WASHINGTON >> Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz. and a former Navy SEAL, says he is no conspiracy theorist. But in the weeks since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, he has made the baseless suggestion that the shooting was part of a coordinated campaign by Democrats or shadowy government actors to try to stop the former president from reclaiming the White House.

“Not only did they try and bankrupt him, but they tried to put him in prison,” Crane told Jeff Oravits, a right-wing radio personality in Arizona, last week. “When that didn’t work, they tried to put him in prison for 750 years. And many of us said the next step in this escalation is for them to try and kill him because they can’t — they know they can’t beat him fair and square.”

In an appearance on “The Glenn Beck Program,” Crane, who traveled to the Pennsylvania rally site where Trump was shot to conduct his own investigation, said, “I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but at the same time, I don’t want to, you know, rule anything out because I don’t put it past some of the people in our government to do anything necessary to hold on to power.”

No evidence has emerged that anyone other than a lone gunman, Thomas Crooks, tried to kill Trump. Crooks, 20, was a registered Republican who was killed at the scene and left few clues about his beliefs or what motivated him to open fire at a Trump rally July 13.

But in the telling of Crane and several of his right-wing Republican colleagues in Congress, as well as GOP candidates seeking election this fall, there is far more to the story. They are trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories that insinuate that Democrats and government forces played a role in trying to take out Trump.

It is the latest example of how elected Republicans have promoted groundless claims that suit their political narrative, drawing unsubstantiated theories and grievance-driven suspicions once relegated to the right-wing fringe into the mainstream of their party — and suffering no criticism from leaders for spreading them.

The effort is similar to the GOP’s bid to deny, sanitize or excuse the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

“Time and time again, we’ve observed a disturbing feedback loop between lawmakers and online conspiracies,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert. “Our elected officials should be holding themselves to a higher standard, sharing verified information, not dealing in speculation that could inflame and endanger more Americans.”

Congressional leaders have established a bipartisan task force to investigate the attempted assassination, and some top Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have called for lawmakers to “turn the rhetoric down.”

Johnson has said he blames the shooting on ineptitude and not any coordinated effort to assassinate Trump. Others have said that online speculation that President Joe Biden or other Democrats had a role in inciting the shooting was unhelpful and lacking in evidence.

And amid bipartisan outrage about the security breaches that allowed the shooting, some Republicans have begged the Secret Service to be more forthcoming about what happened, arguing that their reticence has fed conspiracy theories.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., recounted this week how three of his constituents had approached him at church recently to ask if there was a second shooter.

“If you don’t want conspiracy theories to spread, you need to provide information,” Scott told Ronald L. Rowe Jr., the acting Secret Service director, at a Senate hearing Tuesday. “Very few times in history do our presidents get shot at, so you would know that this is something that the American public is very interested in.”

As misinformation about the shooting has flourished in far-right corners of the internet and private-messaging platforms like Telegram, some Republicans have joined in.

Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., who served as the interior secretary during the Trump administration, said in an appearance on Fox News that “we need to run down the answers, again, whether this negligence and incompetence was willful. Did they willingly atrophy the security to put our president at risk?”