“I'm sure that the Kiev regime is going to distance itself from this. The Kiev regime, along with the apparent support of the CIA, has put together a death list of Americans. A list of Americans who ought to be killed. It's not a list to send them nasty letters. Scott Ritter's on it, I think Douglas McGregor's on it. It is not out of line for them to have done this,” Johnson tells Sputnik.
He describes the fact that Routh was apparently privy to Trump’s whereabouts as “puzzling”, given the latter does not make his schedule public.
“Who leaked that to him? How did he know? Was there somebody inside the Trump team that told him? Was there somebody inside the Secret Service who told him? Was it a foreign intelligence service? Was the Ukrainian intelligence that alerted? That has to be investigated,” Johnson remarks.
According to him, the assassination attempt is going to have a detrimental effect on the support for Ukraine in the United States, at least among Trump’s supporters.
Johnson also suggests that many people in the current US government do not want Trump to become president again and would rather see him dead.
“It would not shock me at all that there would be some elements inside the government that would get involved in that kind of plot. The Secret Service, I think it's on notice and the focus is on it in such a way that they can't afford to allow sloppiness and poor planning and poor security to go unanswered,” he says.