Sean Davis: Trump Shooting Update, & the Real Reason Congress Refuses to Investigate
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 41 minutes
Words per Minute
180.67769
Summary
Almost exactly five months ago, the Republican presidential candidate was shot in the face on camera. The world stops. History changes. But the one thing that doesn t happen is any accounting of what happened. Who was this guy? How did this happen? And why did it happen?
Transcript
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So almost exactly five months ago, the Republican presidential candidate was shot in the face on camera.
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But the one thing that doesn't happen is any accounting of what that was.
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And even now, on the cusp of Trump's inauguration, it's disappeared.
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And so you're one of the people who I think was on the story at the very beginning in a rational but insistent way.
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And so I thought it'd be worth asking, like, what was that?
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Yeah, I'm not sure I've ever seen an incident of that magnitude disappear from the news so quickly.
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We got, what, maybe a week of, like, true kind of flood-the-zone coverage?
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And it raised, like, the most pressing possible questions about a lot of different things.
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And, you know, I understand the news media didn't want to give Trump any advantage, didn't want to run the picture of him triumphant.
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But you would think that every elected official, every American would want to know, how did, how was this allowed to happen?
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It was allowed to happen, but by whom and why and how?
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And I don't hear anybody, including Republicans, asking those questions.
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Yeah, so I kind of look at it as three big questions.
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How did they let it happen, that whole process?
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And then what happened to everyone who let it happen?
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And then within that, like, the framework I have, trying to figure out, you know, what exactly happened, is you can look at it as, like, option one, just a total snafu across the board.
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And then you've got option two, which is kind of what I would call strategic incompetence.
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So you have DHS, which runs Secret Service, and the Secret Service is a soup sandwich from top to bottom.
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Did you have people who were making that even more difficult, who were deliberately making Trump vulnerable, on the off chance that maybe someone would go solve their problems for them?
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So my number three kind of scenario is it encompasses all a number two.
00:03:23.880
But you kind of have two different hands of government.
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You've got the Secret Service hand, which is totally incompetent, making them completely vulnerable.
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But unbeknownst to that hand, you have this other hand.
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Like, I would call it, like, the Russiagate hoax hand.
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These people who are just always doing awful, evil things.
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Was there somebody there looking for super disturbed, impressionable young men to kind of poke with the stick?
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So you have the incompetent hand and then the devious hand.
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And they weren't working with each other, but they were creating the conditions to allow what happened to happen.
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And then I think the fourth one is the government just killed him.
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It's like those are – I kind of look at everything through those lenses and try to figure out, can we disprove this one?
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And, like, where I am now, I'm, like, kind of between two and three.
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I refuse to believe this was just a series of unfortunate accidents and incompetence that's put together.
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Because I've been alive for the last, you know, ten years watching everything they do.
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And yet, I don't think there's evidence for, like, the JFK style.
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Like, we all know Lee Harvey Oswald didn't do it, right?
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So I don't think there's any evidence, or at least I've not seen any, to suggest that was replicated here.
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So I think it's somewhere in between deliberate incompetence to make him vulnerable, and then you had some cell somewhere finding someone to urge to go do it in ways that would make it very hard to trace.
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So thank you for starting with your conclusion.
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Let's work backward and go through by number the three questions that you raised at the outset.
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But who was Crooks, Thomas Crooks, the shooter?
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This kid comes out of nowhere, manages to get on the roof, shoots President Trump, fires eight shots before anyone, even, like, remotely tries to bother him.
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He's able to fly a drone there for, like, 10 or 20 minutes.
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So America First Legal, they sued to get his academic records.
00:06:03.560
I think he got his entire time in high school and college, like, maybe two Cs.
00:06:08.220
I think one was in Spanish and one was in differential equations.
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And the rest were mostly A's and some B's here and there.
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Um, one of the congressional committees did an investigation looking into it.
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Um, and parents really didn't know much about their own son.
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Like, I think, uh, either the mom or the dad at the point asked, are you gay?
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Like, they don't even know, kind of, what's going on there.
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Um, we know the FBI has, like, his phone, his devices, his computer.
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So there's a Senate report from the Homeland Security Committee that tried to dig into it.
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And there are two congressional committees in the House and the Senate that actually did a really good job,
00:07:03.020
given all the constraints they have, figuring stuff out.
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So they asked the FBI, you know, all these questions, because the FBI took the lead on it.
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At the time the Senate put out their initial report, the FBI had given them 27 pages total.
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Like, what, what, I don't understand what is going on.
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On what grounds could, would they not turn that over?
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They actually don't have any legal basis to do it.
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They'll say things like, well, ongoing investigation, that's totally made up.
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Even when there is an ongoing investigation and not when your suspect is dead.
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So, like, clearly no one's going to be criminally tried for that because he's dead.
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There's nothing in the Constitution that says this agency that Congress created and is funded by Congress can just not give them stuff because reasons.
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So, I think a big reason is most people in Congress are totally weak.
00:08:08.780
They don't want to get crosswise with the FBI who take a lot of work.
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The House Committee, for example, they also did a great job.
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They said that the FBI interviewed over 1,000 people in the course of their investigation.
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And they produced over 1,000, they're called FD-302s, which is how the FBI, it's actually crazy what they're allowed to do.
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They don't have to have a transcript or anything when they interview you.
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They just have a piece of paper that's their recollection of what you said.
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That's actually how James Comey got Martha Stewart thrown in prison.
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But so, they have 1,000 interviews, over 1,000 documents.
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So, we don't know, like, anything about this Crooks guy beyond, I think, like, maybe a 15-minute press conference that one of the FBI, I think might have been the FBI guy out of Pittsburgh who runs that office.
00:09:13.000
Like, 15 minutes of him talking in very vague, like, 50,000-foot terms about what they knew.
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Oh, he searched for Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
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How that came out, and that was meant to make it look like, oh, the guy didn't really have any political motives.
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Well, I mean, the base motive was he wanted to kill Donald Trump.
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You'd have the talking heads being like, what was his motive?
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Well, I think he wanted to shoot Trump in the face.
00:09:48.220
But so, you have the FBI, he's like, well, he searched for Trump and Biden, so clearly he didn't have any political views.
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I'm like, well, how many times did he search for?
00:10:00.460
That's, like, kind of a, it's kind of an important thing.
00:10:07.340
That's utterly worthless information that I can do nothing with.
00:10:21.000
Like, here are the things I would want to know.
00:10:23.320
All the places he went in, like, the six months leading up to this.
00:10:30.420
I want to know every person he talked to in person.
00:10:32.900
I want to know every person he had a phone conversation with, texted with, telegrammed with, signaled with.
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I want to know everything he looked for on Google Maps.
00:10:42.720
And I, like, want to go through it in real time.
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Why, like, why has Congress not been told anything about it?
00:10:59.300
It's just, and so that kind of stuff is why it's impossible for me to look at everything and be like,
00:11:05.500
well, it was just a series of unfortunate accidents.
00:11:08.260
But, I mean, the core question in any crime is, like, why was it committed?
00:11:13.260
And, I mean, we're not, it sounds like there's no progress whatsoever.
00:11:20.320
Well, that itself is, like, just tells you that the country's in free fall.
00:11:23.620
That it's just so corrupt it can't even carry out the basic functions of government.
00:11:27.720
They're trying to figure out why murderers murder.
00:11:32.700
Was he just alone in his own silo doing all this?
00:11:38.140
I don't believe it because at one point they told us, oh, he had encrypted text messages,
00:11:42.880
some of which were overseas, and they just let that float out there and then never talked about it again.
00:11:48.960
Is there any evidence he was in touch with any specific person or group overseas?
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So we just, we just, no details about anything.
00:12:00.740
So Heritage Foundation at one point, one of their guys over there, great investigator,
00:12:04.740
Mike Howell, I don't know how he did it, was able to get, like, location data on devices
00:12:18.620
In the weeks or months leading up to it, and then where those had been.
00:12:23.040
So I think this came out, like, maybe a week after.
00:12:31.420
Now, that could be a ton of different things because everything's around the FBI.
00:12:47.960
Yeah, so he had two IEDs in his car that they found afterwards.
00:12:57.420
They were connected to remote sensors that he had a remote control for on the roof to set off.
00:13:04.460
Now, what's super weird about it is in the car, the remote transmitters there were off.
00:13:13.880
So even if he had that remote transmitter in his hand, he couldn't have set him off.
00:13:29.840
But there was nothing that he could do to set them off.
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And he, I should have asked this earlier, no statement of any kind, no manifesto.
00:13:41.460
No description of his own beliefs about anything.
00:13:47.220
Like, he seemed to go to a shooting range every now and again.
00:13:52.160
And I, you know, right after the shooting, there were all these, you know, usual, I was
00:13:57.700
a door kicker of some special operations people on TV saying that's an easy shot, 130 yards.
00:14:06.600
He, Crooks turned, a cop, a local cop came up a ladder behind him.
00:14:14.620
Backed the cop down and then immediately assumed the prone position, got off eight shots at
00:14:21.200
I think it was probably 150, but like, whatever, that's plus or minus.
00:14:29.580
So under extreme stress as a 20-year-old with no military training, I mean, luck plays,
00:14:36.800
does play a role in everything, including shooting, but I'm sorry.
00:14:44.580
It's, it, it, it's helpful to know what he had.
00:14:47.980
So he had, I think it was a DPMS AR-15, like pretty vanilla off the shelf.
00:14:53.520
I had wondered for a long time what his optic was.
00:15:01.820
Like you take some like pipe hitter who's been doing it for 20 years, whatever.
00:15:09.060
So he had a hollow sun red dot with a two MOA red dot, no magnification.
00:15:14.480
That, I, I like to think I'm a pretty good shooter.
00:15:24.180
It's like anyone can sit on a Sunday afternoon with your kids and like, you know.
00:15:29.760
But there's a cop behind you with a gun and you lie down and get off eight shots and one
00:15:39.300
Like when you know the angle, like he started out with a target like this, that became this.
00:15:47.100
And so he went, you know, from probably a four to six inch target to like a one inch target
00:15:55.520
That, I, my friends are going to make fun of me for saying like, that's a hard shot.
00:16:08.020
If you have like a, you know, 18X magnifier on it, you're shooting it paper and you're
00:16:12.780
on a bench and you've got a nice little platform set up.
00:16:15.640
And there's no armed police officer behind you coming up to shoot you.
00:16:22.160
But again, you know, luck does play a role in life for sure.
00:16:24.700
In life as backgammon, you know, luck is a component.
00:16:28.100
So, he brings these explosives inside what should be a perimeter.
00:16:37.120
So, I don't think that was within like the security perimeter.
00:16:47.160
So, we know that he showed up around the park, I think, around 1 o'clock.
00:16:55.700
So, they probably opened the doors at 4, let people in.
00:16:58.540
He was there beforehand, just kind of walking around, looking at things, casing it.
00:17:02.720
Comes back at, I think, 345-ish, 351, and flies a drone for like 20 minutes.
00:17:10.680
Flies it all around, looks at everything, gets a bird's eye view.
00:17:13.660
They were able to recreate the path that he had when they got the drone and the controller.
00:17:24.680
So, he's looking at it on his controller, flying it and seeing what it sees.
00:17:28.520
But when they go to the device, there's no images on it.
00:17:31.820
They can recreate the flight path, but that's it.
00:17:38.120
And what's interesting is the whole day, so the Secret Service didn't send their own drones.
00:17:43.660
But they sent some guy who'd gotten trained like a month or two previous, not on drone mitigation, but on drone detection.
00:17:50.640
So, he brings his little stuff in where he can go and detect a drone.
00:17:54.260
They can use it to figure out where the controller is and where a person is.
00:17:58.900
He spends like hours on the phone with an 800 number doing tech support.
00:18:19.000
Literally minutes after Crooks had been done doing his recon with his drone.
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Is it true, and by the way, did the drone fly over the podium and the place where Trump was?
00:22:45.420
In the reports that are available, they say that they recreated the flight path and it went all around the area.
00:22:51.100
Whether it went right over that podium, I don't, I don't, I would assume so.
00:22:56.780
He gets somehow a rangefinder onto the site through a Secret Service screen?
00:23:04.540
No, I don't think he, I don't think he took it through the magnetometer.
00:23:08.380
So, one of the problems was you have this area that really isn't that big.
00:23:13.200
So, you've got, you know, a horse ring for people doing stuff with livestock.
00:23:21.760
You've got a bunch of barns, but it's not a big area.
00:23:23.600
And you would think they would have made the whole thing the security perimeter, like a full circle all the way around.
00:23:30.420
You're not getting in without getting checked for anything.
00:23:33.320
But they ended up carving out this area, which was the American Glass Research, the AGR building.
00:23:39.200
The sprawling, we'll call it like a five-building complex.
00:23:43.460
And it was from one of those roofs that he shot Trump from.
00:23:47.540
And they decided, you know, we're going to put that outside of our security perimeter.
00:23:51.300
So, you can get to that area without having been screened or anything.
00:23:58.120
And that's like 130, 150 yards from the president.
00:24:03.600
I think he may have been around that area with the rangefinder.
00:24:08.140
He may have gotten in, but they ask one of the Secret Service agents.
00:24:12.300
He's like, well, a rangefinder is not a prohibited item.
00:24:21.800
He's not like trying to figure out, did I use the nine iron or like my pitching wedge?
00:24:31.400
And by the way, there's a difference between golf rangefinders and ballistic rangefinders.
00:24:38.020
Like, you get a nice ballistic rangefinder and it'll like, it'll tell you not just like
00:24:43.580
your horizontal distance, it'll give you your actual shooting distance, compensating for
00:24:49.820
Like, that's not like, oh, it's a hundred, it's a hundred and eight yards.
00:24:55.600
Like, so they see that and the local cops flag him as suspicious.
00:25:00.820
So the local cops start kind of getting on their radios and saying, hey, there's a dude
00:25:05.320
with a rangefinder, like everyone be on the lookout for it.
00:25:10.200
Secret Service doesn't really hear this because all the counter snipers, their lead counter
00:25:15.880
sniper, who is the most junior person on the team, which I find fascinating.
00:25:20.000
The counter snipers hadn't been used, I think, on a non-presidential event in ever.
00:25:28.200
They put, of the four people they send, the most junior guys, the team leader.
00:25:31.860
He doesn't even bother to go pick up his radio.
00:25:34.960
That would have given him comms with all of the local police.
00:25:42.520
I was talking to a former army ranger, sniper friend of mine, was a sniper in combat, was
00:25:49.680
And before I even started telling him kind of the stuff I learned and stuff I knew, he
00:25:54.040
said, well, I mean, a radio is a sniper's most powerful weapon.
00:26:05.520
Like, the most important thing they do is they observe and they record and they communicate.
00:26:08.780
And so, this guy, who's leading all of the counter snipers, who are there, by the way, because
00:26:13.920
there had been a specific long-range threat against Trump from a foreign actor that they
00:26:24.920
And so, when Trump is on stage, when you've got all the local cops, like, setting their
00:26:33.860
hair on fire, trying to get this guy who they know has a range finder, he's acting super
00:26:39.040
weird, at one point, you have local law enforcement starting to draw their weapons.
00:26:46.560
That's something you would think, like, maybe the Secret Service people on stage or the guys
00:26:54.920
Wouldn't, I mean, the first priority would be to establish communication between all
00:27:02.620
So, and they didn't even have a unified command post.
00:27:05.300
They had the Secret Service in one little area, and then they had the local guys over here,
00:27:09.200
and then they had, I think, one or two people who were local in the Secret Service command
00:27:13.820
post, but they didn't actually have a unified command post, which is also bonkers.
00:27:17.360
Can I ask how Crooks knew that this one cluster of buildings was the one place in the whole
00:27:36.400
So, security perimeter is where you can get in, where you don't have to get a pat down or
00:27:45.700
I can walk all the way over there, and I don't have to go through a magnetometer.
00:27:49.340
And then you've got the security bubble, which is like the area that people are responsible
00:27:54.220
for, which is going to be a much broader, bigger area than just your security perimeter.
00:28:01.500
He knew because he'd been walking around there for five hours, totally unmolested.
00:28:05.860
He got a drone up, he had a rangefinder, he cased the place.
00:28:12.260
He knew it just by having walked around and been like, oh, there's no cops over there.
00:28:18.140
It's absolutely, it's, do we ever find out why those buildings were not under surveillance
00:28:26.820
just because it was such an obvious shooting platform?
00:28:29.040
Yeah, so this is what I find the most enraging.
00:28:35.040
This counter-sniper team lead, been deposed by a bunch of different committees, he gives
00:28:42.600
Like, if you want, you know, failure has a lot of people to blame, and so I don't think
00:28:52.440
I think you can blame it on one organization, which is the Secret Service.
00:28:56.800
Um, it's a totally rotten culture with no accountability, nothing.
00:29:02.000
So, um, and within that, you had a bunch of people who failed.
00:29:05.520
But the last link of failure, which is what allowed the guy to get a shot off, was from,
00:29:13.200
He shows up, I think, four days ahead of time to do his advance.
00:29:17.020
So I think this would have been the Wednesday, which would have been July 10th.
00:29:22.660
He has four days on site, puts together his plan.
00:29:41.060
Uh, he's testifying to one congressional committee, and they're like, well,
00:29:47.660
Like, even the day of, when you got time to do a final walkthrough?
00:29:51.060
And he says, no, well, you see, because I had to go do a bunch of paperwork.
00:29:55.960
And I want to make sure my paperwork was good and, like, wasn't fuzzy and stuff.
00:30:08.120
He was so focused on his paperwork that he never went and actually looked around.
00:30:14.280
Do you know anything about this guy, by the way?
00:30:19.180
Uh, he had been with the Secret Service, I think, for six years.
00:30:27.600
Uh, no prior sharpshooter or sniper experience.
00:30:31.920
Uh, he showed up, worked for two years, because you have to work, uh, like a desk or trailing
00:30:36.920
someone for two years before you can be a counter-sniper.
00:30:39.480
And then he had been a counter-sniper for the rest of his time there.
00:30:44.260
I would think if you want someone whose job is to think what a sniper thinks like and
00:30:52.240
be able to have counter-measures and protect against that, you'd probably want a guy who
00:30:59.020
Like, if you're going to have somebody teaching your basketball team how to do defense, you'd
00:31:02.760
like to know that they've made a basket before.
00:31:07.880
So, you had a guy who, no prior military experience, no prior sniper experience.
00:31:15.640
He could shoot, I'm sure he could shoot well from long range, but that, like, that doesn't
00:31:25.240
There's recon, there's observing, there's getting into position, there's communicating,
00:31:30.960
Those are all the things that people who go into sniper school in the military spend weeks
00:31:37.800
And they'll talk about, like, you can kind of teach anyone to shoot a gun.
00:31:55.660
He had no idea when he set the people up where he wanted them for the event.
00:32:06.620
To his, to Trump's three o'clock, which is directly north, you've got that AGR building
00:32:12.840
The sniper team set up directly behind Trump on two of the three barns behind him.
00:32:19.160
So, the ones that we've all seen in that shot were, like, you've got one guy on the tripod
00:32:27.820
One, they never saw the shooter because there's a gigantic tree in their way.
00:32:33.220
From where they were, line of sight to where the building was where Crooks shot, gigantic
00:32:43.500
So, then you have the team leader and his partner, and his partner's the one who shot Crooks.
00:32:55.080
The counter sniper team leader, he never saw the shooter.
00:33:01.700
So, you've got one guy, basically, in that whole area who has visibility on that roof.
00:33:07.880
And you would think, oh, well, he must have been scanning that area regularly.
00:33:14.300
And he says, no, that actually wasn't my area that I was supposed to be scanning.
00:33:18.660
So, if you think of a clock, you know, 12, 12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock, 9.
00:33:23.840
Trump's in the center where he's looking is 12 o'clock.
00:33:26.660
The position from which he was shot would be 3 o'clock.
00:33:30.200
The guy who actually shot him, he was actually watching from 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock.
00:33:40.460
It wasn't until he heard shots that he turned over there.
00:33:43.860
So, of all the people who were tasked with doing counter sniper surveillance and mitigation, only one person ever actually saw the shooter, even though he'd been on the roof for six minutes.
00:33:55.280
So, it sounds like there was a blind spot, an entire quadrant that they weren't even looking at.
00:34:07.980
And afterwards, the Secret Service, you might recall, tried to blame the local cops.
00:34:15.580
They never told the cops, number one, that their job was to be scoping out that roof.
00:34:20.180
All of the cops from the local police forces who were there to provide sniper coverage, first off, they were never told that they were counter snipers.
00:34:31.320
So, they set up in an area in the building where they had a great shot of the crowd, pretty much the entire crowd.
00:34:40.960
They had no idea that they were supposed to be looking at a building roof, which is 180 degrees to their left.
00:34:47.120
And because of how the window opened, it was like one of those, I think they call them casement windows.
00:34:52.940
So, you've got to crank it and then it slowly opens.
00:34:55.400
It's not a double sash that opens top and bottom.
00:34:58.580
I don't think they could have seen that if they had wanted to, just because of how that window opened.
00:35:04.940
They'd have to get around, like, almost leaning out the window to see, which, of course, they're not going to be doing because they think their job is crowd overwatch.
00:35:13.700
So, those guys somehow get blamed in media reports by people who are obviously secret service sources.
00:35:22.680
And all of them were like, no, that was never our responsibility.
00:35:28.580
It's not their job to protect the candidate or the president.
00:35:31.340
Yeah, just because you, secret service, have chosen to delegate, you know, one of your responsibilities, it doesn't stop being your responsibility.
00:35:44.300
You don't let the president get shot in the face.
00:35:46.880
And so, they're questioning this guy, this counter-sniper team lead, and they're trying to get him to admit that things were done wrong.
00:35:55.380
And so, they're asking him, so, like, would you consider what happened a failure?
00:36:05.360
The candidate shot in the face, and that's a possible failure?
00:36:09.960
Does this guy still work for the U.S. government?
00:36:15.800
And it was more like a mental health therapy leave.
00:36:20.220
Oh, like Michael Byrd, you murder someone and you're the victim?
00:36:24.320
And then he's, like, right back, working full-time for the secret service.
00:36:36.100
So, you had Kim Cheadle, who is the head of secret service.
00:36:48.560
Then you had her deputy, who was, like, the guy who was actually in charge of the day-to-day.
00:37:00.200
Like, I find the leadership channel, like, the leadership chain, and I find everyone in it.
00:37:09.280
But, the secret service calls itself a zero-fail agency.
00:37:23.780
And so, you know, in the Ottoman court, everyone was afraid of the bodyguards.
00:37:33.040
We're getting to, like, the most basic facts of life, which is the armed people are in charge.
00:37:38.640
And so, you know, you hate to think that's the rule in America, but do you think it's possible that people were afraid to mess with the secret service because no one wants to mess with the bodyguards?
00:37:48.840
Well, I assume that's why we've never gotten the truth on the JFK shooting.
00:37:51.600
Like, I just kind of assume secret services was involved somehow, and that's why presidents have been cowed into not releasing it.
00:38:04.220
I mean, that's like the most—you know, that's the most basic interest of anybody's not to get shot to death, so if you think—
00:38:13.120
And, you know, I'm speculating to some extent, but you do wonder—I always wondered, and I asked, like, if you're the Trump campaign, why don't you make a—I mean, I think or I know that Trump thinks he doesn't want to whine about being shot because you seem weak when you want.
00:38:36.000
Um, and I think that was a—it was a manly thing to do.
00:38:43.000
However, like, it is kind of important to find out what happened, and I always suspected that maybe, you know, they felt a little bit threatened because they've got a campaign.
00:38:59.100
On the other hand, do you really want to piss off your bodyguards?
00:39:02.000
I mean, do you think that is part of the dynamic here?
00:39:12.540
Uh, they didn't know anything was going on until Trump had been shot.
00:39:17.180
Like, you would think the people on the stage who are, like, the literal personal protective detail, the ones who physically form—
00:39:26.740
Yeah, but there were several men, um, on there.
00:39:31.040
Those guys are the ones who, like, physically have to go in, and I think they call it a body bunker they put around the president.
00:39:37.000
They had no idea anything was going on or there was anything, any trouble anywhere until they hear shots fired.
00:39:42.640
And they interviewed, um, the guy who came—so if you're watching Trump and, um, you see the Secret Service agents come in, the guy on the left gets in first.
00:39:53.340
So I think the House Butler Task Force interviewed him.
00:39:56.900
And they said, okay, take us through what was going on in your head in that moment.
00:40:02.740
He's like, well, yeah, we heard some scuttlebutt that local police were looking at something at 3 o'clock, like, to Trump's right.
00:40:14.840
Like, uh, and he said, my immediate thought was it sounded like one of those pop-it firecrackers just thrown on the ground.
00:40:22.540
Yeah, and he said, so that's, that's what I thought it was.
00:40:27.780
There must have been, like, a heckler who got the pop-its in the crowd.
00:40:39.660
And that's when I knew—and by the way, he's hearing nothing in his ears at this point, getting no communication.
00:40:45.820
He said, that's the point at which I go and jump on the president.
00:40:53.460
I was in a restaurant the other night, in fact, this weekend, and I had a little trouble hearing what people were saying.
00:40:59.680
And I thought to myself, I'm a little young to go deaf.
00:41:03.460
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00:43:27.180
Um, that's, so of the eight shots, like where did they go, those eight shots?
00:43:31.280
I think they were only able to find actual bullet fragments from two.
00:43:40.480
So there were actually, there were 10 shots fired total.
00:43:47.260
There was one from a local law enforcement officer who shot almost simultaneously with Crooks' eighth shot.
00:43:54.540
So you have one, two, three, you had a burst of three, then you had a burst of five, and then the five like all went high.
00:44:02.500
One of them hit a hydraulic line on one of those like telehandlers or lulls or cranes behind it.
00:44:06.820
So it starts spewing hydraulic fluid everywhere and you see it drop all of a sudden after the hydraulic line gets punctured if you watch the video again.
00:44:19.340
As Crooks fired his eighth shot, a local officer fires his gun at Crooks.
00:44:29.420
There's no like forensic medical evidence that he did, but there's no firing from Crooks after that point, after that eighth shot.
00:44:37.240
And then 15 seconds later comes the shot that kills Crooks.
00:44:45.680
And the reason that happened was because nobody had eyes on the roof.
00:44:53.500
So that's an entire magazine worth of, I mean, you could fire an entire magazine.
00:45:05.100
Yeah, so you have the sniper who's on the roof who takes the shot.
00:45:10.740
So like if you are Crooks, if you're where the shooter is and I'm where Trump is, the guy who shot him is looking here and all the way over here the whole time.
00:45:24.100
He has to get up, orient himself to where the shots are coming from, where if he's got like earmuffs on or ear protection on, that can be kind of hard to do.
00:45:37.700
So he's got to locate the guy where the shots are coming from, has to make identification of the guy who's got the gun, and then has to fire at him.
00:45:49.380
So like I don't even blame that guy because he was told to watch this sector.
00:46:20.620
So that's for people who don't shoot, that's so much larger than the .223 or .556 round that Crooks is shooting.
00:46:30.920
I mean, it's like, it's a big, it's a big boy cartridge.
00:46:34.260
And when you fire a .300 Win Mag, like you feel that.
00:46:39.420
I had someone come to my range, just at my house, and with his grandfather's .300 Win Mag, we were just shooting on Sunday afternoon.
00:46:52.380
You go to a range where someone's shooting like .300 or something, you're like, oh.
00:47:08.660
And it hit him in the lip, goes through the face, out the neck, but then back into his back.
00:47:16.340
And they recovered a fragment of the mushroomed bullet from Crooks's body.
00:47:30.780
So tell me about the cop who says he shot Crooks.
00:47:35.980
So there was this furious action going on by the AGR building.
00:47:41.480
Either four or five different local law enforcement agencies.
00:47:53.320
So Butler County was the county where Butler is.
00:48:04.680
And then you had the Washington County, which is southwest of Butler.
00:48:09.640
So you had five different local law enforcement.
00:48:12.060
The Washington guys, I believe, were down by the horse ring.
00:48:16.660
Um, which is probably a good four to 500 yards away from everything.
00:48:20.440
But they had fairly good visual coverage of everything.
00:48:23.980
So it was mostly the Butler and Beaver County people.
00:48:30.200
And you've got one guy who tried to climb on the roof because they're furiously searching.
00:48:40.380
So he's kind of holding on like this to the roof, looks up and sees the shooter right there.
00:48:57.080
He said, there's no way for me to pull my gun because I'm, he's like hanging, like doing a pull up.
00:49:06.260
So he says, I don't, I don't remember exactly what happened.
00:49:12.400
And the next thing I know, I'm getting myself up off the concrete.
00:49:24.260
Um, yeah, I mean not, he wasn't right on him, but he had him in his sights, fired one round.
00:49:35.760
There, there's no forensic evidence in Crooks's body that he was shot.
00:49:40.000
But Crooks stopped firing after the eighth round, which was simultaneous with the round from that cop.
00:49:52.140
There's some speculation that he might have hit the stock.
00:50:00.160
So a magazine has obviously more than eight rounds in it.
00:50:05.500
He had unfired rounds in the, in the mag when he was, when the rifle was recovered, right?
00:50:11.020
They recovered, I think, all eight shell casings.
00:50:13.820
No, but he still had ammunition in the magazine.
00:50:17.680
So, what I'm asking is, it sounds like the local cop stopped the shooting.
00:50:21.760
He didn't run out, he didn't stop shooting because he ran out of ammo.
00:50:25.440
So, it was not the Secret Service that stopped this assassination attempt.
00:50:34.180
It stopped permanently when he got a 210 grain Hornady tip through his upper lip.
00:50:39.720
But the shooting had been stopped prior to that.
00:50:44.800
What, 15 seconds, as noted, is a very long time.
00:50:52.160
You had your two snipers on the roof in the North Barn, and that was the number two unit,
00:50:58.240
how they were kind of categorized in all the documents.
00:51:02.660
They never saw him because they had a gigantic tree in their way.
00:51:12.380
So, they see the guy who's kind of kneeled, kneeling down.
00:51:17.100
People automatically assumed, oh, well, he did it.
00:51:23.760
You see him, like, he's either looking through, I think, his binoculars.
00:51:33.260
He pops up, and he kind of looks around, and you're like, why is he off the glass?
00:51:41.240
Like, those two guys on that North Barn are furiously looking where it is.
00:51:49.620
Unless you were looking, had someone looking there.
00:51:52.960
And then you have the counter-sniper team lead who had convinced himself that because they had local cops in the building, that that was their job to be watching that, even though it was physically impossible for them to do.
00:52:09.140
And then the one guy who had a sight line to that was assigned a sector that was the exact opposite of it.
00:52:22.140
So, three people were shot, two in addition to President Trump.
00:52:30.880
Corey Comparator, the firefighter, he was shot.
00:52:40.780
Trump, two men who were shot and didn't die, and Corey, who was killed by a bullet.
00:52:48.680
Yeah, right next to my producer, like, right next to him.
00:52:59.560
Yeah, I'm only saying that because there's a lot of drama.
00:53:08.800
Do we know anything about them or how they fared?
00:53:14.600
There was an interview with them by one of the networks a couple weeks ago, but they're
00:53:21.520
Obviously, they'll carry scars with it forever.
00:53:24.940
But I don't believe they were permanently disabled in any way.
00:53:33.000
You know, something nicks a bleacher and goes off into the ground, you're never finding a
00:53:37.440
These are .22 caliber bullets, just to be clear.
00:53:40.200
So, they were .223 caliber bullets in a .556 cartridge.
00:53:52.660
People who don't shoot guns and think ARs are massive, big, powerful guns, they'd be
00:54:08.800
Which you could not mistake for anything but like a bullet.
00:54:19.180
We know nothing about why he did this, his beliefs, who he spoke to.
00:54:26.780
He's the only 20-year-old with no social media presence.
00:54:30.560
And apparently no cutlery, silverware in his house.
00:54:41.280
I don't, my theory is that silverware was taken as evidence because he was mixing bombs
00:54:51.080
I did not read anywhere that when officers showed up, because they interviewed one ATF
00:54:57.080
agent who was actually in the home and who was the one who discovered the IED in Crooks'
00:55:07.900
It's not like a bunch of sloppy, sloppy hoarders lived there.
00:55:17.220
So, I don't know where the silverware, because I've heard the same thing.
00:55:20.440
I've not read a single report from someone who was there that says, yeah, we got in there
00:55:26.500
I suspect that they took it to test it forensically to see if he was mixing bombs with it.
00:55:31.680
Because he had a gallon of nitromethane in his closet.
00:55:38.280
What, I, pardon me, Angers, what's nitromethane?
00:55:40.020
It, it, it's, uh, a major component of bomb making.
00:55:55.620
And so the, the ATF guy walks in, sees the bomb, looks around, sees in his closet this
00:56:05.160
And then at that point, they immediately clear the whole house.
00:56:10.040
And I believe all the houses, one house around it.
00:56:16.820
But that, but, but we still don't know anything about him or why he did this.
00:56:20.520
We also don't know why, according to your account, why the Secret Service made this like
00:56:26.320
colossal error in judgment and just like left out an entire quadrant of a potential field
00:56:39.100
That, that's, that's always the easy bureaucratic solution.
00:56:42.120
But even that, is it true that, um, Dr. Jill Biden, America's, I think most famous research
00:56:53.460
Um, but is it true that she was having an event and that that bled off like manpower that
00:57:07.960
So the Secret Service at the Butler event for Trump was actually having issues with their
00:57:12.180
radios because they were getting bleed over from the radios, from the agents at Jill Biden's
00:57:26.400
Um, and okay, so that's a whole lot of we don't knows.
00:57:30.180
Like, um, so your third question was what happened after to everybody?
00:57:36.960
Sorry to break the suspense there, but like nothing.
00:57:45.580
You said you were vacillating between two and three.
00:57:48.380
So two was what I call strategic incompetence where, where Trump was deliberately left vulnerable.
00:57:55.140
And, and I think that for a whole host of reasons, one that I'm conscious and I've been
00:57:59.780
alive, but right after the shooting, um, my, my wife and I were together working on home
00:58:06.740
projects and we got, we hadn't been paying attention to our phones and so started getting
00:58:11.860
My wife got a text from her friend, Trump's been shot.
00:58:14.960
Like, we're just kind of like stunned, like immediately pray because we don't know what
00:58:22.960
A couple of minutes later, fun, you know, texts that he's okay.
00:58:26.480
And then right after that, my phone starts going crazy.
00:58:32.100
And one of the most interesting texts I got, which, which I, uh, tweeted about was that the
00:58:39.040
secret service special operations division, which is kind of like the elite division within
00:58:42.900
the secret service, if you can say that, uh, they had been asking for more protection for
00:58:49.260
years for Trump repeatedly over and over and again.
00:58:53.540
And it was denied repeatedly denied so much that they just stopped asking for it because
00:58:59.340
it was kind of viewed as if you ask for something you, you're not going to get, it's like gauche
00:59:05.460
Um, another great question we don't have an answer to.
00:59:10.380
So it's secret service is now under the umbrella of DHS.
00:59:15.060
And then they moved it, I don't know, five, 10 years ago.
00:59:17.840
So under Mayorkas, like a real, real competent public servant there.
00:59:35.460
Actually, no, I'm going to assume she's doing security for like a Fortune 500 CEO.
00:59:39.800
Or a University of California school, you know.
00:59:46.520
Um, so, but we, it's not clear why they denied or who denied.
00:59:57.380
Secret service spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.
01:00:03.280
And spent the whole weekend calling reporters and telling him I was making it up.
01:00:13.140
Bobby Kennedy was denied secret service protection.
01:00:24.320
I mean, that's a kind of attempted murder, really.
01:00:26.680
So, I just don't understand how, I mean, disobedience to the regime is punished immediately.
01:00:44.720
He asked a question about taxes to Obama, like, in a rope line.
01:00:49.060
They gave that dude, like, the media digital colonoscopy within, like, five minutes.
01:00:54.820
We know more about a guy who asked Obama a question about taxes than we do about a guy who shot Trump in the head.
01:01:05.320
They're not just, you know, the PR office for the regime.
01:01:18.000
Do you know how Crooks' father found out his son was the shooter?
01:01:25.700
Well, we're talking about kind of, like, weird, creepy media stuff.
01:01:35.240
The only thing they have is a serial number on his rifle.
01:01:38.980
So, they call up ATF, and they do what's called an urgent trace to figure out where was this gun bot.
01:01:45.420
Dettelbach, the ATF director, says it took him 30 minutes.
01:01:49.700
But they know by around, like, 8.30, definitely by 9-ish, that the dad bought the gun and where he bought it from.
01:01:57.740
And it was from a retailer that had since been closed.
01:02:01.320
They put together a report, like, a pretty narrow distribution of people.
01:02:06.600
I think it went to Pennsylvania State Police so local police could go stake the place out.
01:02:15.580
And we know because we got the testimony from the guy who sent it out.
01:02:20.000
ATF and a couple cops are sent to go do a stakeout on Crooks' father's house.
01:02:29.760
At that point, they're already seeing cars slowly drive by in ways that, obviously, they don't live on that street.
01:02:39.600
And I think 10.56, they get a word from a dispatcher that Crooks' father has called 911 to report his son missing.
01:02:49.620
At that point, they're no longer doing a stakeout.
01:02:53.980
They have to go confront him because, obviously, he knows something.
01:03:08.280
He got two calls from CNN and a call from an NBC producer.
01:03:19.900
They had it from the ATF report that had the trace of the serial number.
01:03:27.200
Somebody had that and decided, you know what I'm going to do?
01:03:33.440
But it's interesting that they would know it was the son because it was the father on the ATF record.
01:03:39.860
But somehow, CNN and NBC knew that it was not the father but the son.
01:03:43.100
Well, because at that point, did we know the age of the person?
01:03:50.960
And when I found that out, by the way, I'm still angry about the whole Roger Stone raid.
01:03:59.100
CNN happened to be there that morning right before the cops got there.
01:04:06.980
And so I saw that and it just instantly reminded me of the Roger Stone thing and then made me angry again.
01:04:13.400
To be active participants in the repression of a population by its government is like pretty – it's like capo behavior.
01:04:26.700
With Donald Trump returning to the White House, this country has a unique opportunity, maybe our last opportunity, to save ourselves from the anti-American and anti-human left.
01:04:36.720
But our efforts may be stymied by the deep state.
01:04:44.840
Permanent Washington stands in the way of all efforts to approve the lives of ordinary Americans.
01:04:51.820
And right now they are scheming to do the same thing to the second Trump administration.
01:04:57.240
They are determined to keep their stranglehold on power, regardless of elections, anti-democratically.
01:05:09.400
Well, one way you can is by supporting the Heritage Foundation, which is in Washington and understands exactly how it works, in such a way that they're a threat and they're under attack.
01:05:18.460
You know who's effective because the other one's under attack.
01:05:21.460
Heritage has a comprehensive plan to dismantle permanent Washington and restore the country to its democratic foundations.
01:05:29.920
Again, visit heritage.org slash Tucker to learn more and to support this critical effort.
01:05:36.640
And when you make a gift today, you get a free pocket constitution to make certain that you are equipped with the founding principles on your person at all times.
01:05:59.920
I didn't fully know when I was there, but like, yeah, no, they're not observers at all.
01:06:15.260
But, you know, that leak, it materially changed how the police responded.
01:06:26.360
They're waiting to get the signal to actually go confront the family.
01:06:31.240
And because this guy got, I'm convinced that he called police after being called by CNN.
01:06:37.800
It's not in the report, but like, you'll never convince me otherwise.
01:06:41.480
Materially changed how the cops had to approach the home of the shooter.
01:06:50.960
And then let's imagine you're seeing anything, you got this great scoop.
01:06:53.940
What are you getting out of informing a father of that?
01:07:05.080
I mean, they were participants in political repression, cheerleaders for it.
01:07:13.480
They were used by the Biden administration to, well, that was actually the Trump administration.
01:07:25.240
The lack of control over the federal agencies by the executive, by the White House.
01:07:39.080
Is there, I know I've asked the same question 15 times, but I just, I can't believe there's no real answer.
01:07:44.660
We don't know anything about who Crooks talked to?
01:07:51.520
Don't know what was going on on these encrypted apps.
01:07:58.400
Why doesn't the Congress issue subpoenas to find out?
01:08:04.500
I mean, my view is Congress is by far the most powerful branch.
01:08:11.340
And yet, in practice today, in 2025, it's far and away the weakest.
01:08:18.680
Except when they do the one thing that they do do, which is to preserve the total control over the United States by the national security state.
01:08:26.860
And so, you're seeing this right now where, you know, committee chairmen in the Congress are saying to the incoming administration, no, no, no.
01:08:36.860
Like, you can't have Tulsi Gabbard or anyone like Tulsi Gabbard.
01:08:40.580
It's all got to be, you know, John Ratcliffe or someone, you know, we know and who's obviously under our control.
01:08:46.460
And they're insistent on that, exercising that power, which I find really interesting.
01:08:54.480
Like, I believed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because they told us there were.
01:09:00.840
So, it didn't dawn on me that they were all just corrupt liars until really the Russiagate hoax.
01:09:08.400
Like, I feel like it's been that way for like 70 years.
01:09:16.360
I mean, like, we know for a fact it's been that way since right around late November of 1963.
01:09:24.840
I mean, I just think it goes back to, you know, the Second World War.
01:09:29.100
Yeah, because they didn't, their first crime was not killing Kennedy.
01:09:34.580
Like, that wasn't like dipping their toes in the water.
01:09:40.960
It's just interesting that this seems like one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.
01:09:46.280
And I do think you're probably the most informed person in all media, though.
01:10:01.480
You and Schellenberger are two of my favorite, right at the top of my favorite journalist list.
01:10:06.420
And neither one of you, like, started out to do, intending to do this or have like, you know, went to journalism school.
01:10:19.860
It used to be a blue-collar job and you'd work a beat and now you have to go to Medill or Columbia and it's just embarrassing.
01:10:27.300
The journalists I respect more are all people who could be doing something else, making a lot more money, who didn't set out to do this.
01:10:32.840
Just sort of out of curiosity and patriotism and, you know, kind of like moral responsibility are doing it.
01:10:42.020
But anyway, the reason I want to talk to you was it felt like if you can do something as obvious as set up a shooting of Donald Trump in the summer of an election year and get away with it, like, then you're still in control of everything.
01:10:56.680
So, the craziest thing, and people in Trump's circle have told me there's no chance it could have happened this way.
01:11:05.180
They swear there's no way it happened this way.
01:11:12.780
He's kind of talking about when he was, his process of interviewing to be VP and all that.
01:11:18.100
And Trump was considering bringing him up at that Butler rally and announcing him.
01:11:26.080
That was, not just considering, but that was, that was like a much discussed.
01:11:30.980
So, so kind of at that point, JD's been told, like, you're it.
01:11:35.040
And now we know with Trump, like, it's never actually done until it's done.
01:11:43.940
But JD's been told they're, they're mulling the idea of him going to Butler.
01:11:47.720
And then Trump's like, no, we don't really want to do that.
01:11:51.800
So, we'll just put a, you know, put a pin in that.
01:11:54.280
And that was the last rally before he had announced a VP.
01:12:00.380
So, that's, if you are a crooked, evil deep stater and you want to get rid of the virus that is Donald Trump and make sure that he doesn't get to pick the person who would be running in his stead if something happened.
01:12:18.820
And so, I've asked, I said, did anyone leak that?
01:12:24.940
And I said, okay, I 100% believe, like, kind of just knowing who's around that, 100% believe that.
01:12:30.360
You're telling me it's impossible that nobody heard the conversation through other means?
01:12:37.340
Leaked the fact that JD was going to speak at that rally?
01:12:39.940
Or, or leaked that, like, he had basically been picked.
01:12:49.460
I mean, I'm, like, living in some weird rural place, but, um, in Maine.
01:12:56.240
I mean, all the people I know who knew that are good people who love Trump.
01:12:59.600
But, I mean, I'm not suggesting, I'm not suggesting anything.
01:13:03.020
But I'm just, in point of fact, a lot of people knew it.
01:13:04.420
Yeah, so, if other people knew it, that, that is a...
01:13:08.860
The more people who know, you know, the more people who know.
01:13:11.120
Yeah, so I just, that thing, I don't know if I'll ever be able to get that out of my head.
01:13:15.540
The timing, based on what was going on that weekend.
01:13:18.540
But there was at least one subsequent attempt, assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life.
01:13:30.660
Yeah, but I mean, after mid-July, were there, do you think, other attempts?
01:13:38.620
But, I, you know, I think there might have been.
01:13:49.760
That one is so much wackier than the Butler one.
01:13:54.280
Well, I think there was a photo of him with that stupid chef, that stupid commie chef.
01:14:06.700
They've got, I think that guy got a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Biden.
01:14:15.280
Yeah, I think, unless I'm, like, totally getting my wires crossed, I'm pretty sure that guy got a Medal of Freedom and there's a picture of him with Ralph.
01:14:24.100
This, like, homeless Hawaiian mercenary bringing troops to Ukraine who's camped out on Trump's golf course after Trump's already been shot in the head.
01:14:36.960
I think the report I read was he was five feet away, fires like 10 rounds at him, misses.
01:14:43.260
And it was local cops who got the guy 45 minutes later.
01:14:53.620
So, do you, the members, I just want to put it on the record, the members of Congress, you said that the two committee inquiries were pretty good.
01:15:03.040
Given the constraints that they have, so Congress doesn't have a lot of staff for doing this stuff.
01:15:08.940
They don't have the investigative tools that the FBI has.
01:15:12.040
You had the Senate Homeland Security Committee that did its own report.
01:15:15.560
And then you had the Butler Task Force bipartisan in the House that did its report.
01:15:20.360
I thought they did a great job, both of them, given the limitations and constraints they have.
01:15:25.660
It was, I don't know how they could have been more thorough given the FBI trying to block them from doing anything.
01:15:42.400
He's hopefully going to get his people in office.
01:15:48.620
I kind of feel like there's so much going on in the world right now that, you know, maybe people just kind of forget to ask.
01:15:56.900
Like, I mean, I know enough about human nature to where I can't dismiss that.
01:16:06.120
But yeah, there's always some new story we have to go, like, react to and pretend we're, like, very upset about.
01:16:15.260
Remember when news cycles were, like, three days long?
01:16:18.340
I remember when Natalie Holloway disappeared in Aruba.
01:16:24.180
And we spent, you know, approximately three years talking about it every day.
01:16:27.380
You know, no disrespect to Natalie Holloway or the inherent significance of a story about a dead American.
01:16:34.480
And you sort of wonder what else was going on while we were talking about Natalie Holloway.
01:16:38.440
Yeah, I've gone back and thought of all the time I wasted with Gary Condit.
01:16:44.480
You know, how much time did we spend looking into what happened on 9-11 right around zero?
01:16:50.700
They hate us for our freedoms and all that stuff and not asking obvious questions.
01:16:57.120
I think one of the hijackers was living with an FBI informant for, like, a year.
01:17:07.420
So the obvious question is why aren't other elected officials so anxious to get to the
01:17:18.980
When this happened, my wife said, you know, are we ever going to find out what this was?
01:17:25.740
One thing members of Congress care about is not being assassinated.
01:17:29.600
So, like, they have every vested interest in finding out what this was and in making the
01:17:41.460
Yeah, it's, I don't know what's happened to Congress.
01:17:43.900
I think it's probably a combination of, obviously, the more responsibility you take, if you're going
01:17:50.080
to take 100% of the powers you've been given by the founders and the Constitution and exercise
01:17:56.560
that every day, you're going to have 100% of the accountability.
01:17:58.960
There's nothing a member of Congress politician hates more than accountability.
01:18:03.700
So they are generally happy to delegate all of their authority to the executive where
01:18:22.840
It's always a process that can be strengthened.
01:18:31.840
So you can answer this question, but as I just look onto the Congress, where I've never
01:18:36.820
worked, but it seems like the single most corrupt or certainly the most infuriating part of
01:18:57.140
It's not Alexandria O.C. or whatever she's calling herself.
01:19:00.620
You know, it was like a buffoon, but, um, and at least has, you know, 10% sincerity in
01:19:08.420
But I look at some of the Republicans, you know, Rish and some of these guys, I'm like,
01:19:16.140
And, and man, Coburn was, that guy was a unicorn.
01:19:26.400
All he wanted to do was like go up there and cut spending and restore some sanity and
01:19:33.920
And then the Senate was like, actually, we're going to ban you from doing that because it's,
01:19:48.480
The Senate ethics committee went after him for years.
01:20:00.060
If he was an abortionist, that, you know, that would have been fine.
01:20:03.160
But, you know, be actually touching and being with constituents, that was too much.
01:20:07.040
But I remember doing stuff with him where we would have constantly people telling us,
01:20:17.700
And we'd be like, what, what do you mean you don't do?
01:20:19.200
You don't do things like, no, that's, that's not how we do things around here.
01:20:22.920
And because we were all so young and green and idealistic, it was actually the genius
01:20:29.740
It wasn't like an all-star cast of like elite players.
01:20:33.700
He just took a bunch of chuckleheads who like believed in his mission and was like, yeah,
01:20:42.060
And so we were too stupid to know what we weren't supposed to be doing.
01:20:46.520
Why isn't every, I mean, there seems to be something peculiarly, specifically wrong with
01:20:56.920
Like, they seem more committed to betraying their voters than any other group I've ever
01:21:03.320
They're, for most of them, it's like their Senate tenure is five years of doing what they
01:21:07.440
want and then a year of promising to do what their voters want.
01:21:15.680
I don't know if something happens when you become a Republican senator that happens to
01:21:20.460
like 90% of them where they get there and they just like being important and that becomes
01:21:26.320
And they're so, you talked about the media being a player, the media like exists in large
01:21:31.760
part to gaslight Republicans into doing what they want.
01:21:35.400
And so these guys, they, for whatever reason, they care what CNN thinks about them and they
01:21:39.620
care what the New York Times thinks about them.
01:21:41.600
And they don't understand that if you actually want to be powerful as a Republican, not caring
01:21:46.920
what anyone thinks about you makes you a fricking superhero.
01:21:52.040
They don't, like the machine doesn't know how to handle someone who doesn't care about
01:22:02.100
They don't know how to intimidate you or how to threaten you.
01:22:05.060
Like, oh, you'll cast me out of this awful city full of terrible people.
01:22:20.000
So I've, I've got a friend who's, who's like one of the few really good true believers
01:22:24.220
on the right, um, worked in the Senate for a long time, total genius, parliamentary genius.
01:22:29.780
And he says, you can kind of judge senators, unlike house members, you can judge senators
01:22:36.880
And that kind of tells you about the character of that whole group of people.
01:22:40.660
So you've got the guys who came in in 2002, war on terror, got to fight them over there.
01:22:54.500
And then you get the Oh six thing where I, I don't think we even elected a new Republican
01:22:57.900
Senator because it was such a political bloodbath because the Iraq war is a disaster.
01:23:08.920
Those guys still have the tea party mentality, which is fine.
01:23:13.880
But you have to be able to like evolve with the electorate.
01:23:23.960
And it really wasn't until 2016 where you actually started seeing a change that was reflective
01:23:29.460
of where the people are happening again in 2018.
01:23:32.860
And then most of the guys coming in now are so much better than the people they serve
01:23:42.880
And yet they're still senators and they still care about what people think about them.
01:23:48.540
Like somewhat someone like you or me will never ever be in that body.
01:23:56.560
But what's interesting is it's not on questions like, you know, we spent all this time on the
01:24:01.400
training question, which I think is inherently important.
01:24:03.860
And I do think if you eliminate sex differences, civilization collapses because they're built
01:24:14.140
And I think there are tons of Republicans in both houses who agree with all that or say
01:24:21.300
they do or do a good job of pretending it's fine.
01:24:24.460
It's the national security intel stuff, the police power stuff, surveillance power stuff.
01:24:30.320
Man, they are, that's what they take seriously.
01:24:35.260
And it's actually, you see guys who really want to get on the intel committee.
01:24:41.240
Like, unless you're going to do real oversight, which I think one person, Devin Nunes, has
01:24:47.920
The only reason to be on that is to, like, be cool.
01:24:51.240
You get to be with the spies and you get read in on it and they make you feel special and
01:24:57.220
And then maybe one day they'll write a book about you, like Charlie Wilson's war, about
01:25:01.320
how courageous you were and shipping a bunch of weapons all around the world and starting
01:25:05.180
wars that we're still dealing with the ramifications of.
01:25:07.520
Like, it's the Jason Bourne, like John Le Carré kind of stuff that they actually think
01:25:14.580
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01:26:04.880
when you need them, which is usually the moment when you can't get them.
01:26:26.240
I mean way more evil than like, you know, I'm, I think Head Start was a disaster.
01:26:31.540
Social Security is bankrupting the country, Medicare, you know, there's all these problems
01:26:34.940
with social workers, but you don't look at that and say the people who started that are
01:26:40.180
They're just like dumb or they didn't foresee the consequences of the, of what they were
01:26:44.800
But like the people who, you know, cheered the murder of Gaddafi or never admitted they lied
01:26:51.320
about weapons mass destruction or the people pushing, you know, claiming that we should
01:26:55.780
lower the conscription age in Ukraine to 18 because we haven't killed enough Ukrainians
01:27:04.940
It's people who, it's almost like they get off on the rah-rah team sport aspect of people
01:27:13.980
And having their lives, you know, if not ended, ruined forever.
01:27:18.260
And, and I swear, I don't see how any of these people, they must not have ever talked to anyone
01:27:23.900
who spent any time actually doing dirty work in Iraq or Afghanistan because you can't spend
01:27:30.940
It, it, it, it destroyed a whole generation of warfighters and young men.
01:27:37.680
And not just because they were killed or disabled.
01:27:45.820
And, you know, sometimes you have to kill people.
01:27:48.580
If there's, if I have a home invader and my wife and kids are going to kill a guy, I would
01:27:53.580
I mean, you have to, but ultimately killing people is bad and it's bad for the person who
01:28:07.000
Well, I mean, it's why, it's why I never joined.
01:28:11.300
It's because you're afraid of killing and you should be, like, that's a very heavy
01:28:14.920
thing to ask someone to do and then not to acknowledge it.
01:28:19.480
When you see the scars they bring back to the mental, emotional, spiritual.
01:28:23.860
And, you know, some of them deal with it way better than others.
01:28:27.200
But there's a reason the suicide rate is so high.
01:28:29.900
And the divorce rate and the addiction rate and the weirdness rate and the deep kind of
01:28:41.640
And they were asked to do something and they did it.
01:28:44.040
And they did it under duress and at great personal risk.
01:28:49.060
Just saying not to acknowledge what we've asked them to do.
01:28:52.300
Not to acknowledge the burden of having killed somebody.
01:28:58.480
In the news media, the corporate media, they treat it like it's a fun sport.
01:29:05.160
Let's look at what Red Team versus Blue Team did today.
01:29:09.780
Let's look at this footage of, like, this Russian getting killed by a drone.
01:29:14.300
And then they cheer and they, oh, isn't this great?
01:29:21.520
It's like some kid gets his face blown off and you're cheering it?
01:29:28.740
I look back on kind of how I thought about things in the run-up to the Iraq war.
01:29:34.860
Because I was like the jingoistic, rah-rah kind of thing.
01:29:40.480
And you see that it's just, that permanently changed how I looked at that entire bureaucracy.
01:29:45.680
And in 2001 and 2002, when I was tepidly cheerleading, I will say this, my only defense was kind of tepid.
01:29:53.020
I sort of knew it was wrong, but I convinced myself it wasn't.
01:29:55.000
But when I was, you know, making the case for the Iraq war and repeating the lies of the Bush administration, I'd never really seen violence, you know, personally seen it.
01:30:03.680
And that was, you know, a huge change for me seeing that.
01:30:21.200
And so that was personally for me a huge change.
01:30:23.720
But I just think that it's important to remember, especially as Christians, like we're against violence.
01:30:39.000
I mean, we're the only things made in God's image.
01:30:47.160
And it's like you said, somebody breaks into your home.
01:30:57.160
Like you, I remember I was taking a gun training from an uncle of mine.
01:31:05.740
He was, worked with Jeff Cooper out in gun sight.
01:31:11.980
And I remember him, my sister and my aunt and uncle and I went with this other uncle and his wife to do this training.
01:31:19.260
And he made us sit in a classroom for like a whole day.
01:31:31.800
But he's like, yeah, if you're, if you're paying attention, like if you're aware and you know what's going on around you, you should be, you should have the ability and the awareness to never be in a position to ever have to do it.
01:31:49.840
I wonder, you know, the calls for gun control, which are, you know, obviously cyclical, like every time there's some tragedy, some mass shooting, some of which do seem like they're inspired by the FBI, but I can't prove it.
01:32:04.860
But anyway, just there's always like three or four days of the media getting hysterical about gun control, taking your guns away.
01:32:13.200
Those seem more half-hearted than they used to be.
01:32:17.240
And I'm wondering if maybe technology, the convergence of AI and drone technology isn't advancing to the point where the people in charge know it doesn't matter whether you have a gun anymore.
01:32:26.940
Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but I had noticed like the fever pitch of hysteria after a shooting over the last almost like year, six months to a year, they kind of feel like they're just going through the motions with it in the media.
01:32:40.680
It's just a fundraising deal for like the dumb, you know, David Hogg or whatever, you know, these buffoons, media creations, you know, who become famous on, you know, on a pile of dead bodies.
01:32:51.720
It's like so grotesque, but it doesn't seem real to me.
01:32:56.240
And I just wonder, are we at a point where like your AR is not actually a guarantee of freedom at all because like technology is going to give the state so much power that like it doesn't matter.
01:33:14.180
Especially the mass drones because you can't stop them.
01:33:16.780
I talked to one a couple months ago, I was talking to a SEAL, a former SEAL about it, who thinks about this stuff a lot.
01:33:24.620
And I said, so like, how do you stop the drones?
01:33:33.800
Okay, well, what if there's like a thousand of them?
01:33:37.260
Like, I don't, shotgun I have doesn't hold a thousand rounds.
01:33:44.140
Like, there, you got, you have to have a technological solution to it.
01:33:49.260
I don't, I don't know how I is like Joe Blow or you just out minding our business.
01:33:54.340
You're not defeating like a weaponized drone storm at all.
01:33:59.400
And I feel like Democrats, especially the ones who are all about gun control know this because they'll say things like, oh, you think your AR is going to help you?
01:34:16.060
And I, and I think if you want to understand what's actually going on, like watch the rhetoric, of course, never take it at face value.
01:34:24.200
The slogans are a lie, but they do change and they change for a reason.
01:34:29.180
And, and, and so I'm just concerned about that.
01:34:32.920
And I, um, as someone who's always like, you know, had guns and ammo at home.
01:34:37.320
So there's an old, uh, quote from, I think it was JP Morgan that I've used as kind of like my political motivation finding North Star.
01:34:46.900
And it's that every man has two reasons for doing things, a good reason and the real reason.
01:34:53.260
So like on gun control, the good reason that they always give.
01:34:56.920
And, and I think that probably a large percentage of people who espouse it, they, they do intend well.
01:35:02.820
Well, these hurt people and I don't want to hurt people and they, they don't think beyond like the second and third order consequences, but like it's, it's a genuine heartfelt, this thing does awful things to people and I don't want that.
01:35:18.500
I don't agree with it, but then what's the, that's the good reason.
01:35:23.700
I think a lot of people putting that stuff out just don't want us to be free.
01:35:28.480
Well, they, you know, they, they don't believe in human autonomy.
01:35:38.360
You know, I think it's pretty obvious that they see them as objects, you know, who are, have no inherent rights, no inherent dignity, whose lives aren't really worth anything.
01:35:49.660
And they, you know, if you really saw people as creations of God who exist independently from you and your desires, then like there's a degree to which you can control people.
01:35:57.900
But then beyond that, you can't, you can't, even your own children, you can't really control, can you?
01:36:03.980
No, they come fully formed and you can like work 5% of the margins.
01:36:08.560
And I think good parenting is in part recognizing that, you know, because you don't own them.
01:36:16.240
They're, you know, from your body, but they're not, you know, they're human beings.
01:36:20.940
And I just think those are like foundational views that a lot of people in power just don't have.
01:36:27.500
Especially the new kind of like managerial leftism.
01:36:32.120
They look at it and they say, okay, we've got this fixed population of people and I can move this lever and I can move this lever and I'll twist this thing.
01:36:38.300
And then I can get those people to do what I want.
01:36:40.200
We're really just inputs, things that can be tweaked according to them.
01:36:45.240
We're not people who have souls, not eternal beings who have infinite value.
01:36:50.780
We're just things to be manipulated so they can get what they want.
01:36:55.720
It does feel like this, I think a lot of people felt this whether they said it out loud or not, but this election was, you know, the last chance to turn away from what was a certain future of enslavement.
01:37:14.080
Like in five years, what's your best guess for where we are?
01:37:20.840
I'm not an optimist and it has nothing to do with politics.
01:37:25.520
I think this election was kind of a last chance.
01:37:31.800
And my worry is that our politicians are a function of the people.
01:37:35.640
John Adams, it was either John Adams or Franklin said, our system of government is wholly unsuited to an immoral people.
01:37:42.800
We were a nation found on Christian principles by Christian men who put Christ and God as the foremost things in their lives.
01:37:56.720
The way we organized the states was built around it.
01:37:59.500
And it worked for a really long time until that foundation started to crumble.
01:38:11.920
But our moral fabric as a people is totally unrecognizable to someone who helped start the country.
01:38:20.620
And so my view is absent a true collective Christian revival where we collectively repent for what we've done as a nation.
01:38:46.940
Because we want to have a place where people can come.
01:38:52.040
Do you think that is like the moral nucleus of our society today?
01:38:57.260
And so I don't see, absent a true foundational change in us as a people collectively, I don't see how we ever turn the ship around.
01:39:10.400
I pray for mayors and our leaders even when I don't like them because that's what we're commanded to do.
01:39:15.000
And because God has put them in place either for our judgment or our blessing, our fate is not going to be sealed by the politicians we pick.
01:39:31.440
Do you feel like, I mean, I do see around me just in my tiny little weird world, but people who I don't think have ever thought about God talking about God.
01:39:42.620
I read that Bible sales are the highest they've been in a long time.
01:39:49.740
It feels like on election night, scales came off people's eyes.
01:39:58.780
Suddenly people are just saying things that they weren't supposed to say.
01:40:04.720
You had like John Jones, UFC doing the Trump dance after finishing a dude.
01:40:10.380
Like words that people use and sentiments they espouse were completely verboten.
01:40:20.120
There's appears to be a spiritual aspect in hunger in people now that I find really, really heartening, but that it's like seeing the seedling sprout.
01:40:34.760
But of course it has to start with the seedling.
01:40:43.760
So, I mean, that's something worth celebrating.
01:40:54.980
Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show.
01:40:56.860
If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made.