00:01:00.000That was my question, too. And you're actually probably one of the only major media figures that's still keeping the story alive. So it's a pleasure to talk to you. But yeah, there were a couple of books published in the wake, like Selena Zito is a Washington Examiner reporter wrote a book called Butler, but it goes more into the cultural aspects of like the Butler community and the political effects, the political fallout of the event.
00:01:27.000And it's not really like a forensic investigation.
00:03:11.700a fireman and then he's killed by a u.s government sniper and he had no accomplices he's just a
00:03:22.960crazy person one of many and that's all we know case closed and that's bad enough is it but is
00:03:29.140that a fair representation of the to this day the story of what happened in butler uh the biggest
00:03:35.220issue i would take with the official story about just what happened that day is that um a lot of
00:03:40.840people think the Secret Service sniper actually saved the day. Everybody knows about the slope
00:03:47.100roof excuse for why they didn't have somebody posted there in the first place. The fact that
00:03:52.260that building was outside of the ostensible perimeter, even though it was, again, like 150
00:03:58.760yards clear line of sight to Trump. But a lot of people say, well, at least the Secret Service
00:04:05.300sniper stopped it from being a lot worse. In fact, Donald Trump said that a couple weeks ago after
00:04:11.600this most recent White House Correspondents dinner attack, he's talking about, well, they did a lot
00:04:18.340better at that event than they did at Butler. Although my buddy David saved my life at Butler,
00:04:25.780he's the sniper. His name's David King. And Trump says he responded in 4.2 seconds from 400 yards
00:04:33.040away. Neither one of those assertions by Trump are true, which is very bizarre that he doesn't
00:04:40.480know the details about the attempt on his own life. In fact, it was a local cop who saved the
00:04:48.120day. It was the alleged would-be assassin crooks fired three well-measured, discreet shots,
00:04:56.920and then there's a short pause and then he starts rapid firing five shots and then the ninth shot
00:05:04.500comes immediately after that eighth shot all in the span of five seconds uh from the local cop
00:05:10.900on the ground his name's aaron zalaponi he was a butler esu member and then there's 10 whole
00:05:17.140seconds that passed by before david king finally puts the final bullet through crooks thomas crooks
00:05:26.000fired nine shots? He fired eight shots, and then the ninth shot came from the ground
00:05:30.860from Zaloponi. He fired eight shots. Yeah. So let's just start at the beginning.
00:05:37.240Who was Crooks? Well, that's still an unanswered question. My book does have the most complete
00:05:45.500biographical account of Crooks, but he's still an aberration. He almost seemed like he was kind
00:05:53.140of leading a double life. All the public information I found out about him paints him
00:05:59.960as just a really respectable young man, almost, you know, I hate to say it, but like the kind
00:06:06.060of guy you'd want your son to turn out to be like. He was a straight A student in high
00:06:11.540school, well liked by his classmates and teachers, graduates with a 4.0, goes to a community
00:06:18.940College for engineering. While there, one of his projects was actually 3D printing a chessboard
00:06:26.560and a Rubik's Cube that were inscribed with Braille. And his mother's legally blind, so it
00:06:33.480seemed like a pretty sweet thing to do for his mother. I got community college speeches where
00:06:40.340he says one of my favorite things to do is cook with my family. Loved his sister, Katie Crooks.
00:06:46.160and he was planning on going to robert morris university that fall to get his four-year degree
00:06:54.080that's the public facing as of when was he planning on going to college well that's a
00:07:02.040great question because it was actually uh i obtained his uh college emails and i got one
00:07:08.480from june 14th 2024 where he's emailing the community college about the status of his diploma
00:07:15.140because he had just graduated, but apparently he didn't get actual proof and he needed that
00:07:19.940to go to Robert Morris that fall. So less than a month before he winds up dead on a rooftop,
00:07:26.980he's asking about the status of his diploma and still making plans to go to university that fall,
00:07:33.100which is very strange. I just don't know what to make of it. It doesn't sound like a man
00:07:39.160planning to die, you know? It certainly doesn't sound like a man planning to die. It's like the
00:07:44.440death row inmate asking if he can save some for later in his final meal. Does anybody around him
00:07:53.620later say, yes, he was radical and crazy and violent? Nobody that knew him, his father,
00:07:59.920the night of the incident, the ATF responds to the house and they're questioning him. And he said,
00:08:07.060well, I didn't really know much about Thomas's politics. He liked to play the contrarian. He
00:08:12.180He liked to kind of, whatever side the father and the mother would take, he would just be devil's advocate and argue the opposite side.
00:08:20.160He was a registered Republican, but he made a donation to Act Blue, like the left-wing PAC, on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration.
00:08:30.320So I guess the theory there would be if he was left-wing, he registered as a Republican to vote in the primaries and try to vote for the weaker candidates, something like that.
00:12:17.880So when it became apparent last July that the FBI wasn't going to voluntarily release information about Thomas Crooks or the event,
00:12:27.920The transparency organization Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit to force disclosure, and we just got a status report a few months ago saying that they had 45,000 responsive records about Thomas Crooks in response to Judicial Watch's lawsuit.
00:12:47.160A couple months later, we get another status report saying we found another 30,000.
00:28:09.220And the locals did respond to it accordingly. The local command center leader, Edward Lenz, says that he called the Secret Service Command Center. By the way, they're separate command centers, which is a huge issue.
00:28:25.440He talks to a Pennsylvania State police trooper inside the Secret Service Command Center, who then tells the command center leader, Jeffrey Burr.
00:28:36.620And instead of putting that out over the radios, though, Jeffrey Burr then tells the counter drone guy Castro about it.
00:28:45.620Castro calls some agents to go search for it, but they never put it out over the radios.
00:28:51.800And this, by now, is like 5.50 p.m., about 21 minutes before the shooting.
00:28:58.160So we know Crooks is on the roof at 6.03.
00:29:46.060But the problem here is it's the local radios,
00:29:49.160And specifically, he was on a channel that was only heard by like the traffic cops and like some of the people on the ground who are pretty much assisting in like crowd control and things like that.
00:30:01.620He never switches over to Channel 4 to inform the actual snipers in the building or his QRF team that was ready to deploy in response to emergencies.
00:30:14.920Instead, he, again, calls the Secret Service Command Center.
00:30:21.980And here's where things get especially controversial, because Len says that he calls the PSP trooper in the Secret Service Center.
00:30:31.440And then they both inform Jeffrey Burr about somebody who's on the rooftop now.
00:30:40.460So I've kind of called Jeffrey Burr, Jeffrey, a deaf and dumb Burr, because he never he says he never heard anything and he never put anything out over the radios, even though now, obviously, the threat has escalated.
00:30:55.540You know, we should point out that Trump's on the stage at this point.0.75
00:30:58.160He took the stage at 602, which is exactly, you know, that sighting of crooks where they think he's running around, but he goes up top.
00:36:10.040winning photo taken by doug mills where uh trump's beginning to bring his hand up to his ear which is
00:36:17.940really strong evidence that this was like a legitimate shooting and that the bullets were real
00:36:22.300um unless you want to make the argument that the new york times are in on the conspiracy that this
00:36:27.840is staged uh but yeah it shows the bullet and it also shows that trump doesn't have any kind of
00:36:33.140squib in his hand that you know for the fake blood um but in any event yeah so the second one
00:36:39.160whizzes by his shoulder and i'm pretty sure that's the one that hits david dutch uh who was
00:36:45.500one of the wounded rally goers um it actually i think split his liver it was a pretty pretty
00:36:52.360nasty shot uh the third one i'm not sure about it was the second volley of five that one of them
00:37:01.140hits uh the firefighter cory comparatory and then um jim copenhaver who generously wrote the
00:37:08.940forward to my book he got shot twice and one of those bullets is still uh in his body it's like
00:37:16.060too close to the spine i think he's in his mid-80s now so they can't really extract it so
00:37:21.680four people are hit by bullets including trump yeah uh yeah that that's right initially this is
00:37:28.220weird uh ronnie jackson who was once trump's physician now he's in congress i think he
00:37:33.160initially said that like my son was grazed or something but we haven't heard anything about
00:37:37.800that. I, I really don't know what happened there, but we know for sure of these, uh, the, these
00:37:43.660four people. The man who was killed, who was he? Uh, Corey Comparatori. Uh, yeah, he was, uh, you
00:37:52.580know, a firefighter, a family man, a, uh, a girl dad. He had, uh, two girls, a loving wife, Helen,
00:37:59.920uh, by all accounts, just like an upstanding member of the community, the kind of guy you'd
00:38:05.140want to be friends with the kind of guy you'd uh entrust with your life just a real tragedy that
00:38:11.000we lost him so that um there's been a lot of speculation about this being staged it's fake
00:38:16.340there are you know theological arguments for this that come out of the old testament apparently
00:38:25.100there's a part that suggests you know the pricking of the ear is necessary for a prophecy to be
00:38:32.320fulfilled, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of talk about this. What's your view of that?
00:38:38.440Yeah, the same people that make that biblical argument or prophecy argument also says that
00:38:43.960he wasn't really shot. So I don't really understand that if his ear has to be pricked,
00:38:48.560but he didn't get shot in the ear. It's hard to really argue with the people who think it's fake
00:38:55.180because I haven't really heard a coherent theory for how it possibly could have been staged. I mean,
00:39:00.980as we've discussed, the local response to the would-be assassin was very much legitimate.
00:39:09.480The bullets were real. The blood was real. The bodies were real. This would require the complicity
00:39:16.020of the Biden FBI, Biden Secret Service. Keep in mind that he's under investigation at the time
00:39:23.840or facing prosecutions. I'm sure he's surrounded by FBI informants. They're probably listening to
00:39:29.120his calls. I don't know when he would have been able to plan something like this. And then
00:39:36.120one of my favorite pieces of evidence that I found in the transcripts of Congress interviewing
00:39:43.780the local cops is that his personal physician was actually left behind in the chaos when he
00:39:53.260was shuttled off the stage and taken to Butler Hospital. So he had to have been examined by
00:39:58.260a Butler doctor who then, because his personal physician was at the farm show, they take the
00:40:04.820Butler doctor on Trump Force One to the next site. I think it was New Jersey. So I would imagine that
00:40:11.480if this was a staged event, it would have been something like he keeps his own doctor close to
00:40:18.600his side. They go to Butler Hospital. They say, no, nobody's allowed to see Trump's ear for
00:40:24.380national security reasons uh but that wasn't the case it was actually a local doctor who initially
00:40:29.720treated him and he would have had to been in on it too if this was well there are three other people
00:40:33.700shot so i mean i it's hard to if it was fake you know no one told them yeah right yeah so um okay
00:40:42.780i think that the evidence suggests it was entirely real someone was trying to kill trump
00:40:46.280how did the secret service respond they really didn't respond again there um we can go more into
00:40:55.800the failures leading up to it i mentioned uh jeffrey burr who by the way he's the command
00:41:03.240center leader and by the way he's also the special agent in charge of the buffalo field office which i
00:41:09.900found a little bit strange i don't know much about the inner workings of the secret service
00:41:14.380But it was kind of bizarre to me that this 25-year veteran in charge of an entire jurisdiction, he's now just a poststander manning the radios on the ground for a rally outside of his jurisdiction.
00:41:32.680I think the argument there was that they were short-staffed and needed help, and he's a senior guy who knows what he's doing.
00:41:40.800But of course, he makes a lot of the key mistakes by never putting anything out over
00:43:11.960Right, but I mean, he, the FBI sniper waited long enough that Crooks fired eight times before he was taken out.
00:43:20.500Yeah, and the eight shots happened in five seconds.
00:43:23.420He waited an entire, another 10 seconds before he put that final 10th shot through Crooks.
00:43:32.540And, you know, I could give him the benefit of the doubt.
00:43:36.400Maybe he wasn't prepared. He panicked. He had crooks in his scope. The local cop shoots crooks. Crooks staggers back, and now he's got to readjust. However, his congressional testimony is very troubling.
00:43:51.460the sniper initially tells the house task force that he didn't see crooks until after all the
00:44:03.220shooting had stopped he said he was like on his binoculars the shooting started by the time he
00:44:10.180finds crooks in his scope crooks had already fired eight times then he tells a similar story
00:44:17.460to the Senate Homeland Security Committee,
00:44:20.640but a staffer, I don't know who this is,
00:44:52.780This is what the sniper David King wrote immediately after the incident.
00:44:56.280Quote, I and my teammates positioned ourselves to observe that area that everyone was moving to.
00:45:01.580I noticed an individual white male, white or gray shirt, low crawling on the roof.
00:45:07.920I noticed an AR style weapon in his hands.
00:45:12.000as I moved to observe through my rifle scope, I heard weapon fire. I immediately got a laser
00:45:18.540rangefinder distance from my weapon mounted rangefinder. I looked up to see my engagement
00:45:23.960scope, looked back through the scope, observed the individual shooting and engaged. So there's
00:45:30.620a major contradiction there. I'm not necessarily suggesting that he waited on purpose. I think,
00:45:37.540Again, I think he might be covering his ass because, as we discussed before, Trump views him as a hero, and maybe he just doesn't want to admit that he did.0.99
00:45:48.600Where is that sniper now, David King?0.99
00:45:52.860He's still, I believe he's still on Trump's detail because, again, after the White House Correspondents' Dinner attack, Trump goes, I tell David, I love you, David, acting like David's his hero.
00:46:07.540And by the way, that's how we were able to identify him. He's on local police body cam footage with his patch that says D. King. And then Trump says, I think he first told Miranda Devine about a year ago that his name is David.
00:46:25.060So Trump almost kind of outed him. I searched David King's Secret Service. A LinkedIn immediately pops up showing this guy in the special operations division of the Secret Service. I reached out to him. He declined to comment. And reporter Susan Crabtree has since corroborated that identity, the David King name.
00:46:49.380Again, yeah, I think Trump expresses appreciation for him.
00:46:54.360was anyone fired no uh kimberly cheetel resigned the former director resigned under bipartisan
00:47:01.860pressure uh there were five or six suspensions that all came most of them came from the local
00:47:10.460pittsburgh field office even though um they they were kind of thrown under the bus in my opinion
00:47:17.440but no nobody was actually fired nobody was fired unless you count cheetel but that's uh
00:47:23.820Again, she resigned and she has, I don't know if she still has Secret Service protection, but she was given taxpayer-funded security after she was fired, I guess, you know, for the threats or whatever, because people thought she was in on it.
00:48:14.560But then I also heard they took Corey Comparatore's body to Allegheny County
00:48:19.040because the press was at the Butler County coroner.
00:48:22.800office um and they wanted to avoid the press attention crooks was shot once correct i think
00:48:29.280the local cop hit him um first yeah i i definitely think uh the local cop hit him because you keep
00:48:37.080in mind crooks stopped shooting after the local cop fired uh there's some speculation that uh
00:48:43.820Aaron Zaloponi might have hit the buttstock of the gun and shattered it.
00:48:49.960But the thing is that the X-ray of Crook shows that there's bullet fragments still in his shoulder.
00:48:59.360And people, ballistic experts have told me that that 300 Win Mag final shot wouldn't have fragmented like that.
00:49:07.560The Secret Service's 300 wind mag round went through Crooks' neck, out, back in the shoulder.
00:49:15.040Then it fragments into two pieces and makes two re-exit wounds.
00:49:20.080They actually recovered those fragments.
00:49:22.360It's this material in the shoulder that was left in there.
00:49:26.820Actually, the body was released for cremation with the fragments still in the shoulder, which seems like a mishandling of evidence, but what do I know?
00:49:34.540So how quickly after this event was his body cremated?
00:49:40.540I believe it was released for cremation a week or two after.
00:49:45.380And we didn't find out about this until Representative Clay Higgins went to go look at the body.
00:49:51.500And they said, well, you know, Mr. Higgins, the body doesn't exist.
00:49:57.500How would you assess the thoroughness of the autopsy?
00:50:01.340Well, the medical examiner who did the autopsy insists that Aaron Zalopone didn't hit Crooks, which I just think all the evidence points to the contrary. Not only the bullet fragments, but reason would dictate that the shot did something because he stopped shooting after Zalopone fired.
00:50:25.000So there's that. There's the releasing the body, I would argue, prematurely. But the biggest question I have is about this toxicology report, which I obtained, which, by the way, obtaining this report was kind of a, I guess, interesting story, at least to me in itself, because this was kind of my first big scoop in late 2024 when I got these documents.
00:50:49.660When I found out that the body was taken to Allegheny County, I requested it from them,
00:50:55.120and they said, well, we did the autopsy and the toxicology, but this is Butler County
00:51:02.820I then asked Butler County for it, and they denied it too.
00:51:06.160It was almost like they're pointing at each other, playing show games with the evidence.
00:51:10.580I went through a couple months long legal battle to get these documents and then actually
00:51:18.680got them in early October and put them up on our website, HeadlineUSA. So that was a big scoop,
00:51:24.800but I didn't think much of the documents, like they didn't really seem to show any scandal to
00:51:31.860me at first until a Twitter sleuth notified me a couple months later and said, if you looked at
00:51:38.580this toxicology report, it seems incomplete. And I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about.
00:51:44.840So the medical examiner, Ariel Goldschmidt, collected eight specimens from Thomas Crooks, four tubes of heart blood, a tube of urine, some eye fluid, bile, and then an envelope of hair.
00:52:03.420And now these are numbered one through eight. And now if you look at the findings, you have one, the heart blood one, two, and then it's four, five, and six. But there's three specimens that Goldschmidt, the medical examiner, collected and either didn't test or didn't include in the report.
00:52:27.460That's the bile, one tube of blood, and the envelope of hair.
00:52:32.520So I don't know what to make of it again, but these samples, you could argue they would have shown evidence of some kind of perhaps psychotropic drug use.
00:52:45.820Has Goldschmidt, the medical examiner, explained why he didn't test or there's no record of him testing these samples?
00:52:52.940When I found out about this, I reached out to him on numerous times, including his lab assistants, too, and they haven't given any answers as to why this is.
00:53:05.440Okay. And that kind of is the question that hangs over all of this. Why are there no answers in a case that, according to the government, is open and closed?
00:53:15.300Lone gunman, crazy person, killed by a heroic Secret Service sniper, no accomplices, there's no reason to hide anything.
00:53:22.940do you have any idea why the fbi is continuing to hide information about this case well i hope
00:53:30.860you i would just hoping you could tell me i have some theories about it yeah i mean joe kent said
00:53:35.740it's directly related to he believes directly related to our war in iran um you know can't
00:53:43.040prove that but i uh but just to establish clearly that they are hiding it you've gone presumably to
00:53:50.520the Justice Department to ask for this information. What answer do you get? In fact, I did a FOIA
00:53:55.840request for all the 302s in this case the day after Kash Patel said about a year ago that the
00:54:03.300investigation is closed, Crooks acted alone, nothing more to see here. So, oh, okay, great,
00:54:08.400the investigation's closed. Now they can comply with FOIA and make all this stuff public. I filed
00:54:13.800my FOIA and get a response about a month later saying, we're not giving you these records because
00:54:19.200in fact the investigation's still open so it seems to me as they're playing uh legal games
00:54:25.600with these documents uh they've since cash patel has changed his tune and said well the investigation
00:54:31.480is open but not active and in my mind that's just a way they're an excuse they're using to avoid
00:54:40.380disclosure so at the root of all of this is the question of trump and his you know he was the
00:54:47.660target of the assassination attempt, which you have said, and I agree with you, was real.
00:54:51.740Like someone tried to kill him, missed, killed somebody else.
00:54:56.640But if the president wanted this investigation to continue, it would continue, correct?
00:55:43.360because i i don't see a non-sinister explanation for that but maybe you have one
00:55:50.440no i mean it's just total speculation but i sometimes i wonder did they stumble onto some
00:55:56.840sort of like mk ultra program i don't know is this are they threatening trump's family
00:56:02.160um it does and this is why like i don't get too mad when people think he's faking it because
00:56:08.580he's so tight-lipped you know you can't blame people for speculating i think that's exactly
00:56:15.320right it doesn't make any sense at all are there any uh pieces of evidence that you have seen that
00:56:22.260suggests that crooks acted in concert with anybody else i've seen nothing uh explicit
00:56:29.960it uh no there is there's some unanswered questions about what happened on uh july 13th
00:56:39.2002024 that might point to others being involved on the scene of course we have the false sightings
00:56:44.880of crooks like if they saw somebody that looked like him there were numerous such cases so i have
00:56:51.500questions about that and then uh the bomb squad allegheny county bomb squad initially responded
00:56:57.920to a van that was parked about a half mile away from the site. And the series of events
00:57:04.940raises questions in my mind. Crooks is dead up on the rooftop. They find a transponder in his pocket
00:57:14.100that they believe might be used to set off IEDs. They evacuate the rooftop. And after that point,
00:57:21.560the locals are never involved in the crime scene again. It's totally controlled by the FBI.
00:57:27.920They're searching underneath, inside the building with bomb-sniffing dogs.
00:57:34.720And at one point, they find blood in the building, which I guess a local trooper climbed over a fence and cut his hand and then got blood everywhere.
00:57:44.900They find a bicycle with a backpack that wasn't Crooks's, but they initially assumed it was.
00:57:55.520They searched the van with the bomb squad and tow it away, and we haven't heard anything about this since.
00:58:01.860And this is before they searched Crooks' car, which was parked right on the street by the AGR building.
00:58:09.620So I have questions of why they searched the van before the car.
00:58:14.560I did a FOIA on the van and was told that, yes, it was part of the investigation, but again, I was denied actual records about it.
00:58:21.760Is there proof that Crooks constructed bombs or a bomb?
00:58:25.740Yeah, they eventually found bombs in the trunk of his Hyundai Elantra.
00:58:33.680And this was after they searched his home and found some empty ammo canisters and some racing fuel and other bomb-making equipment in his bedroom.
00:58:45.720That led to the search of the car, supposedly.
00:58:49.100But again, I don't know why it's van, house, car.
01:07:27.820that he put down, and this is the target.
01:07:29.440So not really sophisticated stuff. The informant then introduces him to two undercover FBI agents, the guys that Ted Cruz was arguing to you that were hitmen.
01:07:44.220The hitmen, the agents, take Mershant to a strip club, and they have some kind of vague conversation about possibly either assassinating politicians, stealing government documents, or staging protests.
01:08:02.000Mershant tells them, you know, visit me in Pakistan in September, and we'll give you the official target.
01:08:10.320um they want the undercover fbi agents want him to make a down payment to show that he's serious
01:08:17.820and he uh is trying to get five thousand dollars trying to scrounge it up from his family initially
01:08:25.360he's turned down by his family in pakistan and and eventually finds i guess cousins in tanzania
01:08:32.700who are willing to front him $5,000 through like the Huala system
01:08:39.220where he can pick it up in New York but borrow on it in Tanzania.
01:08:43.980So the FBI informant actually helps him do this.
01:08:47.720The informant picks up the $5,000, gives it to Mershant,
01:09:12.660He supposedly has a family in Iran, and we should, you know, steel man the other side.
01:09:20.840When he's arrested, he was interrogated, and he did say that, yes, I was working for Iran to try to do something.
01:09:31.200He wouldn't admit to the Trump assassination plot.
01:09:34.040So we could definitely, it's not like as egregious as the Whitmer plot, the supposed government kidnap plot, where they're just, they weren't even looking to do anything, and it was totally provoked by the FBI.
01:09:46.620This thing, this, you appear to have a somewhat willing defendant, but again, absolutely no capacity, no means, no money, can't even speak English, surrounded by feds. Like there was definitely no relationship to Butler that we know of.
01:16:30.400It is worth mentioning that Susie Wiles and Sean Curran were both
01:16:34.640involved in what I would argue like a psyop on Trump to make him think the Iranians were out to
01:16:40.460get him. And this is after the Ryan Ruth event. They actually tell Trump that the Iranians have
01:16:46.900smuggled missiles into the country and they want to shoot down your plane, which there's absolutely
01:16:51.440no evidence for that. I mean, no actual documentation, no witnesses, no arrests were
01:16:56.840made. If that were true, the war would have started a lot earlier. But in any event, they
01:17:02.380actually put Trump on a decoy plane with... I remember. Yeah, they used Steve Whitcoff's plane
01:17:09.220And him, Whitcoff, and Susie Wiles would ride in Whitcoff's plane while the staff were serving his decoys on Trump Force One, which I'm not sure how they would feel about that.
01:17:24.060Like, if you look at the reporting on this, the staff would be going to Trump Force One and the Secret Service would be like, oh, keep your head down, like acting like a threat was out there.
01:17:33.320Like, it really seemed like a total psyop to me.
01:19:53.420Yeah, I guess he gets credit for at least not hesitating. But again, the guns pointed at him. But he did cause Ryan to flee. And Ryan's caught 45 minutes later in another-
01:20:08.360Yeah, yeah. And so this isn't the Secret Service that caught him either. And he could have been at large, this could have been another like Tyler Robinson situation with the Kirk case, where he gets into his daughter's Nissan Xterra and speeds off.
01:20:22.940And it was actually a witness who heard the gunshots and took down Ruth's license plate and gives it to the Palm Beach sheriffs, who then put out a warning, be on the lookout for this Xterra.
01:20:37.420And Ruth is pulled over on the I-95 in another county.
01:25:08.640And then he gets another round of probation. So very bizarre of how his cases were handled. But to answer your question, I don't know how he became so politically radicalized.
01:25:22.160In 2016, he was a Trump supporter. 2019, he briefly jumped on the Tulsi Gabbard bandwagon. And then when Putin invades, apparently he felt like he had to stand up for global freedom or democracy or something like that.
01:25:38.820So he winds down his construction business, takes a flight to Poland, tries to cross the border and volunteer to serve in the International Legion. He's a 58-year-old construction worker with no combat experience, so they say, no, we can't really make use of you.
01:25:57.620so he turns to recruiting foreign fighters as you say uh a little interesting factoid in his
01:26:07.180self-published book which is still available on amazon he said his best partner quote best
01:26:12.400partner in this venture was an israeli guy i was never able to track down who that partner was
01:26:18.640this is also crazy yeah it is absolutely but if you're right i mean if you've got an extensive
01:26:24.220criminal record for violent crimes and you wind up in poland trying to join the ukrainian foreign
01:26:32.880legion and then recruiting foreign fighters like cia knows because they're running ukraine and the
01:26:38.060war they know you exist to their father i mean of course yeah and he was in an azoff battalion
01:26:44.400commercial which of course azoff was sponsored by the cia the nazi battalion yeah the nazi
01:26:50.240battalion um he was flagged by multiple people at one point i think i counted seven federal or
01:26:57.740international agencies that were aware of what he was doing because a travel nurse i think her name
01:27:04.640is like chelsea walsh initially reported him to the fbi the state department and customs and said
01:27:12.820hey, this guy's got really dangerous rhetoric and he's doing sketchy things.
01:31:04.800There's also classified information like the Merchant case.0.99
01:31:07.980There's classified information in the Ryan Ruth case.
01:31:13.380And Judge Cannon sealed the information on the grounds that it could, quote, harm national security.
01:31:20.880Yeah. Now, why would a multiple convicted felon construction worker who tries to murder the Republican nominee have classified national security related intelligence anywhere near him?
01:31:36.860I assume there's probably FISA involved, perhaps, you know, surrounded by informants.
01:31:43.940So just to go back to the question of the classified information, I'm just baffled by this. What could that possibly, why would Ryan Ruth intersect? You said CISID-FISA, I'm not sure what that means. Can you explain that a little more?
01:32:00.160Yeah, sure. So again, like the Merchant case, there was classified discovery in the Ryan Ruth case that's subject to a law called the Classified Information Procedures Act, which means that you as a defendant don't have a right to your own discovery if it's classified information, even if it harms your case.
01:32:20.920And I think the SEPA law was passed in the late 70s. And at the time, it was very select usage of it. It was to protect overseas informants and to protect certain FISA information. But increasingly, with the advent of text messages and chat groups, the DOJ is just using it to hide things.
01:32:45.660They might have an informant overseas, but that person's life isn't in jeopardy.
01:32:52.820Well, they might also be orchestrating crimes.
01:32:54.800And there's, yeah, there's major, major scandals that this classified information procedure law has been used to cover up.
01:33:02.720Just to name a couple, the Pulse nightclub shooting where the shooter's father, Omar Mateem's father, was an FBI informant.
01:33:11.140The shooter himself may have been an informant, too, and that's according to Trevor Aronson.
01:33:17.660But classified, the SIPA law was used to cover up information there.
01:33:23.100The granddaddy of them all, in my opinion, is the Garland, Texas shooting in 2015, where there were two people who were allegedly upset at a draw, the Prophet Muhammad contest.
01:33:35.580They went there to shoot up the contest, which was like at a local fair, I think.0.98
01:33:40.040and they were stopped right away but there was a third guy who was behind them who went to run
01:33:46.420away uh the cops arrested him but it turns out that that was an undercover agent who were friends
01:33:52.420who was friends with the you know the supposed terrorist um and also in that case i don't know
01:34:00.280if it was the same agent or another informant actually told the defense or the the shooters
01:40:12.320I mean, again, the excuse was that they had more advanced facilities, but then they do this kind of run-of-the-mill autopsy and toxicology.1.00
01:40:19.340The fireman who was killed at Butler went to the local medical examiner, but Thomas Crooks went to this medical examiner, the dual citizen.
01:40:26.240Well, actually, Cory Comparatory was taken to Allegheny County as well, but they've got contradictory excuses where they say they took Cory there to avoid the press attention at the Butler office, and then Thomas was supposedly sent there for the more advanced facilities.
01:40:43.520So, um, the facilities that allowed him to be cremated with the fragments still in him and didn't list the testing of his hair. Okay. Um, that's really, really interesting. Has he, and he has not spoken to this medical examiner?
01:41:00.020No, he hasn't. He did testify at an open hearing where Clay Higgins pressed him. Clay Higgins, say what you will about him, but I think he's been pretty good on this story. He's the only guy in government who's emphasized Aaron Zaloponi's heroics.
01:41:16.240And Higgins is trying to press Goldschmidt about like, how could you possibly say that Zaloponi didn't hit anything? And Goldschmidt just insisted that the Secret Service was the only person who shot Crooks that day.
01:41:32.420That's really bonkers. Okay. So those are your top two questions.
01:41:40.640My top question is why the secrecy? Do you have any theories on that?
01:41:46.240Just total speculation. I do think Crooks was probably almost certainly manipulated, possibly in contact with the feds based on these violent comments that you disclosed a few months ago, openly calling for assassinating politicians on YouTube.
01:42:09.500That gets you flagged to law enforcement.
01:42:11.620So there could be some kind of cover-up telling Mr. Trump, if this is revealed, it'll be the end of the FBI.
01:42:52.240I thought, yeah, I thought it was probably one of the biggest stories to happen in the last five years, you know, outside of the wars and things like that.
01:42:59.300And so it's been really puzzling that I don't have much competition, nor do I have much interest.
01:43:05.760I mean, you're, again, you're one of the only guys keeping this story alive.
01:43:09.780So I'm hoping that the book, you know, unfortunately, it doesn't have like a big smoking gun.
01:43:16.340This is the guy who did it, or this is the institution behind it.
01:43:19.980It is the best and most complete picture of what happened.
01:43:24.740I'm hoping it could be a starting point for future researchers, people who want to jump
01:43:30.460on board and and help find out you know some of the answers to these uh bizarre questions we have
01:43:36.380we'll probably both be long dead when someone you know writes the book um i hope that's wrong
01:43:43.380but and that's 10 tends to be the way this stuff plays out you know it's 100 years after
01:43:49.020lusitania and it was like actually there were armaments on the boat the trump assassination
01:43:53.700plots, what the investigations missed, and why it matters.
01:43:58.800Ken Silva, thank you very much for doing this.