I would say it's not even to distract as much as to silence him. If you watch the event, he was talking about it 20 minutes before being shot. He was saying that other republicans needed to answer for blocking the release of said files. The fact he wasn't letting go of the epstein case and he has one of the biggest followings of young republicans, he was a threat to whoever doesn't want that discussed. It's possible it could have been something else, but who knows?

I swear, Trump could order the military to murder every single person left on the political spectrum of Hitler tomorrow, and people would be like "Stop trying to distract from the Epstein files".