A 75-year-old man in Provo, Utah, was apparently armed at the time when the FBI came breaking his door down. We talk to one of his dear friends, a Utah Valley University professor who says, I can t believe it . He talks about what his wife witnessed and what a neighbor witnessed, and he tells us about the man.
00:00:00.740Welcome to the program. We spend an awful lot of time on a name. Say it. Say the name.
00:00:06.520Craig Robertson. Robertson apparently armed at the time when the FBI came breaking his door down.
00:00:14.720We talked to one of his dear friends, a Utah Valley University professor who says, I can't believe it.
00:00:20.680He talks about what his wife witnessed and what a neighbor witnessed, and he tells us about the man.
00:00:27.100But it's complex because the man also was living some sort of, I don't know, invincible guy life on the Internet and was making threats against the president, which you would expect the FBI to do.
00:00:39.560Come visit the man, especially if the president is in town.
00:00:42.820But his threats were really over the top and ridiculous because he was going to dress as a bush and use a rifle to kill the president.
00:00:52.540Okay, well, he's 300 pounds and he walks with a cane and he's 75 years old.
00:00:57.920I don't think that's a good disguise in the first.
00:01:00.240Why is that fat bush over there walking with a cane?
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00:01:49.500It is the one thing that the preppers have been missing, at least me.
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00:01:58.620If you have somebody with, in my case, I have two kids with epilepsy, or you have diabetes, or you need heart medicine, high blood pressure medication, what do you do?
00:02:35.900Police say, not police, sorry, sources say, unnamed sources say, that Craig Robertson, the 75-year-old man in Provo, Utah, was armed at the time of the shooting.
00:05:16.160He lived less than half a block away from the church.
00:05:19.640And he would drive himself and his son to church just because he really couldn't walk that distance.
00:05:27.660If you saw him and you were on an FBI interview, would he be the kind of guy that, you know, if you only know that what he said, I've got a ghillie suit.
00:05:40.600I'm going to go up into a parking lot and I'm going to stake out the president and I'm going to shoot him with my high-powered rifle.
00:05:48.920Is he the kind of guy that you would, of course, if the president's coming in, you would go and make sure that he's not in his ghillie suit.
00:05:57.360But would that be a possibility or laughable if you had seen him, just seen him and not known him?
00:06:13.200I could not imagine him in a million years getting dressed up in a ghillie suit and taking up some position, you know, as a sniper, you know, in the condition that he was.
00:06:24.240He was just simply not capable of executing these threats that he made.
00:06:56.760My wife is good friends with the next door neighbor who called us immediately after it happened because she had a five-year-old in the house and she was very traumatized and was looking for someplace that as soon as they let her out of her house, she was the whole neighborhood was locked down.
00:07:14.300So as soon as she was able to get out of her house, she wanted a safe place for her and her five-year-old.
00:07:19.860So she called my wife, thought that maybe that could happen.
00:07:23.360And then my wife went over to go check on her and spoke with her.
00:07:29.800And as near as I can tell, the shooting took place inside the house.
00:07:33.700They attempted to bash his front door down.
00:07:40.100Then they had a vehicle mounted battering ram that went in through his front window and then they went into the building.
00:07:46.180And then that's when shots were fired.
00:07:48.500And then for some reason, I don't know, his body was taken out.
00:07:56.080And when my wife went to go check on her friend who was living right next door with her five-year-old son, and they were obviously traumatized, his body was still laying out there on the sidewalk under a sheet.
00:08:20.540He was just this person that we knew from church, this kind of lovable teddy bear kind of a guy who didn't seem like a threat to anyone, was just laying out there.
00:08:32.420She thought it was very disrespectful.
00:08:35.140People don't understand the neighborhoods in Utah are different.
00:08:39.780Usually everybody goes to church and the church is usually within a walking distance of a couple blocks.
00:08:46.620And so families really get to know each other and children get to know each other.
00:08:51.020Was he the kind of guy that the children knew in the neighborhood?
00:08:56.420I understand that she did everything she could to keep her five-year-old son from knowing what was going on.
00:09:05.980Took him down to the basement to protect him because it was a very scary situation.
00:09:12.040And the second she found someone who could, you know, take her kid and get them out of that situation, she did.
00:09:21.180But they were stuck there while all this was unfolding.
00:09:25.780Yeah, I'm wondering how all the other children on the block, if they saw this man that they knew.
00:10:31.220I think there's a monster in each of us that comes out sometimes on social media that you're like, you'd never say that in real life.
00:10:40.260But you just become a monster because you're on social media and you think you can get away with it.
00:10:44.780Yeah, I think he just kind of leaned into his online persona.
00:10:50.420But anyone who saw him and his condition and anyone who knew him and his personality would have just thought, this guy is just trolling and just went over the top and in exceedingly bad taste.
00:11:04.940And not very wise, you know, statements.
00:11:09.320But I can't imagine anybody who knew him thinking that he was, any of that was more than just bluster.
00:12:59.360Um, I don't know, but I mean, it wouldn't surprise me because he talked about concealed carry, but if he did, he wasn't flashing it in church.
00:13:08.380He wasn't, you know, he wasn't like some of these gun nuts who are flashing their gun and doing everything else.
00:13:15.280If he did, he was very discreet about it.
00:13:17.700And, and it, it never worried me at all.
00:13:20.760Um, he was always very conscientious about his guns, about safety, his guns, his guns were in a secure place in his house.
00:13:28.360Um, and so I, I can't, you know, I can't imagine, I mean, yeah, I had guns in the house, but I, I don't know what the situation or how it unfolded.
00:19:34.300First of all, I thought George Floyd, I thought that was all about, you know, and all the march against the police of using excessive force when it wasn't needed.
00:20:19.800If you wanted to get this guy and make sure that you had him in custody, why wouldn't you take him when he got out of his car at the parking lot of the supermarket?
00:20:30.180Why wouldn't you take him out, you know, and surround him and arrest him in the parking lot of his church?
00:22:27.060It's like, well, we had two agents shot in 2021 on that child pornography warrant down in Miami, and we send SWAT to people that might have a gun because that's one of the criteria.
00:22:35.440If they have a dangerous dog, that's a criteria for SWAT.
00:22:38.360And if they've shared basically that they have negative feelings about law enforcement.
00:22:41.940And one of the three charges that is in that complaint about this guy, Craig Robertson, is a complaint about him making threats to law enforcement.
00:22:48.980That's the court number two, it's 18 U.S.C. 115, where he basically told the FBI, come back with a warrant, and by the way, I'm carrying a gun.
00:23:02.980Bad choices, but you also see that the reason that this thing kicked off and why they went to go grab him was because Joe Biden was coming to the state, and he made a threat to Joe Biden.
00:23:11.680So we had the final straw was actually 18 U.S.C. 871, which is usually a Secret Service sort of prerogative.
00:23:17.800It just turns out they had this open case from the FBI.
00:23:20.540So why wouldn't the Secret Service be the ones to go in?
00:24:29.300So and did any of those people and I had people respond to me on social media and they said, well, the Secret Service called them.
00:24:34.600And I said, I always felt like when the Secret Service called somebody, it's the same as a SWAT team breaking down your window at 615 in the morning.
00:24:40.580It's just it's night and day in the experience of it.
00:24:43.580And so that is where it feels like it's weaponized because people are seeing two different sides and the way they were treated.
00:25:08.860And so they can justify, like I said, you can say that this is a justified shoot and that it was a, quote unquote, good shoot in the law enforcement context.
00:25:16.340And really, because I hang on just a second, Kyle, because I can't do that.
00:25:20.100If I if my life isn't truly threatened, even if he's pointing a gun at me, if if I don't feel I'm truly threatened by that, it's not a justifiable shooting.
00:25:30.980And I'll have to go to court to prove that.
00:25:46.700Like I said, I don't I don't I don't think anybody that was on that warrant woke up in the morning and said, we're going to go kill this guy.
00:26:08.000He has a gun on the desk with his hand on it.
00:26:11.220OK, you are approaching this guy to give him a subpoena.
00:26:13.680You get up and you realize he has a weapon system.
00:26:15.620If you try to talk him down, he is saying he's going to kill himself.
00:26:19.320But he kills his secretary and then he kills himself before you get a chance to react.
00:26:22.420And the fact of the matter is, is all these scenarios, action will beat reaction.
00:26:26.860If someone has a weapon system in their hand and they have it at low ready or it is their hand in a holster, they can actually shoot you.
00:26:33.220You can actually draw a weapon out of the holster and shoot somebody.
00:26:36.160If you make that decision before the person who's holding a gun on, you can actually react.
00:26:40.820It's been proven over and over and over again on every level, special operations through to it.
00:26:44.720So that's why there's an image standard.
00:26:46.260I've actually gone through the training and one of the scenarios is a guy who's holding his girlfriend hostage.
00:26:53.760And the only way that you win in that situation is if you shoot him first.
00:26:59.220So I've I've seen the training and I understand that I'm just I I'm I'm just bothered by what this what happened here, because I've never seen it before.
00:30:42.100I know what is going to be said today.
00:30:48.160There are going to be people that write that I am defending this teddy bear of a man who was threatening the president of the United States.
00:32:21.860When they start doing the right things and speaking the truth, no matter how hard it is or who it hurts, including themselves, then they will deserve trust again.
00:32:36.160And you shouldn't be the kind of person that can bring this kind of dishonor to your family, where I can't defend you because you said these things, but I really want to because I don't think you believed in it.
00:32:50.600I don't think you meant any of those things.
00:32:53.540Maybe you did, but I don't think he did.
00:34:03.240I don't know how many times I think to myself, you know, in shameful moments, when I say something and my first thought is, well, well, I mean, Jesus didn't live in these times.
00:34:23.960I don't have a crown of thorns on my head.
00:34:26.780I think he might have had a little worse than I have.
00:34:29.100And he still prayed for the people because he knew they're all our brothers and sisters.
00:34:37.940And if the shooter would have realized that in his anger, he wouldn't have said those things.
00:34:44.920And quite honestly, if the FBI was doing their job and they were a system of justice for, by, and of the people, they wouldn't have gone in and done this.
00:42:02.100She happened to invest in it when it was going up when the government's getting their money.
00:42:06.280And then when they started looking at it, they're like, oh, boy, this thing's going to fail.
00:42:10.040She got her money out, so she made her profit.
00:42:12.780That's building it from the bottom up, isn't it?
00:42:15.320When they say, we're going to build it from the bottom up, we're going to build the poor people and give them the money and the power instead of the rich.
00:42:29.880I don't want the government doing any of that.
00:42:53.440But then you have to take that opportunity.
00:42:56.980Freedom doesn't mean you're given everything.
00:42:59.720It means I have the opportunity to change my life.
00:43:03.100I have the opportunity to live my own life.
00:43:06.100Now, that may mean that I'm just not going to do anything.
00:43:09.160Well, then your opportunity is going to kind of go away because you have closed the door on that opportunity.
00:43:15.960But if you're somebody that wants to educate themselves and you don't need a special education, unless you're a brain surgeon, you don't need that expensive education.
00:43:26.540You can educate yourself for the love of Pete.
00:43:44.800You need to educate yourself and take responsibility for yourself and walk through those doors of opportunity and don't kick them closed for the people behind you.