Two weeks now after the brazen assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump the FBI says it still doesn’t have a motive – and the director oddly claimed last week he didn’t know whether it really was a bullet that hit Trump’s ear.

The agency immediately had to walk that back and admit it was, indeed, a bullet. Are the feds truly the last to know anything about the historic assault? Or just the last to admit it?

Regardless, it’s unlikely the public is putting much stock in anything authorities are saying at this point.

Fact is, the public has gotten most of its information not from the federal bureaucracy, but from citizen videos and congressional sleuths such as Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley – who has actually visited the site (though the FBI “told me to leave”), and who is receiving alarming reports of security lapses from whistleblowers.

“What I’m told by federal law enforcement is they still don’t have a handle on the shooter’s motive, other than that he clearly wanted to kill Trump. I mean, I think we can be pretty sure of that,” Hawley says sarcastically in an exclusive interview with The Heartlander. “So, whatever else was going on in his head, he clearly had the desire, the intent, the premeditation, and then very nearly the execution to kill President Trump.”

Thus far, Hawley has beaten most of the fairly sanguine media to breaking news on the assassination attempt. Whistleblowers first told his office that the former president’s rally was bizarrely considered a “loose” security event.

“For example,” Hawley said in a press release, “detection canines were not used to monitor entry and detect threats in the usual manner. Individuals without proper designations were able to gain access to backstage areas. Department personnel did not appropriately police the security buffer around the podium and were also not stationed at regular intervals around the event’s security perimeter.”

Hawley also has made headlines with news that whistleblowers allege an officer was supposed to be on the shooter’s roof that day, but was not because of the heat; and that the Secret Service declined a local law enforcement agency’s offers before the rally to secure the site with drones.

On Thursday Hawley introduced the Trump Assassination Attempt Transparency Act requiring the federal government to, as a press release puts it, “declassify any and all information related to the U.S. Secret Service’s preparations for the rally, their interactions with the shooter, and their response to the assassination attempt on July 13.”

“Really, it’s a miracle that Trump is alive,” Hawley tells The Heartlander. “It is a miracle that more rally-goers were not killed, because the security on that day was appalling. It was absolutely a disaster. A lot of people need to be fired or resign because of this.”

Something better change quickly: Trump announced Friday he’ll be returning to redo the rally at the very Butler County, Pennsylvania, field where he and three supporters were shot July 13.

Does Hawley think the security failures back then were incompetence or something more?

He won’t exactly say.

“Well, they were at the very least incompetent. And I can tell you, it’s at every single level. You’ve got the Secret Service, who don’t really appear to have had a handle on what was going on. They were not coordinating well with local and state law enforcement. 

“You’ve got snipers who were supposed to be on the roof where the shooter was, but weren’t because they said it was too hot. You’ve got law enforcement who were supposed to be patrolling the building where the shooter was, but weren’t because they said it was too hot. 

“I mean, you cannot make this stuff up. And it’s not funny, because the president was shot, a good American is dead, others are critically wounded. And I’m telling you, having seen now how little real security there was that day, it is truly miraculous that more Americans were not killed at that rally.”

Judging from chatter online, many of Hawley’s constituents and others around the nation are suspicious the assassination plot may have been bigger than one man.

Is that what he’s hearing from ordinary Missourians?

He won’t exactly say.

“Well, I think that people are just desperate to get the truth. As am I. 

“I’ve said this to Secret Service, I’ve said this to the FBI, it’s why I personally went to the site to do my own investigation: I don’t trust those people to be honest, to give us the facts. I don’t trust them to give us the truth. 

“They owe that to the American people. I don’t want to be sitting here years in the future and talking about this like we still talk about JFK, where we don’t really know what happened and the government still won’t really tell us all they know. 

“This cannot be like that. We need to know everything: every detail, every fact, every failure. We need to know it. And I’m committed to getting that as long as it takes.”