wray wasn’t going to sit there and speculate or draw inferences about his motive.

A congressman asked Wray, “do you and your team know the motive of the shooter or have any idea what could have driven it?”

Wray responded: “Well, ‘know’ and ‘have any idea’ are two very different things.”

When a Republican asked him if Democrats’ rhetoric played any role, Wray balked: “Respectfully, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me, as the FBI director, to be characterizing or engaging in public commentary on specific people’s rhetoric.”

That was then; this is now.

In keeping with the second Trump administration’s extraordinary moves to comment on ongoing investigations and politicize them, top officials leapt this week to attach a mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis that killed two children and injured more than a dozen others to the left – both implicitly and explicitly.

They did so even as the known picture of the shooter Robin Westman’s words painted a complicated and often incoherent picture of Westman’s beliefs and possible motives.

Perhaps most striking of all was Wray’s successor as FBI director, Kash Patel.

While Patel didn’t ascribe a motive to Westman, he cherry-picked a handful of Westman’s words. He said that Westman “left multiple anti-Catholic, anti-religious references,” spoke of “hatred and violence toward Jewish people” and said “Free Palestine,” and wrote “an explicit call for violence against President Trump on a firearm magazine.”

Patel said the crime was being investigated as not just terrorism, but a “hate crime targeting Catholics.”

FBI Director Kash Patel speaks during a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on August 11. Anew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem echoed Patel, noting Westman wrote “Where is your God?” and “Kill Donald Trump” on her weapons and ammunition.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was more explicit about Westman’s motive, saying it was “anti-God sentiment that motivated the shooter.”

What do those things have in common? They happen to align with groups and people Republicans have set themselves up as protecting – and have accused the left of attacking. Along with citing Westman’s references to Trump, the intimation is clearly that this was an attack motivated by leftist ideology.

But the fuller picture of Westman’s words shows this is a highly selective reading. It suggests the shooter could have been influenced by a host of extremists with varying and even often right-wing views. Westman expressed hatred towards a whole host of groups, including ones that could be coded as allies of the left.

Westman wrote racial slurs against Black and Hispanic people and an epithet for gay people, as well as “Nuke India.” Westman appeared to celebrate anti-Muslim terrorists Anders Breivik from Norway and Brenton Tarrant from New Zealand. Westman cited the cases of anti-government, white-supremacist extremists Randy Weaver and Timothy McVeigh and the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas – cases that became rallying cries on the far right.

Westman also appeared to celebrate those who attacked Christian institutions and Jews. But the common thread seems to be the celebration of hatred and massacres of many kinds.

It’s a hodge-podge of potential motivations that suggest an ideology that isn’t neatly pinned down.

Trump administration officials and others have also gestured at the fact that Westman was transgender. Patel seemed to make a point to call Westman “the male subject,” despite Westman having taken legal steps to transition and live as a woman, according to court documents from 2019 and 2020. Noem said Westman “was a 23 year-old man, claiming to be transgender.”

They weren’t necessarily saying that was relevant, but they were certainly making a point to say it. And that too fed into right-wing allegations that trans people are more likely to commit such atrocities.

There is no evidence supporting that latter claim, though. The perception seems to owe in large part to people falsely claiming previous mass shooters were transgender, often shortly after the shootings. This happened after school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 and Madison, Wisconsin last year, among others. Even Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. repeated the false claim that the shooters had been transgender.

Conservative media figures, especially on Fox News, were happy to connect the dots more explicitly.

“The left is weaponizing trans kids and turning them into culture warriors, and they’ve been turned loose against the church, schools, and Trump,” Fox host Jesse Watters said Wednesday. “You see it, I see it.”

Added Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida on Fox host Laura Ingraham’s show that night: “This is about mental health issues that the radical left refuses to acknowledge, comes from their crazy ideology, which is damaging so many children in the United States who are now becoming young adults.”

Ingraham responded: “Mutilating their bodies and their minds.”

Even the idea that Westman was necessarily targeting Catholics appears speculative. Yes, this was an attack on a religious school. But it also happens to have been a religious school that Westman attended.

Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds speaks at the annual CPAC DC conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland on Friday, 21. Dominic Gwinn/AFP/Getty

And to the extent we’re taking Westman’s words at face value, Westman explicitly said that wasn’t a motivation.

“This is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message,” Westman wrote. “The message is there is no message.”

The episode highlights a kind of rush to judgment has become especially common on the right. Trump and his allies have attached his would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, to the left, despite Crooks having been a registered Republican and there still being no solid picture of his motivations. It was a similar story with the attack on Paul Pelosi and the shootings of two Minnesota state lawmakers this year.

The lure of attaching these people to the other side based on incomplete and often-wrong information is apparently too tempting.

But usually this isn’t done with an assist from top administration officials who are supposed to be circumspect about prejudging a case.