As Lawmaker Claims Trump’s Shooting Was Inside Job, G.O.P. Indulges Him

He posits that there is a mole within Donald J. Trump’s Secret Service detail and warns that the former president should bolster his private security to “watch the watchers.”

He says he is skeptical that the F.B.I. will “get to the bottom” of the first attempted assassination against Mr. Trump — and even if they do, he declares, “I don’t believe that they would give us the truth.”

He has repeatedly raised the possibility that the shooter who tried to assassinate Mr. Trump in July at an open-air rally in Butler, Pa., did not act alone, and that the gunman who was arrested last month in what the F.B.I. described as a second assassination attempt at his Florida golf course was an “asset” of a foreign adversary who was being “handled.”

Representative Eli Crane, a first-term Republican from Arizona, has been everywhere that will have him, promoting conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts against Mr. Trump, despite all evidence that such theories are false. And far from sidelining or attempting to silence him, Republican leaders have given him a prominent platform to air his outlandish claims at the highest levels, lending credence to the conspiracy theories spread by him and others on the far right.

Though he was left off a bipartisan House task force investigating the shooting, the Republican leaders of the panel invited him and Representative Cory Mills of Florida, another right-wing lawmaker who has embraced conspiracy theories about the first assassination attempt, to testify at their first public hearing. Mr. Mills is among the Republicans accompanying Mr. Trump to a rally in Butler on Saturday.