The Tucker Carlson Show - The Attempts on Trump’s Life, Why He Shut Down the Investigations & How It Altered History Forever

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00:00:30.000 Ken Silva, thank you very much for doing this.

00:00:36.840 You've written a book on the Trump assassination plots,

00:00:40.700 the two from the summer of 2024,

00:00:45.100 about which there are more unanswered questions than answered questions.

00:00:49.540 And they're so transparently ridiculous, the stories that we have been told.

00:00:54.700 My first question is, where are all the other books on this topic?

00:00:58.620 Why did this fall to you?

00:01:00.000 That 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.

00:01:27.000 And it's not really like a forensic investigation.

00:01:29.340 This is the first of that kind.

00:01:31.660 Does Zito's book have a conclusion?

00:01:33.660 Does it reach a conclusion about what that was?

00:01:37.620 Or does she affirm the official story, which is this was a crazed left-wing lone gunman?

00:01:44.020 Yeah, it's more or less an affirmation of the official story.

00:01:47.540 And again, just like the political fallout.

00:01:49.700 That's more of the book.

00:01:51.300 She was there that day.

00:01:52.620 So there is like a autobiographical account of what happened, you know, from when she got there.

00:01:59.240 But it doesn't go into like the details about what happened over on the AGR building or the security failures or who Thomas Crooks was.

00:02:07.800 So I'm going to state what I think is the official account of what happened in Butler that day.

00:02:13.640 And then I would like you to just take us through what you know about what happened in Butler that day.

00:02:18.340 So the official account is there's this weird kid, local kid, who really hates Trump, and he's been radicalized probably online.

00:02:29.440 We don't really know because he has no meaningful online profile.

00:02:33.880 He's like the only young man in America who's not online.

00:02:39.600 And he's somehow a very good shot.

00:02:42.640 and he somehow gets into the one vulnerable place

00:02:48.480 at the event site in Butler Township

00:02:51.580 that gives him a sight line to Trump

00:02:55.260 and nobody notices this

00:02:58.440 because there are just these unaccountable holes in security.

00:03:01.860 It's just amazing.

00:03:03.200 It's just a failure of security

00:03:06.020 and he takes the shot.

00:03:08.440 He misses. 0.98

00:03:09.740 He kills someone in the stands.

00:03:11.700 a fireman and then he's killed by a u.s government sniper and he had no accomplices he's just a

00:03:22.960 crazy person one of many and that's all we know case closed and that's bad enough is it but is

00:03:29.140 that a fair representation of the to this day the story of what happened in butler uh the biggest

00:03:35.220 issue i would take with the official story about just what happened that day is that um a lot of

00:03:40.840 people think the Secret Service sniper actually saved the day. Everybody knows about the slope

00:03:47.100 roof excuse for why they didn't have somebody posted there in the first place. The fact that

00:03:52.260 that building was outside of the ostensible perimeter, even though it was, again, like 150

00:03:58.760 yards clear line of sight to Trump. But a lot of people say, well, at least the Secret Service

00:04:05.300 sniper stopped it from being a lot worse. In fact, Donald Trump said that a couple weeks ago after

00:04:11.600 this most recent White House Correspondents dinner attack, he's talking about, well, they did a lot

00:04:18.340 better at that event than they did at Butler. Although my buddy David saved my life at Butler,

00:04:25.780 he's the sniper. His name's David King. And Trump says he responded in 4.2 seconds from 400 yards

00:04:33.040 away. Neither one of those assertions by Trump are true, which is very bizarre that he doesn't

00:04:40.480 know the details about the attempt on his own life. In fact, it was a local cop who saved the

00:04:48.120 day. It was the alleged would-be assassin crooks fired three well-measured, discreet shots,

00:04:56.920 and then there's a short pause and then he starts rapid firing five shots and then the ninth shot

00:05:04.500 comes immediately after that eighth shot all in the span of five seconds uh from the local cop

00:05:10.900 on the ground his name's aaron zalaponi he was a butler esu member and then there's 10 whole

00:05:17.140 seconds that passed by before david king finally puts the final bullet through crooks thomas crooks

00:05:26.000 fired nine shots? He fired eight shots, and then the ninth shot came from the ground

00:05:30.860 from Zaloponi. He fired eight shots. Yeah. So let's just start at the beginning.

00:05:37.240 Who was Crooks? Well, that's still an unanswered question. My book does have the most complete

00:05:45.500 biographical account of Crooks, but he's still an aberration. He almost seemed like he was kind

00:05:53.140 of leading a double life. All the public information I found out about him paints him

00:05:59.960 as just a really respectable young man, almost, you know, I hate to say it, but like the kind

00:06:06.060 of guy you'd want your son to turn out to be like. He was a straight A student in high

00:06:11.540 school, well liked by his classmates and teachers, graduates with a 4.0, goes to a community

00:06:18.940 College for engineering. While there, one of his projects was actually 3D printing a chessboard

00:06:26.560 and a Rubik's Cube that were inscribed with Braille. And his mother's legally blind, so it

00:06:33.480 seemed like a pretty sweet thing to do for his mother. I got community college speeches where

00:06:40.340 he says one of my favorite things to do is cook with my family. Loved his sister, Katie Crooks.

00:06:46.160 and he was planning on going to robert morris university that fall to get his four-year degree

00:06:54.080 that's the public facing as of when was he planning on going to college well that's a

00:07:02.040 great question because it was actually uh i obtained his uh college emails and i got one

00:07:08.480 from june 14th 2024 where he's emailing the community college about the status of his diploma

00:07:15.140 because he had just graduated, but apparently he didn't get actual proof and he needed that

00:07:19.940 to go to Robert Morris that fall. So less than a month before he winds up dead on a rooftop,

00:07:26.980 he's asking about the status of his diploma and still making plans to go to university that fall,

00:07:33.100 which is very strange. I just don't know what to make of it. It doesn't sound like a man

00:07:39.160 planning to die, you know? It certainly doesn't sound like a man planning to die. It's like the

00:07:44.440 death row inmate asking if he can save some for later in his final meal. Does anybody around him

00:07:53.620 later say, yes, he was radical and crazy and violent? Nobody that knew him, his father,

00:07:59.920 the night of the incident, the ATF responds to the house and they're questioning him. And he said,

00:08:07.060 well, I didn't really know much about Thomas's politics. He liked to play the contrarian. He

00:08:12.180 He 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.

00:08:20.160 He 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.

00:08:30.320 So 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.

00:08:39.340 But yeah, we don't know for sure.

00:08:41.780 probably the best evidence of his political leanings comes from the trove of data that you

00:08:47.120 published a couple months ago in your documentary about, you know, the violent comments and kind of

00:08:53.040 showed his political transformation in 2019 and 2020. But that was when he was like 16, 17. So

00:09:01.120 we don't really know what happened those last three, four years of his life. He started using

00:09:06.520 more encryption, VPNs. There's not much of a data trail there. I did obtain his community college

00:09:17.260 metadata. What I did there is FOIA it from the college and they sent me like a big string of

00:09:25.180 jumbled up code, but I had somebody who knew what they were doing kind of decipher it and it showed

00:09:30.340 the actual websites that he was visiting while he was on the community college campus. It doesn't

00:09:36.500 show the contents of any of his messages or anything but you know he voted uh he uh visited

00:09:43.060 like a game of thrones fan site he seemed to be a pittsburgh steelers fan uh twitter.com reddit.com

00:09:51.840 nothing very unusual i mean he went to like ar15.com but that doesn't really tell you that much

00:09:59.080 uh so yeah he's a total cipher when it comes to the last few years of his life what was the last

00:10:05.860 time we heard someone on their deathbed saying they wish they'd spent more time working, particularly

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00:12:01.700 It's iGaming, Ontario.

00:12:03.040 Very.

00:12:03.760 The FBI has a lot of this information, we should say, and has not released it for reasons maybe we can speculate about in a minute.

00:12:10.980 But it's fair to say the FBI has a lot of information about this guy that's not public.

00:12:16.280 That's absolutely right.

00:12:17.880 So when it became apparent last July that the FBI wasn't going to voluntarily release information about Thomas Crooks or the event,

00:12:27.920 The 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.

00:12:47.160 A couple months later, we get another status report saying we found another 30,000.

00:12:53.020 So now it's up to 75,000.

00:12:55.580 And they started making monthly productions to Judicial Watch.

00:13:01.660 But it's been four months, and it's been a couple dozen pages apiece.

00:13:07.520 So like 200 in total.

00:13:09.960 Out of 75,000.

00:13:11.340 Yeah, so at that rate, we'll all be dead before all the records are produced.

00:13:17.160 It's pretty egregious.

00:13:19.060 Which, and also pretty revealing.

00:13:20.760 Like, what is that, right?

00:13:22.060 If it's a crime committed by a lone gunman who's deceased,

00:13:28.200 no one else involved in this case at all,

00:13:30.840 then that's the official story.

00:13:33.160 Then what would be the motive to hide it?

00:13:35.960 Yeah, I mean, as controversial as the Epstein files rollout has been,

00:13:40.020 one of the beneficial things that the Justice Department did

00:13:42.740 is just put them all in a word searchable database.

00:13:45.700 and you'd think they'd be able to do something like that with the crooks files so people could

00:13:51.620 just type in any word and it'll pull all the records with that word on it. One of

00:13:57.980 Kash Patel's excuses was that, well, Donald Trump is a victim here and he has rights too,

00:14:06.700 so that's why we're not releasing some of this out of respect for him. But that's not a legal

00:14:12.460 thing. Like, that's not covered in FOIA. Of course, they could redact Donald Trump's name,

00:14:17.760 but they can't just say, oh, because Trump's a victim, we're not going to comply with FOIA. 0.79

00:14:23.520 It's pretty ridiculous. And of course, no individual, even president,

00:14:28.260 owns the U.S. justice system. Justice is affected on behalf of the entire country.

00:14:32.500 It's supposed to be rule of law. Right. That belongs to the American people.

00:14:36.260 These documents belong to the American people. The FBI belongs to the American people. So that's

00:14:40.240 like it's a nonsensical uh argument it's a grotesque argument actually so um tell us about

00:14:46.060 that day so this guy about whom we know very little who seems pretty normal shows up at this

00:14:52.860 trump rally and what happens yeah so i guess the story starts 8 a.m that morning there's a secret

00:15:00.340 service site counterpart her name's dana dubray she shows up and none of her colleagues are there

00:15:07.960 And apparently there's rumors that they had been out drinking late the night before at a Pittsburgh bar called Tequila Cowboy.

00:15:16.440 So she's kind of upset that her ostensible partner isn't helping her with the setup.

00:15:24.620 They finally start trickling in around 10 a.m. and they hold a briefing.

00:15:28.580 And this is the first kind of weird anomaly is that a Pennsylvania police trooper tried to participate in the Secret Service briefing.

00:15:37.960 and they actually kicked him out.

00:15:39.980 So it seemed pretty insular.

00:15:42.420 We don't know exactly why that is.

00:15:45.140 So the briefing would be the meeting that law enforcement has

00:15:49.620 at the beginning of the day to talk through what they're going to do

00:15:52.500 and what the potential threats might be.

00:15:54.240 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:15:55.440 And I guess one of the reforms to come out of this whole fiasco

00:15:58.280 is now they hold a unified briefing where they let the locals in.

00:16:02.660 But, you know, a little too late for that.

00:16:07.160 so how did crooks get there how did he get in how did he get to this spot like what do we know about

00:16:16.120 all that uh he first showed up around 10 a.m when they're holding this secret briefing where

00:16:21.980 they're keeping out the locals and the stadies and crooks shows up and apparently he just drives

00:16:27.900 around and kind of cases out the place and he later goes home uh to bethel park which is about

00:16:34.900 a 45-minute drive. He lived closer to Pittsburgh, butlers more out in the country. So yeah, Crooks

00:16:41.900 goes home. And meanwhile, we have the first security failure at the site before anything

00:16:47.780 even happens. The counter drone operator, an agent named Eduardo Castro, just can't get his

00:16:55.680 drone detection equipment working. He's initially by the stage. He tries to move it. He thinks it

00:17:01.820 might be some kind of signal issue he even calls like a 1-800 number for troubleshooting and he

00:17:09.320 doesn't get it working until about 4 20 p.m which is when crooks finally returned crooks flies a

00:17:16.800 drone over the site for about 11 minutes and this is like 350 to 401 and then he returns with the

00:17:26.300 drone and then the drone detection equipment it gets up and working which is uh an unfortunate

00:17:31.480 coincidence i guess what does crooks uh get at his house do we know uh well he got his rifle

00:17:39.080 which apparently belonged to him but his father was in possession of it so he asked his dad for

00:17:46.900 his rifle and uh he goes to a local shop he buys some ammunition he also bought a ladder that

00:17:55.700 morning. And I think a lot of people think that he got up on the rooftop on a ladder, which isn't

00:18:02.260 the case. He actually scaled some air conditioning unit and the ladder was found in Bethel Park in

00:18:08.420 the woods later. So I think what probably happened there is he bought the ladder. He went that

00:18:14.760 morning and cased out the site and realized that he wouldn't need the ladder. He could use the air

00:18:19.300 conditioning and then just abandoned it in the woods. And like I said, supposedly the rifle

00:18:25.920 belonged to him, but the father was possessing it. But the ATF would eventually track the rifle

00:18:32.000 to the father. And the father said that he sold it informally to his son a couple of years ago,

00:18:40.220 but there's no paperwork for that. So the paperwork shows that the rifle belonged to the

00:18:45.180 father. And I guess there's a loophole in Pennsylvania state law where you can transfer

00:18:50.620 long guns. Two Pennsylvania residents can do that with each other without any kind of paperwork. So

00:18:56.420 we don't know for sure. I mean, that's the story that he transferred it, but there's no paperwork

00:19:01.940 to that. How does crooks get a rifle onto the grounds of a Trump event? It was probably broken

00:19:07.440 down in his backpack. Yeah, we don't know that for sure. There is surveillance footage that the

00:19:14.560 fbi's uh still withholding that would presumably you know shed light on some of these details like

00:19:22.720 there's an ice cream uh shop north of the agr building that apparently has footage of crooks

00:19:29.700 actually even scaling the building but that's just one of like the thousands and thousands

00:19:35.240 of records that the fbi has refused to disclose including the the footage of crooks training on

00:19:42.360 a local firing range that might give us insight into how this kid was able to get off the shots

00:19:48.320 that he did. Yeah, Claritin Sports Club, we went there 43 times in the span of maybe 10 months.

00:19:55.780 I did find with those records that there were four times where he signed in with somebody else

00:20:02.000 at the exact same time and for the exact same range. So you could go to either the pistol range

00:20:10.240 or long rifle range, and every time that somebody else signed in at the exact same time,

00:20:16.660 they would go to the same range.

00:20:17.980 There was even a day where he went to pistol and rifle, and this mystery person, it could

00:20:23.620 have been his dad, but the names redacted in the records, so the person that signed

00:20:29.340 in at the same time also went to the pistol and rifle.

00:20:33.280 Another interesting thing I found as far as that goes is, again, back to the community

00:20:38.120 College emails, November 9th, 2023, he actually emails his teacher saying that he's going to be

00:20:46.960 late to class. And that was the day that he went to the range, presumably with this mystery person,

00:20:52.760 and they trained on pistols and rifles. And you can go to the range anytime. Thomas was,

00:21:00.940 again, a model student. I think he missed class maybe like three or four times his whole

00:21:05.940 career so uh i've got questions about why it was so important for him to go to the range that he

00:21:12.720 emailed his teacher and said i'm going to be late today because he was going with someone else

00:21:17.660 obviously sure yeah but you know the deeper question like why why was it urgent that day or

00:21:23.840 what you know why they needed to go that particular time he was uh at one point

00:21:30.860 like in contact with security at the event correct uh he he got a range finder through

00:21:39.540 well he never went through the magnetometers uh or went through security which is another weird

00:21:45.600 anomaly is that he registered through an encrypted email to get a ticket to the event but then he

00:21:52.220 never went through uh went inside so i don't know what his original plan was again he might have

00:21:59.140 gone there that morning and realized like, well, shoot, this is easy. I don't even have to go

00:22:04.080 through security. Like there's a clear line of sight there. But yeah, he never went into the

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00:23:13.100 with joy and blokes. He gets up on the roof. Do we know how long he was there?

00:23:17.720 he was up on the roof yes yeah he was um up on the roof since about 6 0 3 p.m and this is actually

00:23:29.580 a pretty bad local security failure i do believe it was a mistake and not something intentional

00:23:36.500 and i could actually show you and i'll try to articulate what's going on here

00:23:42.500 uh for people just listening but so this is the agr building and a local sniper spots him here

00:23:57.120 and the local sniper crooks runs off when he's spotted and the local sniper says he's going all

00:24:04.720 the way around the building when in fact he went into this alcove and climbed up so this is like

00:24:09.780 603, all of local law enforcement is responding here thinking that he ran all the way around when

00:24:16.920 in fact he went in and up on the rooftop. And that was just one of the few mistakes made by the

00:24:23.100 locals. 603 is when he was first spotted. Well, that's an interesting question because

00:24:29.620 the local snipers in that building, there were three in there and one of them left around 4.20

00:24:38.640 p.m. And he texts his buddies inside the building and says, there's this guy sitting out on a

00:24:45.780 parking bench. He's looking up in the building. I think he knows you guys are in there and just

00:24:51.440 flagging this for your situational awareness. And it was initially reported in the wake of

00:24:58.380 the shooting that that was like the first sighting of crooks. But then somebody released

00:25:03.020 cell phone footage showing crooks walking on the other side of the site like over a half mile away

00:25:12.120 so the question is like who did these local snipers really see that they thought was suspicious

00:25:19.700 one of them not one of the snipers but another one of the local cops on the ground his name's

00:25:25.840 Chris Copas, he insists that, yes, that really was Crooks that we saw at 426 p.m. I swear it

00:25:33.980 was him, except he was wearing pants instead of shorts. But obviously, Crooks can't be

00:25:39.880 two places at one time. So there was a lot of false sightings, or I don't know if they were

00:25:47.480 false sightings or not. But another rally goer said he saw somebody that looked like Crooks

00:25:54.320 carrying a long rifle north of the AGR building, and this would have been captured by that

00:26:01.380 surveillance footage from the ice cream shop.

00:26:04.360 And the reason I take this sighting seriously is because the rally-goer who says he saw

00:26:12.220 this was communicating with a Pennsylvania state police trooper with a body cam, and

00:26:19.380 so he actually sues to get the footage of the body cam that would have shown this young

00:26:23.640 man open carrying a rifle and he didn't tell anybody about this lawsuit he like didn't want

00:26:29.200 the attention but a local newspaper uncovered the lawsuit and found out what he was doing

00:26:34.800 and uh the upshot of the lawsuit is that the state police said well we don't have any footage

00:26:40.720 for you like it doesn't exist um but again the reason i think that's a legitimate sighting is

00:26:47.060 because he didn't want attention he was actually trying to prove his case he's not just like

00:26:50.840 talking you know so uh when was the shooting what time did he pull the trigger uh 6 11 p.m

00:26:58.840 uh so putting aside those possibly false sightings or you know god knows what's going on

00:27:06.760 it's around 5 20 that a local sniper inside the building again sees crooks this time crooks has

00:27:14.360 a range finder now instead of putting this over the radio he texts some of his local counterparts

00:27:22.120 into including the command center leader butler esu commander edward lens and nothing's really

00:27:30.680 done because i guess they're not checking their phones it's not until like 5 40 that people

00:27:35.960 finally see like oh this is like the infamous pictures of uh crooks sitting on a concrete wall

00:27:41.400 by the AGR

00:27:42.360 said he's lurking around,

00:27:44.460 he has a range finder.

00:27:46.060 And they identified it correctly

00:27:47.320 as a range finder.

00:27:49.120 We've never seen a picture

00:27:50.340 of the range finder,

00:27:51.240 but they say they found that

00:27:52.540 in Crooks' pockets

00:27:53.680 after he was killed.

00:27:55.280 So yeah, I think that's...

00:27:56.620 So if you're trying to protect

00:27:58.240 the life of the principal,

00:28:00.000 somebody,

00:28:01.260 and someone at the scene

00:28:02.700 has a range finder,

00:28:06.020 I mean,

00:28:06.740 could there be a clear indication

00:28:08.580 of intent?

00:28:09.220 And 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.

00:28:25.440 He talks to a Pennsylvania State police trooper inside the Secret Service Command Center, who then tells the command center leader, Jeffrey Burr.

00:28:36.620 And instead of putting that out over the radios, though, Jeffrey Burr then tells the counter drone guy Castro about it.

00:28:45.620 Castro calls some agents to go search for it, but they never put it out over the radios.

00:28:51.800 And this, by now, is like 5.50 p.m., about 21 minutes before the shooting.

00:28:58.160 So we know Crooks is on the roof at 6.03.

00:29:00.620 What happens between then and 6.11?

00:29:03.340 Okay, so, yeah, Crooks gets up on the rooftop.

00:29:07.620 Meanwhile, all the cops are searching north of the building.

00:29:11.640 Like, they don't know.

00:29:13.620 But then a local cop does spot Crooks on the rooftop around 6.06 p.m.,

00:29:20.100 says somebody's on the roof.

00:29:21.440 He seems to be running around.

00:29:23.060 Again, they still don't know what exactly to make of this.

00:29:26.260 I don't think they even knew it was the guy that had the rangefinder.

00:29:30.300 This gets passed on to the local command center, Edward Lenz,

00:29:37.200 and he puts it out over Channel 3 at 6.08 p.m.

00:29:40.920 that there's a guy on the rooftop.

00:29:43.000 It's not one of ours.

00:29:46.060 But the problem here is it's the local radios,

00:29:49.160 And 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.

00:30:01.620 He 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.

00:30:14.920 Instead, he, again, calls the Secret Service Command Center.

00:30:21.980 And here's where things get especially controversial, because Len says that he calls the PSP trooper in the Secret Service Center.

00:30:31.440 And then they both inform Jeffrey Burr about somebody who's on the rooftop now.

00:30:38.040 Burr claims that he never heard this.

00:30:40.460 So 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.

00:30:55.540 You know, we should point out that Trump's on the stage at this point. 0.75

00:30:58.160 He 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.

00:31:06.080 So things are getting serious.

00:31:07.520 and at some point people in the crowd beneath crooks notice him up there yeah people notice

00:31:14.300 him up there like around 608 or and they're watching the locals um kind of frantically

00:31:22.380 scramble around seeing how they can get up on the rooftop and yeah it's kind of a spectacle and even

00:31:28.480 some people inside the perimeter start to notice you know the commotion going on by the agr so then

00:31:34.400 a local

00:31:36.580 cop tries to get on the roof, what

00:31:38.480 happens and when? Yeah, so while all this

00:31:40.600 is transpiring

00:31:41.960 Detective Collins

00:31:44.720 Tyler Collins

00:31:45.840 is actually at the Butler

00:31:47.980 police station

00:31:49.580 maybe a mile away and he's

00:31:52.700 hearing all this chatter and he's

00:31:54.380 I guess he's a relatively younger and fitter

00:31:56.540 guy so he decides to go

00:31:58.500 assist in the chase

00:32:00.140 he drives directly to the

00:32:02.580 AGR building and

00:32:04.380 And, you know, this is seen on body cam.

00:32:06.180 He has one of his buddies boost him up to try to get up on the roof.

00:32:11.940 He gets up there.

00:32:13.180 He looks.

00:32:14.160 He says he saw Crooks.

00:32:16.380 Crooks swivels his rifle at Tyler Collins.

00:32:21.500 Collins drops down.

00:32:22.760 And now he says the person on the roof is armed.

00:32:26.600 Now we're probably talking like 30, 25 seconds before the shooting.

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00:34:06.600 So one of the most interesting, I mean, it's minor, but it's interesting facts of this is that Crooks is on the roof.

00:34:12.300 He's surprised by a local cop, aims his rifle at him, then pivots and starts firing within 30 seconds at over 100 yards.

00:34:23.060 and hits trump's ear famously that's pretty that's like biathlon level shooting in that

00:34:29.800 there's clearly lots of adrenaline it's a quick turn and you see all these you know people on tv

00:34:35.260 oh that's an easy shot that's not an easy shot for a man filled with adrenaline just been

00:34:39.480 confronted by a police officer like that's that's someone who is either like remarkably cool under

00:34:46.440 pressure or who's done a lot of training yeah crooks uh from what i can tell was a really good

00:34:53.600 shot um this wasn't his training at clariton sports club he also took a pistol course at

00:34:59.500 i think it's called like the keystone range out in pennsylvania and there was one other guy who

00:35:06.460 was with the class in the class with crooks he's called by the fbi a couple days later when um you

00:35:12.840 know, the FBI finds that Crooks was training here. And this guy gave an interview and said

00:35:17.760 that Crooks once shot a target in the same spot with a nine millimeter so many times that he blew

00:35:23.660 a hole out of the target. So yeah, Crooks was really good. And, you know, I've heard you talk

00:35:29.560 on your previous podcast about this with Sean Davis. Yeah, that's an incredibly difficult shot

00:35:35.800 under that pressure situation where you see a local cop, you know, coming up to get you

00:35:41.420 and you have to focus

00:35:43.540 and keep your breathing under control

00:35:46.060 and he came within

00:35:48.100 millimeters. I'm really struck by that.

00:35:51.220 So then

00:35:51.920 he sets in place he's prone

00:35:54.120 he's lying and

00:35:55.840 he gets off eight shots.

00:35:57.780 What happens to those bullets?

00:36:00.140 The first one 0.98

00:36:01.620 grazes Trump's ear.

00:36:04.200 The second one flies over

00:36:05.780 Trump's shoulder and this is

00:36:07.400 the Pulitzer Prize

00:36:10.040 winning photo taken by doug mills where uh trump's beginning to bring his hand up to his ear which is

00:36:17.940 really strong evidence that this was like a legitimate shooting and that the bullets were real

00:36:22.300 um unless you want to make the argument that the new york times are in on the conspiracy that this

00:36:27.840 is staged uh but yeah it shows the bullet and it also shows that trump doesn't have any kind of

00:36:33.140 squib in his hand that you know for the fake blood um but in any event yeah so the second one

00:36:39.160 whizzes by his shoulder and i'm pretty sure that's the one that hits david dutch uh who was

00:36:45.500 one of the wounded rally goers um it actually i think split his liver it was a pretty pretty

00:36:52.360 nasty shot uh the third one i'm not sure about it was the second volley of five that one of them

00:37:01.140 hits uh the firefighter cory comparatory and then um jim copenhaver who generously wrote the

00:37:08.940 forward to my book he got shot twice and one of those bullets is still uh in his body it's like

00:37:16.060 too close to the spine i think he's in his mid-80s now so they can't really extract it so

00:37:21.680 four people are hit by bullets including trump yeah uh yeah that that's right initially this is

00:37:28.220 weird uh ronnie jackson who was once trump's physician now he's in congress i think he

00:37:33.160 initially said that like my son was grazed or something but we haven't heard anything about

00:37:37.800 that. I, I really don't know what happened there, but we know for sure of these, uh, the, these

00:37:43.660 four people. The man who was killed, who was he? Uh, Corey Comparatori. Uh, yeah, he was, uh, you

00:37:52.580 know, a firefighter, a family man, a, uh, a girl dad. He had, uh, two girls, a loving wife, Helen,

00:37:59.920 uh, by all accounts, just like an upstanding member of the community, the kind of guy you'd

00:38:05.140 want to be friends with the kind of guy you'd uh entrust with your life just a real tragedy that

00:38:11.000 we lost him so that um there's been a lot of speculation about this being staged it's fake

00:38:16.340 there are you know theological arguments for this that come out of the old testament apparently

00:38:25.100 there's a part that suggests you know the pricking of the ear is necessary for a prophecy to be

00:38:32.320 fulfilled, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of talk about this. What's your view of that?

00:38:38.440 Yeah, the same people that make that biblical argument or prophecy argument also says that

00:38:43.960 he wasn't really shot. So I don't really understand that if his ear has to be pricked,

00:38:48.560 but he didn't get shot in the ear. It's hard to really argue with the people who think it's fake

00:38:55.180 because I haven't really heard a coherent theory for how it possibly could have been staged. I mean,

00:39:00.980 as we've discussed, the local response to the would-be assassin was very much legitimate.

00:39:09.480 The bullets were real. The blood was real. The bodies were real. This would require the complicity

00:39:16.020 of the Biden FBI, Biden Secret Service. Keep in mind that he's under investigation at the time

00:39:23.840 or facing prosecutions. I'm sure he's surrounded by FBI informants. They're probably listening to

00:39:29.120 his calls. I don't know when he would have been able to plan something like this. And then

00:39:36.120 one of my favorite pieces of evidence that I found in the transcripts of Congress interviewing

00:39:43.780 the local cops is that his personal physician was actually left behind in the chaos when he

00:39:53.260 was shuttled off the stage and taken to Butler Hospital. So he had to have been examined by

00:39:58.260 a Butler doctor who then, because his personal physician was at the farm show, they take the

00:40:04.820 Butler doctor on Trump Force One to the next site. I think it was New Jersey. So I would imagine that

00:40:11.480 if this was a staged event, it would have been something like he keeps his own doctor close to

00:40:18.600 his side. They go to Butler Hospital. They say, no, nobody's allowed to see Trump's ear for

00:40:24.380 national security reasons uh but that wasn't the case it was actually a local doctor who initially

00:40:29.720 treated him and he would have had to been in on it too if this was well there are three other people

00:40:33.700 shot so i mean i it's hard to if it was fake you know no one told them yeah right yeah so um okay

00:40:42.780 i think that the evidence suggests it was entirely real someone was trying to kill trump

00:40:46.280 how did the secret service respond they really didn't respond again there um we can go more into

00:40:55.800 the failures leading up to it i mentioned uh jeffrey burr who by the way he's the command

00:41:03.240 center leader and by the way he's also the special agent in charge of the buffalo field office which i

00:41:09.900 found a little bit strange i don't know much about the inner workings of the secret service

00:41:14.380 But 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.

00:41:32.680 I 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.

00:41:40.800 But of course, he makes a lot of the key mistakes by never putting anything out over

00:41:46.620 the radio.

00:41:47.860 Another Secret Service blunder was when they did call the Secret Service counter-sniper

00:41:54.840 response agent, who is like the agent on the ground, that the snipers can say, hey, go

00:42:01.420 check this out, and he'll go run over there.

00:42:04.520 And he's kind of like the eyes and ears of the snipers on the rooftops.

00:42:09.860 He goes to search for crooks when they're notified of the range finder,

00:42:16.160 and he's actually turned away by another agent, which is really inexplicable.

00:42:22.600 And this agent said, like, oh, we have the AGR building covered.

00:42:26.520 There's people searching for the suspicious person.

00:42:29.680 Go to the south of the stage and look there, which didn't make any sense

00:42:34.420 because everybody knew the action was happening by the AGR building.

00:42:39.180 But again, the granddaddy of them all is the fact that the Secret Service sniper waited up to 23 seconds before responding.

00:42:48.360 And I say 23 seconds because we have footage of him looking through his scope before the shooting starts.

00:42:57.760 He actually had, you know, he was looking through his scopes.

00:43:01.300 I don't know if he had crooks in his sight or not.

00:43:03.880 But he was looking in that direction.

00:43:05.040 He was looking in that direction.

00:43:06.120 And yeah, I listened to your...

00:43:07.540 This is after eight shots have been fired.

00:43:09.960 This is before any shooting started.

00:43:11.960 Right, but I mean, he, the FBI sniper waited long enough that Crooks fired eight times before he was taken out.

00:43:20.500 Yeah, and the eight shots happened in five seconds.

00:43:23.420 He waited an entire, another 10 seconds before he put that final 10th shot through Crooks.

00:43:32.540 And, you know, I could give him the benefit of the doubt.

00:43:36.400 Maybe 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.

00:43:51.460 the sniper initially tells the house task force that he didn't see crooks until after all the

00:44:03.220 shooting had stopped he said he was like on his binoculars the shooting started by the time he

00:44:10.180 finds crooks in his scope crooks had already fired eight times then he tells a similar story

00:44:17.460 to the Senate Homeland Security Committee,

00:44:20.640 but a staffer, I don't know who this is,

00:44:23.060 but the staffer's heroic.

00:44:24.500 He pulls out, this is almost like a Perry Mason moment,

00:44:27.800 he pulls out the sniper's own notes

00:44:29.500 that they apparently got as part of a production

00:44:32.940 from the Secret Service, and he says,

00:44:36.400 well, you know, David, your own notes after the incident

00:44:39.320 says that you saw Crooks, quote,

00:44:41.580 low-crawling with an AR-15 into position

00:44:44.960 and that you had seen him before the shooting start.

00:44:49.780 I actually, I have the exact notes.

00:44:52.780 This is what the sniper David King wrote immediately after the incident.

00:44:56.280 Quote, I and my teammates positioned ourselves to observe that area that everyone was moving to.

00:45:01.580 I noticed an individual white male, white or gray shirt, low crawling on the roof.

00:45:07.920 I noticed an AR style weapon in his hands.

00:45:12.000 as I moved to observe through my rifle scope, I heard weapon fire. I immediately got a laser

00:45:18.540 rangefinder distance from my weapon mounted rangefinder. I looked up to see my engagement

00:45:23.960 scope, looked back through the scope, observed the individual shooting and engaged. So there's

00:45:30.620 a major contradiction there. I'm not necessarily suggesting that he waited on purpose. I think,

00:45:37.540 Again, 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

00:45:48.600 Where is that sniper now, David King? 0.99

00:45:52.860 He'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.

00:46:07.540 And 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.

00:46:25.060 So 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.

00:46:48.160 But he still works there.

00:46:49.380 Again, yeah, I think Trump expresses appreciation for him.

00:46:54.360 was anyone fired no uh kimberly cheetel resigned the former director resigned under bipartisan

00:47:01.860 pressure uh there were five or six suspensions that all came most of them came from the local

00:47:10.460 pittsburgh field office even though um they they were kind of thrown under the bus in my opinion

00:47:17.440 but no nobody was actually fired nobody was fired unless you count cheetel but that's uh

00:47:23.820 Again, 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.

00:47:40.500 So what happened next?

00:47:42.840 Trump gets shot, he leaves, he goes to New Jersey with the local doctor.

00:47:47.200 What happens to Crooks' body?

00:47:51.200 That's a great question.

00:47:52.800 Crooks' body was actually left on the rooftop until 6 a.m. the next morning.

00:48:00.160 And instead of taking him to the Butler County coroner, he shipped to Allegheny County.

00:48:06.220 I guess we've gotten conflicting explanations.

00:48:10.240 I guess Allegheny County is where Pittsburgh is.

00:48:12.460 They have more advanced facilities.

00:48:14.560 But then I also heard they took Corey Comparatore's body to Allegheny County

00:48:19.040 because the press was at the Butler County coroner.

00:48:22.800 office um and they wanted to avoid the press attention crooks was shot once correct i think

00:48:29.280 the local cop hit him um first yeah i i definitely think uh the local cop hit him because you keep

00:48:37.080 in mind crooks stopped shooting after the local cop fired uh there's some speculation that uh

00:48:43.820 Aaron Zaloponi might have hit the buttstock of the gun and shattered it.

00:48:49.960 But the thing is that the X-ray of Crook shows that there's bullet fragments still in his shoulder.

00:48:59.360 And people, ballistic experts have told me that that 300 Win Mag final shot wouldn't have fragmented like that.

00:49:07.560 The Secret Service's 300 wind mag round went through Crooks' neck, out, back in the shoulder.

00:49:15.040 Then it fragments into two pieces and makes two re-exit wounds.

00:49:20.080 They actually recovered those fragments.

00:49:22.360 It's this material in the shoulder that was left in there.

00:49:26.820 Actually, 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?

00:49:34.540 So how quickly after this event was his body cremated?

00:49:40.540 I believe it was released for cremation a week or two after.

00:49:45.380 And we didn't find out about this until Representative Clay Higgins went to go look at the body.

00:49:51.500 And they said, well, you know, Mr. Higgins, the body doesn't exist.

00:49:54.760 They gave it to the funeral home.

00:49:57.500 How would you assess the thoroughness of the autopsy?

00:50:01.340 Well, 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.

00:50:25.000 So 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.

00:50:49.660 When I found out that the body was taken to Allegheny County, I requested it from them,

00:50:55.120 and they said, well, we did the autopsy and the toxicology, but this is Butler County

00:51:01.360 jurisdiction.

00:51:02.820 I then asked Butler County for it, and they denied it too.

00:51:06.160 It was almost like they're pointing at each other, playing show games with the evidence.

00:51:10.580 I went through a couple months long legal battle to get these documents and then actually

00:51:18.680 got them in early October and put them up on our website, HeadlineUSA. So that was a big scoop,

00:51:24.800 but I didn't think much of the documents, like they didn't really seem to show any scandal to

00:51:31.860 me at first until a Twitter sleuth notified me a couple months later and said, if you looked at

00:51:38.580 this toxicology report, it seems incomplete. And I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about.

00:51:44.840 So 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.

00:52:03.420 And 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.

00:52:27.460 That's the bile, one tube of blood, and the envelope of hair.

00:52:32.520 So 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.

00:52:43.600 I don't know.

00:52:45.820 Has Goldschmidt, the medical examiner, explained why he didn't test or there's no record of him testing these samples?

00:52:52.940 When 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.

00:53:05.440 Okay. 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?

00:53:15.300 Lone gunman, crazy person, killed by a heroic Secret Service sniper, no accomplices, there's no reason to hide anything.

00:53:22.940 do you have any idea why the fbi is continuing to hide information about this case well i hope

00:53:30.860 you i would just hoping you could tell me i have some theories about it yeah i mean joe kent said

00:53:35.740 it's directly related to he believes directly related to our war in iran um you know can't

00:53:43.040 prove that but i uh but just to establish clearly that they are hiding it you've gone presumably to

00:53:50.520 the Justice Department to ask for this information. What answer do you get? In fact, I did a FOIA

00:53:55.840 request for all the 302s in this case the day after Kash Patel said about a year ago that the

00:54:03.300 investigation is closed, Crooks acted alone, nothing more to see here. So, oh, okay, great,

00:54:08.400 the investigation's closed. Now they can comply with FOIA and make all this stuff public. I filed

00:54:13.800 my FOIA and get a response about a month later saying, we're not giving you these records because

00:54:19.200 in fact the investigation's still open so it seems to me as they're playing uh legal games

00:54:25.600 with these documents uh they've since cash patel has changed his tune and said well the investigation

00:54:31.480 is open but not active and in my mind that's just a way they're an excuse they're using to avoid

00:54:40.380 disclosure so at the root of all of this is the question of trump and his you know he was the

00:54:47.660 target of the assassination attempt, which you have said, and I agree with you, was real.

00:54:51.740 Like someone tried to kill him, missed, killed somebody else.

00:54:56.640 But if the president wanted this investigation to continue, it would continue, correct?

00:55:04.720 Presumably, yeah.

00:55:05.480 Maybe in his first administration, you could argue that he didn't have total control over

00:55:10.080 the deep state or whatever.

00:55:12.060 But now, yeah, he's got loyalists installed in most of the key positions.

00:55:17.240 So, yeah, I don't see any possible excuse for why.

00:55:22.460 Right.

00:55:23.040 So it's not just that, you know, 0.68

00:55:25.900 Kash Patel's incompetent or Dan Bongino's incompetent.

00:55:29.480 There's a statement of fact,

00:55:30.560 Trump shut down the investigation into Butler.

00:55:32.980 So he shut down the investigation

00:55:34.880 into his own attempted murder.

00:55:37.520 And I think that's the most shocking fact

00:55:41.440 to come out of this Trump term

00:55:43.360 because i i don't see a non-sinister explanation for that but maybe you have one

00:55:50.440 no i mean it's just total speculation but i sometimes i wonder did they stumble onto some

00:55:56.840 sort of like mk ultra program i don't know is this are they threatening trump's family

00:56:02.160 um it does and this is why like i don't get too mad when people think he's faking it because

00:56:08.580 he's so tight-lipped you know you can't blame people for speculating i think that's exactly

00:56:15.320 right it doesn't make any sense at all are there any uh pieces of evidence that you have seen that

00:56:22.260 suggests that crooks acted in concert with anybody else i've seen nothing uh explicit

00:56:29.960 it uh no there is there's some unanswered questions about what happened on uh july 13th

00:56:39.200 2024 that might point to others being involved on the scene of course we have the false sightings

00:56:44.880 of crooks like if they saw somebody that looked like him there were numerous such cases so i have

00:56:51.500 questions about that and then uh the bomb squad allegheny county bomb squad initially responded

00:56:57.920 to a van that was parked about a half mile away from the site. And the series of events

00:57:04.940 raises questions in my mind. Crooks is dead up on the rooftop. They find a transponder in his pocket

00:57:14.100 that they believe might be used to set off IEDs. They evacuate the rooftop. And after that point,

00:57:21.560 the locals are never involved in the crime scene again. It's totally controlled by the FBI.

00:57:27.920 They're searching underneath, inside the building with bomb-sniffing dogs.

00:57:34.720 And 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.

00:57:44.900 They find a bicycle with a backpack that wasn't Crooks's, but they initially assumed it was.

00:57:53.000 And most interestingly is this van.

00:57:55.520 They searched the van with the bomb squad and tow it away, and we haven't heard anything about this since.

00:58:01.860 And this is before they searched Crooks' car, which was parked right on the street by the AGR building.

00:58:09.620 So I have questions of why they searched the van before the car.

00:58:14.560 I 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.

00:58:21.760 Is there proof that Crooks constructed bombs or a bomb?

00:58:25.740 Yeah, they eventually found bombs in the trunk of his Hyundai Elantra.

00:58:33.680 And 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.

00:58:45.720 That led to the search of the car, supposedly.

00:58:49.100 But again, I don't know why it's van, house, car.

00:58:53.940 But we do know he made bombs.

00:58:56.300 Yeah, we know for sure.

00:58:57.320 And in fact, one of the community college emails,

00:59:00.400 the only one that showed any possible evidence

00:59:02.840 that he was planning this

00:59:04.540 is him ordering racing fuel from a company.

00:59:09.420 I think almost everything he did

00:59:11.440 would have had to have been on his encrypted emails.

00:59:13.840 But this one order he places

00:59:15.920 through his community college email

00:59:17.480 that does show him in January 2024

00:59:20.340 ordering racing fuel,

00:59:23.420 which is used to make like for anfo bombs.

00:59:26.580 Yes.

00:59:27.020 The same material that McVeigh allegedly used in OKC. 0.68

00:59:32.200 So like, yeah, little tiny miniature anfo bombs

00:59:35.680 found in his trunk in the house.

00:59:37.960 But we have no idea why he made these bombs

00:59:40.780 or what he planned to do with them.

00:59:42.240 Yeah, my speculation is that, again,

00:59:44.440 he probably planned an attack that day, maybe. Again, I can't get inside of his mind, but maybe

00:59:51.640 he showed up thinking that I'm going to do a bombing and then realized that, wait, no, I could

00:59:56.300 do a shooting instead. I don't know. He might've had multiple possible plans because the bombs

01:00:02.940 weren't even set to go off in the trunk. Like even if he pressed the button on his transponder,

01:00:08.600 he would have had to flip switches to activate the bombs inside of the trunk beforehand. So

01:00:14.100 So, yeah, I don't know really what to make of that.

01:00:17.040 Has his Google search history ever been released?

01:00:20.800 Other than the limited release, well, that you got from...

01:00:26.080 Well, they didn't release anything.

01:00:27.340 I got that from a source who got it himself.

01:00:29.920 Yes, I...

01:00:30.520 Outside...

01:00:31.080 To misphrase that.

01:00:31.800 Outside the federal government, yeah.

01:00:33.460 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:34.520 No, nothing.

01:00:35.780 We've gotten assertions.

01:00:37.980 Like, he apparently Googled how far was Oswald away from Kennedy.

01:00:42.220 he googled rnc dnc joe biden donald trump um but nothing that would really shine light on

01:00:50.880 you know the details that matter they claim he was transgender too uh no they never claimed he

01:00:56.700 was transgender i think uh there were rumors about that at one point the dad asked his son

01:01:02.760 if he was gay but that's just because he didn't have a girlfriend but no this wasn't a trans type

01:01:08.360 thing um okay shortly after there was widely publicized uh claims that iran had something

01:01:19.340 to do with this what were were those real what was that yeah i saw you actually debating ted

01:01:25.780 cruz about this like a year ago saying there's no evidence that iran the government of iran

01:01:31.780 yeah the government of iran tried to kill trump and and ted cruz is like actually yeah they

01:01:37.740 hired two hitmen to take out Trump in 2024. Well, those hitmen actually turned out to be

01:01:44.740 undercover FBI agents, and there was never any serious threat to Trump. It appears to be

01:01:50.320 totally controlled sting operations, you know, at the very least, if not an actual plot to

01:01:58.640 manufacture a phony case about Iran. So what happened here is somebody did, a Pakistani man 0.60

01:02:06.120 named Asif Mershant was arrested July 12th, 2024, the day before Butler. And when the case was

01:02:14.160 announced in August, everybody automatically assumed that it had to have been linked somehow.

01:02:22.500 But if you look at the details, again, it's a totally controlled sting operation. They were

01:02:28.040 actually monitoring Mershant before he even entered the country. And I think some intelligence

01:02:35.620 may have been passed through Israel.

01:02:38.480 That's what the New York Times reported

01:02:40.640 a couple months ago,

01:02:42.240 and so did Max Blumenthal.

01:02:44.820 Information was passed through Israel.

01:02:46.780 What does that mean?

01:02:48.100 Yeah, I don't...

01:02:49.380 Information about the Iranian plot against Trump

01:02:52.660 came in part from Israel.

01:02:54.240 The New York Times specifically reports

01:02:56.000 that the initial intelligence came from Israel.

01:03:00.060 But the thing is,

01:03:00.920 I would argue, again,

01:03:02.900 phony cases have been

01:03:04.240 there's been years of them. The first such case was John Bolton in 2022 where the DOJ announced

01:03:13.360 that Iran tried to assassinate him. And it turns out it was just some guy in Iran talking to an

01:03:19.420 FBI informant. The informant took photos of Bolton's house to try to pretend to be conducting

01:03:28.220 surveillance. Bolton had full knowledge and was consenting to all this. They announced an

01:03:35.080 indictment, but of course the defendants in Iran. So it's kind of like the Russia indictments where

01:03:41.080 they never have to prove this case. It's almost just like a big press release.

01:03:46.180 So, I mean, presumably considering that Trump launched a war against Iran in February of this

01:03:52.000 year, if there was evidence that Iran was involved in this assassination attempt, the Department of

01:03:57.440 Justice would be pursuing it vigorously and publicizing it in order to backfill a motive for this war.

01:04:03.740 People have used the Murchant case as evidence that, yes, there was some sort of threat.

01:04:10.680 But you've got to measure a threat by both intent and capacity.

01:04:15.100 And here, there was absolutely no capacity.

01:04:17.980 Like I said, they let Murchant into the country in April 2024 on purpose as part of the sting operation.

01:04:25.520 a reporter named john solomon actually had sources tell him that this was similar

01:04:30.980 to operation fast and furious where the atf was allowing illegal gun purchases to supposedly track

01:04:38.840 where these guns were going uh apparently the biden administration was doing that with humans

01:04:45.120 where they're like letting terrorists into the country on purpose to supposedly track

01:04:49.740 where they're going. So Mershant's led into the country and a leader at a local mosque 0.99

01:04:56.960 connects him to a driver because he doesn't speak English, doesn't have a car, doesn't have any 0.99

01:05:03.040 means. So supposedly a friendly guy is driving him around just because that's part of their culture.

01:05:09.580 They're trying to help each other. But this guy turned out to be an FBI informant. He's actually

01:05:16.900 an Afghan who served in Afghanistan as a translator for the U.S. military.

01:05:26.620 And the story about how he became an informant is unclear because in the DOJ's indictment,

01:05:33.320 they say that he heard what Mershant was plotting and he went to the feds and flipped

01:05:39.060 and became an informant.

01:05:41.280 And I could see your face.

01:05:42.340 You'd probably find that dubious.

01:05:43.740 we found out in court that the official story changed supposedly now he says that

01:05:51.860 he's driving marchant around and he sees unmarked cars following them everywhere they go

01:05:58.380 and he's worried because of his experience in afghanistan that maybe uh some taliban is out

01:06:06.340 to get him or something like that so he happens to have the card of an fbi agent in his pocket

01:06:12.180 who supposedly he had like a friend who died a few years earlier and he got a card from an FBI

01:06:17.920 agent from then. He calls the FBI and says, I think, I don't know, the Taliban's out to get

01:06:24.520 me or something. And they supposedly fill him in on the operation saying, no, we're monitoring

01:06:30.260 Mershant because we think he's dangerous. Will you work for us? Will you just kind of be our 0.82

01:06:36.200 eyes and ears and go along with whatever he says. So again, this is the official story that came

01:06:43.580 out in court. He agrees to become an informant. Him and Mershant have a meeting in a hotel room

01:06:52.020 in early June that's wired for surveillance. And keep in mind that Mershant has not

01:06:59.820 propose anything

01:07:01.880 related to the

01:07:04.200 assassination or otherwise

01:07:05.980 illegal at this point, but there are already

01:07:08.020 full-fledged surveillance

01:07:09.920 of him. He sketches

01:07:11.940 out some plan

01:07:13.980 that looks like a 10-year-old would have drawn

01:07:15.900 it about, yeah, this is the target.

01:07:18.000 How will it die? 0.98

01:07:19.740 Again, this is all in Urdu, so we just

01:07:21.860 have an English translation of what was

01:07:23.940 said, and I think the

01:07:25.760 vape, he had a vape

01:07:27.820 that he put down, and this is the target.

01:07:29.440 So 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.

01:07:44.220 The 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.

01:08:02.000 Mershant tells them, you know, visit me in Pakistan in September, and we'll give you the official target.

01:08:10.320 um they want the undercover fbi agents want him to make a down payment to show that he's serious

01:08:17.820 and he uh is trying to get five thousand dollars trying to scrounge it up from his family initially

01:08:25.360 he's turned down by his family in pakistan and and eventually finds i guess cousins in tanzania

01:08:32.700 who are willing to front him $5,000 through like the Huala system

01:08:39.220 where he can pick it up in New York but borrow on it in Tanzania.

01:08:43.980 So the FBI informant actually helps him do this.

01:08:47.720 The informant picks up the $5,000, gives it to Mershant,

01:08:52.500 who then gives it to the FBI agents.

01:08:55.840 Like instead of the informant just giving it,

01:08:57.440 you could see they're really trying to set him up.

01:09:00.040 And then it's when he is trying to leave the country on July 12th that he's arrested.

01:09:08.400 He's not Iranian, by the way, just to restate, he's Pakistani.

01:09:11.840 Yeah, that's right.

01:09:12.660 He supposedly has a family in Iran, and we should, you know, steel man the other side.

01:09:20.840 When he's arrested, he was interrogated, and he did say that, yes, I was working for Iran to try to do something.

01:09:31.200 He wouldn't admit to the Trump assassination plot.

01:09:34.040 So 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.

01:09:46.620 This 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.

01:10:07.520 No, no.

01:10:08.380 I've heard Joe Kent ask that question, like, well, was Mershon in touch with Crooks?

01:10:15.580 He didn't even speak English, and I don't think he was playing with a full deck of cards.

01:10:22.440 So, yeah, he definitely wasn't.

01:10:25.340 Joe Kent also asked, was the informant in touch with Crooks?

01:10:28.120 And I think that's a far more interesting question, but we'll probably never find out

01:10:33.680 because there's actually classified information in the Mershant case,

01:10:39.900 over 1.6 million pieces of evidence that not even Mershant was allowed to look at.

01:10:47.040 There's something called the Classified Information Procedures Act,

01:10:50.200 which says, well, if discovery is classified, not even the defendant can get it.

01:10:55.260 So it's not a real trial?

01:10:56.760 No, it was a total show trial.

01:10:58.520 And bizarrely, again, they trot out all this dubious evidence,

01:11:02.260 But on the last day, Mershon's attorney allows him to testify.

01:11:08.460 And again, he says that, yes, I was working for Iran.

01:11:14.820 So he does think that.

01:11:17.820 And I guess he said he was acting under duress.

01:11:21.260 But it was pretty much just an admission of guilt.

01:11:23.620 It's something that he should have said during the plea deal proceedings and not on the last day of his trial.

01:11:32.260 And so, yeah, I have a hard, I don't know really what to make of that.

01:11:37.300 It seems like legal malpractice, to be frank.

01:11:39.760 Yeah, well, it's not uncommon to see defendants in cases like this represented by lawyers

01:11:44.880 who are acting against their interests, which is interesting.

01:11:47.440 I've seen it a number of times.

01:11:48.920 Yeah.

01:11:49.480 And so that may be part of the whole performance, but I don't know.

01:11:55.080 Sure.

01:11:55.340 And just to steel me, I guess I've argued with people online about this and they say,

01:12:00.580 well, even though he didn't have any capacity, we knew because of what he says that he thinks

01:12:06.140 he was working for Iran, that Iran was plotting something. So why not let him into the country

01:12:13.060 just to make this case and stick it to Iran? And, you know, there's a couple of responses to that. 0.84

01:12:19.540 I think foremost, it's like while the FBI is constructing, fomenting this case, they let

01:12:25.900 crooks and ryan ruth totally slip under their noses um but even more importantly i don't think

01:12:33.900 anybody's really realized that is this case arguably is what almost got trump killed um because

01:12:40.540 the uh the reason that the secret service snipers were sent the butler was because of a so-called

01:12:48.040 Iranian threat. The head of Trump's detail, Sean Curran, was briefed about an Iranian threat and

01:12:56.700 he's getting briefed on the Mershant case a week before Butler and they decide to send

01:13:03.200 Secret Service snipers to Butler as a result. It was the first time that a former president

01:13:08.820 has ever had Secret Service sniper protection and the first time that year that the Trump

01:13:14.840 campaign had Secret Service snipers. And I would argue that if that phony Iranian threat never 0.93

01:13:21.900 sparked, you know, the notion to send Secret Service snipers to Butler, that it would have

01:13:27.560 been local snipers up on those barns behind Trump instead of the guys who waited 15 seconds to

01:13:33.580 respond. And I could almost guarantee you that the local response would have been better because

01:13:38.640 the locals uh they would have been on the local radios that's another thing about the secret

01:13:44.760 service snipers at butler is they did not pick up the local radios that were where's sean curran now

01:13:50.080 he's actually the director of the entire agency which again is a totally baffling decision

01:13:56.440 so that that's kind of the context that piques my interest i mean i do think whenever you i mean

01:14:03.040 you've been a reporter for a long time you know that when you press down on one specific story

01:14:07.600 you find anomalies,

01:14:08.740 things are impossible to explain.

01:14:10.060 You also find coincidences

01:14:11.240 that are just bizarre,

01:14:12.300 but maybe they really are coincidences.

01:14:14.860 But big picture,

01:14:17.160 it's truly crazy

01:14:19.960 what we're looking at.

01:14:21.500 So here you have Trump

01:14:22.600 two days before

01:14:23.720 the Republican convention.

01:14:24.820 He has not yet chosen

01:14:25.920 a running mate.

01:14:27.560 Everyone in,

01:14:28.860 everyone in,

01:14:30.760 up for consideration

01:14:31.520 is a neocon

01:14:32.200 except for J.D. Vance.

01:14:33.600 Okay, so,

01:14:34.780 and so that's when

01:14:36.280 the assassination attempt

01:14:37.420 takes place before Trump has chosen a running mate, a vice president. The second this shooting

01:14:43.540 happens, you see a bunch of high profile endorsements of Trump. And shortly after all of

01:14:48.280 his legal problems go away. And ultimately in very short order, Trump becomes not just a neocon,

01:14:53.420 but like the leading neocon in the world, way more of a neocon than like Bob Kagan and Bill

01:14:59.260 crystal ever were and so you see a complete change in trump and in official washington's

01:15:08.640 view of trump like people who didn't like trump endorsed trump after this and then you see trump

01:15:13.640 appoint the people who effectively allowed this to happen by their incompetence at best

01:15:18.760 to positions of greater authority and then you see trump shut down the investigation into the

01:15:23.320 shooting according to reporters right am i like what the hell you're exactly right and according

01:15:30.720 to reporter susan crabtree i guess sean curran is um a favorite of susie wiles which i don't know

01:15:38.020 why susie wiles would have the power to keep or promote him to be secret service director after

01:15:44.760 he was pretty much but it's about trump though i mean it's like yeah if you had bodyguards were

01:15:49.820 supposed to protect you with their lives if necessary and they allow again by their incompetence

01:15:55.600 at best somebody to hit you in the ear with a 223 round you'd say these guys have to go like you

01:16:03.800 failed your one job is to keep a sniper from shooting me at me and you failed but instead 0.98

01:16:09.660 of doing that trump promotes the guy i have no good answer for you as far as that goes i mean

01:16:16.040 I'm tormented by it, especially considering what happened after, where Trump gets effortlessly

01:16:22.460 elected and then becomes this crazed neocon. He becomes the one thing he said he hated.

01:16:28.340 There's a total change in Trump.

01:16:30.400 It is worth mentioning that Susie Wiles and Sean Curran were both

01:16:34.640 involved in what I would argue like a psyop on Trump to make him think the Iranians were out to

01:16:40.460 get him. And this is after the Ryan Ruth event. They actually tell Trump that the Iranians have

01:16:46.900 smuggled missiles into the country and they want to shoot down your plane, which there's absolutely

01:16:51.440 no evidence for that. I mean, no actual documentation, no witnesses, no arrests were

01:16:56.840 made. If that were true, the war would have started a lot earlier. But in any event, they

01:17:02.380 actually put Trump on a decoy plane with... I remember. Yeah, they used Steve Whitcoff's plane

01:17:09.220 And 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.

01:17:22.080 But, I mean, it's pretty crazy.

01:17:24.060 Like, 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.

01:17:33.320 Like, it really seemed like a total psyop to me.

01:17:36.280 It's bizarre.

01:17:37.740 Repertory to this war, of course, right?

01:17:40.720 I would think so, yeah.

01:17:42.200 I mean, you can make the argument that Trump was already an Iranian hawk,

01:17:47.260 but, you know, this certainly didn't help.

01:17:50.040 You can't make the argument that Trump was in favor of a regime change war with Iran

01:17:54.180 since he was explicitly against a regime change war with Iran, like, for a decade.

01:18:00.320 Yeah, that's certainly what he said.

01:18:02.240 I did, wasn't there rumors that he was about to launch a war in the last month

01:18:06.520 of like his of the first presidency although yeah i mean those were more than rumors that he was

01:18:12.120 under a lot of pressure to do that but the fact is he didn't and then he spent yeah his campaign

01:18:18.360 uh in the 2024 race arguing against regime change were attacking people who were in favor of it

01:18:25.000 and then he launched it and not just launched it but became this kind of enthusiastic tool of the

01:18:31.880 government of israel so i mean maybe those are all organic changes of heart uh but he's never

01:18:38.500 explained how or why and the demarcation the change point the pivot seems to be the shooting

01:18:46.240 yeah who's ryan ruth uh ryan ruth was the second would-be assassin and this happened on september

01:18:54.820 15th, 2024, just over two months after Butler. Trump's golfing on his Palm Beach golf course.

01:19:04.460 He's on the fifth hole and the Secret Service is doing an advance on the next hole and an agent

01:19:09.740 spots Ruth hiding in the bushes with an SKS rifle. The agent initially thinks this is a

01:19:16.540 homeless guy until he sees a rifle pointing right at him. He shoots five times at point-blank range

01:19:23.920 about from five or 10 feet away.

01:19:26.440 Misses all five times,

01:19:28.620 but causes Ruth to flee.

01:19:30.640 Yeah.

01:19:31.780 Yeah.

01:19:32.720 You know.

01:19:34.000 He missed him five times at close range?

01:19:36.940 And presumably the Secret Service officer

01:19:39.700 had a rifle too.

01:19:40.900 It's not like he pulled out his pistol or anything

01:19:42.860 because he's on the advance,

01:19:45.060 probably armed and ready.

01:19:47.560 So.

01:19:48.480 Wow, I didn't know that.

01:19:49.420 Yeah, another security failure.

01:19:52.020 Well, an embarrassing one too.

01:19:53.420 Yeah, 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-

01:20:07.640 He actually got away?

01:20:08.360 Yeah, 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.

01:20:22.940 And 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.

01:20:37.420 And Ruth is pulled over on the I-95 in another county.

01:20:43.260 And this is...

01:20:44.220 No way.

01:20:45.780 Yes.

01:20:46.120 Again, he had an escape plan.

01:20:49.300 Well, how did the Secret Service agent allow, if he's that close to him, why didn't he chase him down?

01:20:56.100 We've got even less details about the Secret Service's actions at Palm Beach than we do from Butler.

01:21:05.580 So I don't know.

01:21:06.700 I don't have an answer to that question.

01:21:08.500 So then what happens?

01:21:09.540 So they arrest the guy.

01:21:10.980 And here's where the most tragic part of the whole incident happens is that there's a bunch of traffic backed up on the I-95.

01:21:18.040 due to this unexpected arrest and a lady slams into the backed up traffic with her three-year-old

01:21:25.780 daughter in the back seat. The daughter was put into a coma and has permanent brain damage as a 0.99

01:21:32.040 result. So regardless how you feel about Trump or anything else, it's very sad. And a lot of people

01:21:40.760 actually think Ruth is kind of like a clownish, buffoonish guy, but I don't have a whole lot of 0.87

01:21:46.120 sympathy for him because this narcissism led to this little girl's permanent brain damage so what 0.89

01:21:51.780 do we know about ryan ruth we know a lot more about him than we do about crooks i mean by like

01:21:58.760 midnight of that day people had already dug up articles about him being in ukraine and recruiting

01:22:07.140 foreign fighters the fbi holds a press conference the next day and says that we actually did receive

01:22:16.020 a tip about him in 2019 that he was a felon in possession of a firearm. We didn't act on that

01:22:24.200 tip, but we're trying to be forthcoming and we'll do better in the future, I guess, is what they

01:22:30.500 were trying to present. But it's actually far, far worse than that. One of the things I did,

01:22:38.340 because I live close to where Ruth grew up in Greensboro, I pulled local police reports about

01:22:44.300 these criminal incidents from the early 2000s. It turns out that he was actually on the ATF's

01:22:49.280 radar since at least 2002. He was a construction worker, and he owned a construction firm. He had

01:23:00.160 gotten into a dispute with illegal immigrants who he was hiring. Apparently, he wasn't paying them.

01:23:07.580 He threatens one with a 410 shotgun. They wrestle the shotgun away from him. He gets in his truck,

01:23:14.300 and escapes and almost runs over these, uh, these workers of his, they, the, uh, the workers call

01:23:21.620 the police and the police respond. And then they find that Ruth was like, uh, possessed in possession

01:23:28.400 of dynamite illegally. And they put him in jail while he's in jail. Uh, somehow he gets a cell

01:23:36.260 phone in there. He calls, uh, somebody who was helping him run the business and says,

01:23:41.420 get rid of the dynamite we have on the other sites because they're about to probably search

01:23:47.580 those sites too. A prison snitch tells the police about this. He gets charged with having that

01:23:54.900 dynamite too. He gets let out on bail. About six months later, he's in a police, he gets pulled

01:24:03.760 over. He's got a machine gun in his passenger seat. He runs away from the police, gets into a

01:24:10.240 standoff um and finally after a couple hours he's arrested again and the upshot of that is that

01:24:18.400 after all that he was only uh given probation but this case was reported to the atf which declined

01:24:25.920 to uh take any action how did that guy wind up i think you said recruiting foreign fighters

01:24:31.720 in ukraine yeah so can you recruit foreign fighters in ukraine without the knowledge

01:24:38.880 and participation of U.S. government authorities?

01:24:41.400 Well, he certainly had knowledge of it.

01:24:43.780 And again, yeah, career criminal,

01:24:45.860 just to put a bow on that,

01:24:47.640 he's charged again with a scheme

01:24:50.100 of paying crackheads to steal stuff

01:24:53.540 from construction sites,

01:24:55.600 gets caught in 2010

01:24:57.800 with like $30,000 worth of stolen equipment.

01:25:01.640 That triggers a probation violation from 2002,

01:25:06.880 but that gets waived the next day.

01:25:08.640 And 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.

01:25:22.160 In 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.

01:25:38.820 So 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.

01:25:57.620 so he turns to recruiting foreign fighters as you say uh a little interesting factoid in his

01:26:07.180 self-published book which is still available on amazon he said his best partner quote best

01:26:12.400 partner in this venture was an israeli guy i was never able to track down who that partner was

01:26:18.640 this is also crazy yeah it is absolutely but if you're right i mean if you've got an extensive

01:26:24.220 criminal record for violent crimes and you wind up in poland trying to join the ukrainian foreign

01:26:32.880 legion and then recruiting foreign fighters like cia knows because they're running ukraine and the

01:26:38.060 war they know you exist to their father i mean of course yeah and he was in an azoff battalion

01:26:44.400 commercial which of course azoff was sponsored by the cia the nazi battalion yeah the nazi

01:26:50.240 battalion um he was flagged by multiple people at one point i think i counted seven federal or

01:26:57.740 international agencies that were aware of what he was doing because a travel nurse i think her name

01:27:04.640 is like chelsea walsh initially reported him to the fbi the state department and customs and said

01:27:12.820 hey, this guy's got really dangerous rhetoric and he's doing sketchy things.

01:27:19.260 He was reported to Interpol.

01:27:21.940 A former CIA officer named Sarah Adams flagged him too.

01:27:25.620 So, of course, the CIA was aware.

01:27:28.820 And the State Department actually opened up an investigation for him

01:27:32.640 violating international arms trafficking regulations.

01:27:37.080 Not that he was trafficking in actual arms,

01:27:39.480 but that also covers the human fighter element of it.

01:27:43.580 So there was actually an open State Department investigation

01:27:46.400 at the time of the September 2024 assassination attempt.

01:27:51.260 So in September of 2024,

01:27:53.060 Trump was telling me and everybody else

01:27:56.100 that I'm going to end this war between Russia and Ukraine

01:27:58.860 and I can do it.

01:27:59.560 I can do it in one day and I know Putin

01:28:01.080 and I know Zelensky and I can do this.

01:28:03.680 This happens on his golf course.

01:28:06.760 fast forward now almost two years and trump has done nothing down the war and in fact has kept

01:28:13.300 it going with american tax dollars can to this day we're lying about it but that's a fact 0.53

01:28:18.040 and that's like a big change no yeah another broken the guy who is in an azoff battalion

01:28:27.420 commercial tries to kill trump with an sks rifle and then lo and behold all of a sudden trump is

01:28:34.500 for the Ukraine war. It's bizarre. I don't think Ryan was explicitly told to do this,

01:28:41.440 because keep in mind, he was put on trial and he actually represented himself. And I think at any

01:28:48.360 time he could have blurted out, well, hey, you know, the FBI told me or whatever. I think it's

01:28:53.040 a little more subtle. I did talk to a lot of people who knew him in Ukraine, and I think it

01:28:58.380 very easy to be influenced uh he was around a lot of virulent anti-trump people at one point

01:29:06.460 i'm talking to a guy who knew him this guy thinks like the russia pee tapes are real 0.69

01:29:11.520 he goes off on a tangent to me about how he wants to punch jd vance in the face

01:29:15.720 so it's like these type of turbo turbo liberals were like ruth's friends over there and moreover

01:29:23.020 This isn't like your wine-drinking aunt that hates Trump.

01:29:26.140 These are more high-status people.

01:29:28.820 They come from money.

01:29:30.260 They have State Department connections.

01:29:32.420 Ruth probably thought, like, oh, these are really important people.

01:29:35.620 I could be a hero.

01:29:36.920 They hate Trump.

01:29:37.820 I could save the day by doing this.

01:29:40.700 That said, the biggest anomaly I have that suggests something darker

01:29:46.960 is the fact that Ruth had been camping at the golf course

01:29:52.820 for about 11 hours before the shooting actually happened.

01:29:57.580 And if you read the House Task Force final report,

01:30:01.640 Trump actually made a last-minute decision to go golfing,

01:30:05.620 and the Secret Service was informed at 2 a.m.

01:30:09.980 And look at the state search warrant.

01:30:12.700 It says that according to geolocation data pings,

01:30:16.840 Ruth showed up at like 2.30 a.m.

01:30:18.680 No way.

01:30:19.580 Yeah.

01:30:20.200 And that, yeah, that's...

01:30:21.560 Are you serious?

01:30:22.220 I'm absolutely serious.

01:30:23.860 Did Ruth at trial ever explain why he, since Trump hadn't been planning to golf, decided to show up at 2.30 a.m.?

01:30:31.800 That was never explained.

01:30:33.800 Actually, Ruth represented himself, and the trial was a disaster, so we didn't get any helpful information.

01:30:41.300 I mean, during his opening statement at one point, he goes off on a tangent about the importance of human rights and democracy.

01:30:48.280 The judge says, Mr. Ruth, this has nothing to do with your case.

01:30:51.620 If you keep doing this, you're going to forfeit your own opening statement.

01:30:55.260 He says, you know, yes, your honor.

01:30:57.000 And he immediately delves right back into the same tangent.

01:31:00.920 He forfeits his opening statement. 1.00

01:31:02.600 So it was a real shit show. 0.98

01:31:04.800 There's also classified information like the Merchant case. 0.99

01:31:07.980 There's classified information in the Ryan Ruth case.

01:31:13.380 And Judge Cannon sealed the information on the grounds that it could, quote, harm national security.

01:31:20.880 Yeah. 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?

01:31:36.860 I assume there's probably FISA involved, perhaps, you know, surrounded by informants.

01:31:43.940 So 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?

01:32:00.160 Yeah, 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.

01:32:20.920 And 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.

01:32:45.660 They might have an informant overseas, but that person's life isn't in jeopardy.

01:32:50.900 It's just all chat room stuff.

01:32:52.820 Well, they might also be orchestrating crimes.

01:32:54.800 And there's, yeah, there's major, major scandals that this classified information procedure law has been used to cover up.

01:33:02.720 Just to name a couple, the Pulse nightclub shooting where the shooter's father, Omar Mateem's father, was an FBI informant.

01:33:11.140 The shooter himself may have been an informant, too, and that's according to Trevor Aronson.

01:33:17.660 But classified, the SIPA law was used to cover up information there.

01:33:23.100 The 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.

01:33:35.580 They went there to shoot up the contest, which was like at a local fair, I think. 0.98

01:33:40.040 and they were stopped right away but there was a third guy who was behind them who went to run

01:33:46.420 away uh the cops arrested him but it turns out that that was an undercover agent who were friends

01:33:52.420 who was friends with the you know the supposed terrorist um and also in that case i don't know

01:34:00.280 if it was the same agent or another informant actually told the defense or the the shooters

01:34:05.720 to, quote, tear up Texas.

01:34:07.660 So it was a clear case of provocation.

01:34:10.640 And to top it off,

01:34:12.260 they had guns that were purchased

01:34:14.340 at the Lone Wolf gun store

01:34:16.640 that was involved in Operation Fast and Furious

01:34:20.040 and Pat Con,

01:34:21.840 which was like this undercover operation in the 90s.

01:34:25.080 So that's a really dark one.

01:34:27.820 It's so dark.

01:34:29.240 But what makes the two assassination attempts

01:34:33.100 that you wrote a book about

01:34:35.280 different is that they, I think, changed world history. My suspicion is that they changed world

01:34:41.700 history and that they changed Trump, the president of the United States. So if you, and I know this,

01:34:48.620 this book is in some ways like a list of unanswered questions, but if you could pick

01:34:54.700 some number of top questions, the most pressing questions that the department of justice could

01:35:01.520 answer the trump administration could answer but won't what would they be the first and foremost

01:35:06.680 question i have in my mind is why did this sorry to keep harping on this but why did the secret

01:35:12.000 service sniper wait up to 23 seconds before responding and why does he have contradictory

01:35:18.200 uh testimony and this is the one trump is complimenting in public that's right yeah

01:35:24.320 and so july 14th some you know crooks's body is still on the rooftop chop and susan crabtree

01:35:31.740 reports and she this is like a great reporter she's very deeply sourced in the secret service

01:35:38.060 and she was told that this um the snipers were given instructions that you can't respond to a

01:35:46.540 threat until that threat actually fires their weapons uh this report from crabtree sparks

01:35:52.920 outrage people like that's preposterous how could they have to wait until the threat actually

01:35:57.720 starts shooting until the principal gets killed before they respond and then nuts the secret

01:36:02.480 service denies it says that's not true we they weren't they were not under these instructions at

01:36:07.840 all uh and i almost again total speculation but i you know can safe to say that crabtree was really

01:36:14.780 told this by a legitimate source i think they were almost like trying to float an excuse out there

01:36:20.700 and seeing, like, A-B testing it,

01:36:23.160 seeing if the public would buy this,

01:36:24.980 when the public acted like this is the craziest thing ever,

01:36:28.680 they walked it back,

01:36:30.260 and then we just haven't gotten any good answer,

01:36:33.520 you know, pretty much sense.

01:36:34.560 But that's your number one question,

01:36:35.800 is why did the Secret Service sniper wait 23 seconds

01:36:39.280 after the volleys, two different volleys,

01:36:42.060 eight shots have been fired,

01:36:43.340 and one that hit Trump, three other people killed one,

01:36:46.660 he did not respond.

01:36:48.500 that's the number one question and i would follow it up by asking if that's the number one question

01:36:53.880 why is this the number one guy trump is complimenting praising a year and a half later

01:37:01.200 your guess is as good as mine that's just bizarre it is it's it's incredibly incredibly bizarre i

01:37:07.360 mean i would think this aaron zaloponi uh the local heroic cop who actually shot crooks like

01:37:14.280 if I were Trump, I would make July 13th Aaron Zalapone Day, but he doesn't even acknowledge

01:37:19.140 this guy's existence. I mean, so on one level, it's just kind of sad, a little bit disgusting

01:37:25.720 that he's not honoring the true heroes. But, you know, I think you're suggesting, you know,

01:37:30.380 something more disturbing going on. I'm suggesting a fact pattern, a known fact pattern

01:37:36.280 that has no non-sinister explanation that I can think of. That's all I'm saying.

01:37:41.640 sure i can't and i've i mean trust me i've brought this to a lot of different people like what is

01:37:46.860 this include you know people very knowledgeable people and i've never had one person say well

01:37:53.660 actually what you're missing is this here's why trump shut down the investigation which he did

01:37:59.160 fact obviously but it is also fact i've i've i know it and uh so i've never had any person say

01:38:08.640 you know don't jump to conclusions actually there's a good explanation i still don't see

01:38:13.920 and you just wrote a book on it you don't see one either no absolutely not no um i guess another

01:38:19.620 big unanswered question i have has to do with this seemingly incomplete toxicology report which

01:38:26.980 you know i hesitate to mention this because i i don't know the significance of this but the person

01:38:33.120 who wrote this report, the medical examiner in Pittsburgh, who autopsied crooks, released the

01:38:39.300 body for cremation with fragments and still inside, insisted Zaloponi never hit him, and then

01:38:44.960 either doesn't test certain specimens from crooks or didn't put them in his report. This guy is

01:38:51.960 actually a dual Israeli citizen who was in Israel after October 7th, helping identify the bodies

01:39:01.300 there so you know again actually actually yeah this is in the front page of like the pittsburgh

01:39:08.020 jewish chronicle he's actually pictured he's standing next to a guy named chen kugel who is

01:39:14.560 an israeli and a source of a lot of these dubious claims about beheaded babies um yeah and gold

01:39:22.600 schmidt's standing right next to him i guess he volunteered and went over there to help and again

01:39:27.600 And he is a dual citizen.

01:39:29.300 He is a dual citizen.

01:39:30.500 Yeah, that's correct.

01:39:32.220 And he's the medical examiner who did at best an incomplete job with the autopsy, or of the report anyway, of Crooks.

01:39:43.180 Yeah, that's a hell of a nine or ten month run for his career to go from responding to October 7th to autopsying Crooks.

01:39:53.380 And yeah, again, I'm not necessarily suggesting anything, but because he's such a key player, we do need to know.

01:40:00.880 And he is not the medical examiner that victims, dead people in Butler Township, Pennsylvania, would normally go to.

01:40:11.080 No, not at all.

01:40:12.320 I 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

01:40:19.340 The fireman who was killed at Butler went to the local medical examiner, but Thomas Crooks went to this medical examiner, the dual citizen.

01:40:26.240 Well, 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.

01:40:43.520 So, 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?

01:41:00.020 No, 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.

01:41:16.240 And 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.

01:41:32.420 That's really bonkers. Okay. So those are your top two questions.

01:41:40.640 My top question is why the secrecy? Do you have any theories on that?

01:41:46.240 Just 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.

01:42:09.500 That gets you flagged to law enforcement.

01:42:11.620 So there could be some kind of cover-up telling Mr. Trump, if this is revealed, it'll be the end of the FBI.

01:42:17.780 You can't do this. 0.63

01:42:18.640 You have to keep your mouth shut.

01:42:20.540 It could be something darker.

01:42:21.940 I don't know.

01:42:24.500 Do you expect that you'll be the last guy to look into this?

01:42:30.480 Because the cover-up or the secrecy or the studied lack of curiosity doesn't end at the Justice Department.

01:42:37.800 It extends into the media.

01:42:39.500 It's like, however you feel about Trump, everyone has an opinion.

01:42:44.000 It's just an amazing story.

01:42:46.440 And I just don't know why I'm ending where I began.

01:42:49.700 Why are you the only guy doing this?

01:42:52.240 I 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.

01:42:59.300 And so it's been really puzzling that I don't have much competition, nor do I have much interest.

01:43:05.760 I mean, you're, again, you're one of the only guys keeping this story alive.

01:43:09.780 So I'm hoping that the book, you know, unfortunately, it doesn't have like a big smoking gun.

01:43:16.340 This is the guy who did it, or this is the institution behind it.

01:43:19.980 It is the best and most complete picture of what happened.

01:43:24.740 I'm hoping it could be a starting point for future researchers, people who want to jump

01:43:30.460 on board and and help find out you know some of the answers to these uh bizarre questions we have

01:43:36.380 we'll probably both be long dead when someone you know writes the book um i hope that's wrong

01:43:43.380 but and that's 10 tends to be the way this stuff plays out you know it's 100 years after

01:43:49.020 lusitania and it was like actually there were armaments on the boat the trump assassination

01:43:53.700 plots, what the investigations missed, and why it matters.

01:43:58.800 Ken Silva, thank you very much for doing this.

01:44:01.620 Thanks again.

The Tucker Carlson Show - June 08, 2026

The Attempts on Trump’s Life, Why He Shut Down the Investigations & How It Altered History Forever

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