0:04Ken Silva, thank you very much for doing this. You've written a book on the Trump assassination plots, the two from the summer of 2024, about which there are more unanswered questions than answered questions, and they're so transparently ridiculous, the stories that we have been told.
0:24My first question is, where are all the other books on this topic? Why did this fall to you?
0:30That was my question, too.
0:32And you're actually probably one of the only major media figures that's still keeping the story alive.
0:37So it's a pleasure to talk to you.
0:39But 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.
0:53And the political effects, the political fallout of the event.
0:57It's not really like a forensic investigation.
0:59This is the first of that kind.
1:01Does Zito's book have a conclusion?
1:03Does it reach, does it reach a conclusion about what that was or does she affirm the official story, which is this was a crazed left-wing lone gunman?
1:13Yeah, it's more or less an affirmation of the official story and again, just like the political fallout.
1:19That's more of the book.
1:21She was there that day.
1:22So there is like a autobiographical account of what happened from when she got there.
1:29But 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.
1:38So I'm going to state what I think is the official account of what happened in Butler that day, and then I would like you to just take us through what you know about what happened in Butler.
1:48So the official count is there's this weird kid, local kid who, um, really hates Trump and he's been radicalized probably online. We don't really know because he has no meaningful online profile. He's like the only young man in America who's not online, um, and he's somehow a very good shot and he somehow gets into the one vulnerable place at the event site in Butler Township that gives him a sight line to Trump and nobody notices this because there are just these and accountable holes in security, but it's just amazing.
2:33It's just a failure of.
2:35Security and he takes the shot, he misses, he kills someone in the stands, a fireman, and then he's killed by a U.S.
2:48Government sniper, and he had no accomplices, he's just a crazy person, one of many, and that's all we know, case closed.
2:57And that's bad enough.
2:58But is that a fair representation of, to this day, the story of what happened in Butler?
3:03Uh...
3:04The biggest issue I would take with the official story about just what happened that day is that, um, a lot of people think the secret service sniper actually saved the day.
3:14Um, you know, everybody knows about the slope roof excuse for why they didn't have somebody posted there in the first place, the fact that that building was outside of the ostensible perimeter, even though it was, you know, again, like 150 yards clear line of sight to Trump, but a lot people say, well, at least The Secret Service sniper stopped it from being a lot worse.
3:38In fact, Donald Trump said that a couple of weeks ago after this most recent White House correspondence dinner attack, he's talking about, well, they did a lot better at that event than they did at Butler, although my buddy David saved my life at Butler.
3:55He was, he was the sniper, his name's David King.
3:58And Trump says he responded in 4.2 seconds from 400 yards away.
4:04Neither one of those assertions by Trump are true, which is very bizarre that he doesn't know the details about the attempt on his own life.
4:14In fact, it was a local cop who saved the day.
4:20The alleged would-be assassin crooks fired three well-measured, discreet shots, and Then there's a short pause.
4:30Then he starts rapid firing five shots and then the ninth shot comes immediately after that eighth shot all in the span of five seconds from the local cop on the ground his name is Aaron Zalopony he was a butler esu member and then there's 10 whole seconds that pass by before David King finally puts the final bullet through.
4:54Thomas Crooks fired nine shots?
4:57He fired eight shots and then the ninth shot came from the ground from Saloponi.
5:02I heard eight shots.
5:04So let's just start at the beginning.
5:07Who was Crooks?
5:10That's still an unanswered question.
5:12My book does have the most complete biographical account of crooks, but he's still in aberration.
5:21He almost seemed like he was kind of leading a double life.
5:24All the public information I found out about him paints him as just a really respectable young man, almost, you know, I hate to say it, but like the kind of guy you'd want your son to turn out to be like.
5:39He was a straight-A student in high school, well-liked by his classmates and teachers.
5:46Graduates with a 4.0, goes to a community college for engineering.
5:52While there, one of his projects was actually 3D printing a chessboard and a Rubik's cube that were inscribed with Braille.
6:01His mother is legally blind, so it seemed like a pretty sweet thing to do for his mother.
6:06I got community college speeches where he says one of my favorite things to do is like cook with my family Loved his sister katie crooks And he was planning on going to robert morris university that fall to get his four-year degree That's the public As of when was he planning on going to college?
6:31Oh, that's a great question.
6:32Cause it was actually, uh, I obtained his, uh college emails and I got one from June 14th, 2024, where he's emailing the community college about the status of his diploma.
6:45Cause he had just graduated, but apparently he didn't get actual proof.
6:49And he needed that to go to Robert Morris that fall.
6:52So less than a month before he winds up dead on a rooftop, he's asking about.
6:58The status of his diploma and still making plans to go to university that fall, which is very strange. I just don't know what to make of it.
7:07Now it doesn't sound like a man planning to die, you know?
7:11It certainly doesn't sound like a man planning to die.
7:14It's like the death row inmate asking if he can, you know, save some for later in his final meal.
7:21Does anybody around him later say, yes, he was radical and crazy and violent?
7:27Nobody that knew him, his father, the night of the incident, the ATF responds to the House and they're questioning him. And he said, well, I didn't really know much about Thomas's politics.
7:40He liked to play the contrarian.
7:42He liked whatever side the father and the mother would take.
7:45He would just be devil's advocate and argue the opposite side.
7:50He was a registered Republican, but he made a donation to act blue like the left-wing pack.
7:57On the day of Joe Biden's inauguration.
8:00So 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 candidate, something like that.
8:09But yeah, we don't know for sure.
8:11Probably the best evidence of his political leanings comes from the trove of data that you published a couple of months ago in your documentary about the violent comments and kind of showed his political transformation in 2019 and 2020.
8:26But that was when he was like 16, 17.
8:30So we don't really know what happened those last three, four years of his life.
8:35He started using more encryption, VPNs.
8:39Uh, there's not much of a data trail there.
8:43I did obtain his community college metadata.
8:49Uh, what I did there is FOIA it, um, from the college and they sent me like a big string of jumbled up code, but I had somebody who knew what they were doing kind of decipher it and it showed the actual websites that he was visiting while he was on the community college campus.
9:05It doesn't show the contents of any of his messages or anything, but he visited like a Game of Thrones fan site, he seemed to be a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, twitter.com, reddit.com.
9:21NOTHING!
9:22Very unusual.
9:23I mean, he went to like ar15.com, but that doesn't really tell you that much.
9:29So yeah, he's a total cipher when it comes to the last few years of his life.
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10:33The 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.
10:41But it's fair to say the FBI has a lot information about this guy that's not public.
10:45That's absolutely right.
10:48So when it became apparent last July that the FBI wasn't going to voluntarily release information about Thomas Crooks or the event, the transparency organization Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit to force disclosure.
11:04And 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, a couple of months later, we get another status report saying we found another 30,000.
11:22So now it's up to 75,000 and they started making monthly productions to Judical Watch, but it's like a couple dozen, it's been four months and it's spent a couple dozen pages a piece.
11:36So like 200 in total.
11:39Out of 75,000.
11:40Yeah, so at that rate, we'll all be dead before all the records are produced.
11:47It's pretty egregious.
11:48Which, and also pretty revealing, like what is that, right?
11:51If it's a crime committed by a lone gunman who's deceased, no one else involved in this case at all, then that's the official story, then what would be the motive to hide it?
12:05Yeah. I mean, as controversial as the Epstein files rollout has been, one of the beneficial things that the Justice Department did is just put them all in a word searchable database.
12:16And you'd think they'd be able to do something like that with the Crooks files.
12:20So people could just type in any word and it'll pull all the records with that word on it.
12:26One of Cash Patel's excuses was that, well, Donald Trump is a victim here and he has rights too, so that's why we're not releasing some of this out of respect for him.
12:40But that's not a legal thing.
12:43That's not covered in FOIA.
12:44Of course, they could redact Donald Trump's name, but they can't just say, oh, because Trump's a victim, we're going to comply with FOIA, it's pretty ridiculous.
12:55And of course, no individual, even president, owns the U.S.
12:58Justice system.
12:59Justice is effected on behalf of the entire country.
13:02It's supposed to be a rule of law and- Right, that belongs to the American people. These documents belong to the America people.
13:07The FBI belongs to American people, so that's a nonsensical argument. It's a grotesque argument, actually.
13:14So tell us about that day.
13:16So this guy about whom we know very little, who seems pretty normal, shows up at this Trump rally and what happens?
13:25Yeah, so I guess the story starts 8 a.m. That morning.
13:28There's a secret service site counterpart.
13:31Her name is Dana Dubre.
13:33She shows up and none of her colleagues are there.
13:38And apparently, there's rumors that they had been out drinking late the night before at a Pittsburgh bar called Tequila Cowboy.
13:46So she's kind of upset that her supposed ostensible partner isn't helping her with the setup.
13:54They finally start trickling in around 10 a.m.
13:57And they hold a briefing.
13:58And this is the first kind of weird anomaly is that a Pennsylvania police trooper tried to participate in the Secret Service briefing and they actually kicked him out.
14:09So it seemed pretty insular. We don't know exactly why that is.
14:14So the briefing would be the meeting that law enforcement has at the beginning of the day to talk through what they're going to do and what the potential threats might be.
14:23Yeah, that's exactly right.
14:25And I guess one of the reforms to come out of this whole fiasco is the, now they hold a unified briefing where they let the locals in, but, you know, a little too little, a little too late, um, for that.
14:37So how.
14:40Did Crooks get there? How did he get in?
14:43How did get to this spot?
14:45Like, what do we know about all that?
14:46Uh, he first showed up around 10 AM when they're holding this secret briefing where they're keeping out the locals and the stateys and crooks shows up and apparently he just drives around and kind of cases out the place and he later goes home, uh, to Bethel park, which is about a 45 minute drive.
15:05He lived closer to Pittsburgh, but there's more out in the country.
15:10So, um, yeah, Crooks goes home.
15:12And meanwhile, we have the first security failure at the site before anything even happens.
15:18The counter drone operator, an agent named Eduardo Castro, just can't get his drone detection equipment working.
15:28He's initially by the stage.
15:29He tries to move it.
15:30He thinks it might be some kind of signal issue.
15:33He even calls like a 1-800 number for troubleshooting.
15:37And he doesn't get it working until about 4 20 p.m.
15:42Which is when Crooks finally returned.
15:45Crooks flies a drone over the site for about 11 minutes.
15:50And this is like 3.50 to 4.01.
15:53And then he returns with the drone and then the drone detection equipment, it gets up and working, which is an unfortunate coincidence, I guess.
16:02What does Crooks get at his house, do we know?
16:06Well, he got his rifle, which apparently belonged to him, but his father was in possession of it.
16:15So he asked his dad for his rifle and he goes to a local shop.
16:22He buys some ammunition.
16:23He also bought a ladder that morning.
16:27And I think a lot of people think that he got up on the rooftop on a ladder, which isn't the case.
16:32He actually scaled some air conditioning unit.
16:35And the ladder was found in Bethel Park in the woods later.
16:40So I think what probably happened there is he bought the ladder, he went that morning and cased out the site and realized that he wouldn't need the ladder.
16:48He could use the air conditioning and then just abandon it in the wood.
16:52And like I said, supposedly the rifle belonged to him but the father was possessing it but the ATF would eventually track the rifle to the father.
17:03And the father said that he sold it informally to his son a couple of years ago, but there's no paperwork for that.
17:12So the paperwork shows that the rifle belonged to the father.
17:15And I guess there's a loophole in Pennsylvania state law where you can transfer long guns to Pennsylvania residents can do that with each other without any kind of paperwork.
17:25So we don't know for sure.
17:28I mean, that's the story that he transferred it, but there is no paperwork to that effect. How does How does crooks get a rifle onto the grounds of a Trump event?
17:35It was probably broken down in his backpack.
17:39Yeah, that's, we don't know that for sure. There is a surveillance footage that the FBI is still withholding that would presumably, you know, shed light on some of these details, like there's an ice cream shop North of the AGR building that apparently has footage of crooks actually even scaling the building. But that's just one of like.
18:03Thousands and thousands of records that the FBI has refused to disclose.
18:08Including the footage of crooks training on a local firing range, that might give us insight into how this kid was able to get off the shots that he did.
18:19Yeah, Clariton Sports Club went there 43 times in the span of maybe 10 months.
18:25Uh, I did find with those records that there were four times where he signed in with somebody else at the exact same time and for the exact, uh, same range.
18:37So you could go to the, the pistol club, uh pistol range or long rifle range.
18:42And every time that somebody else signed in at the exact same time, they would go to the same range.
18:47There was even a day where he went to pistol and rifle and this mystery person, it could have been his dad, but the names redacted in the records, so the person that signed in, at the same time also went to the pistol and the rifle.
19:03Another interesting thing I found as far as that goes is again, back to the community college emails, November 9th, 2023.
19:12He actually emails his teacher saying that he's going to be late to class.
19:17And that was the day that he went to the range, presumably with this mystery person and they trained on pistols and rifles and you know, you can go to the range any time Thomas was again, a model student, I think he missed class maybe like three or four times his whole career.
19:37So, uh, I've got questions about. Why it was so important for him to go to the range that he emailed his teacher and said I'm going to be late today Because you were going with someone else, obviously.
19:49Sure, yeah, but you know the deeper question like why why was it urgent that day or what why they needed to go that particular time?
19:57He was at one point in contact with security at the event, correct?
20:06He got a rangefinder through.
20:09Well, he never went through the magnetometers or went through security, which is another weird anomaly is that he registered through an encrypted email to get a ticket to the event, but that he never when inside.
20:24So I don't know what his original plan was.
20:27Again, he might've gone there that morning and realized like, well, shoot, this is easy.
20:32I don't even have to go through security.
20:34Like there's a clear line of sight there.
20:37But yeah, he never went into the perimeter.
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21:46Do we know how long he was there?
21:48He was up on the roof.
21:50Yes. Yeah.
21:51He was, um, up on the roof since about 6 0 3 PM.
21:57And this is actually a pretty bad local security failure.
22:03I do believe it was a mistake and not something intentional.
22:06And I could actually show you, and I'll try to articulate what's going on here, uh, for people just listening.
22:15But...
22:20So this is the AGR building and a local sniper spots him here and the local sniper, Crooks runs off when he's spotted and the sniper says he's going all the way around the building when in fact he went into this alcove and climbed up.
22:38So this like 603, all of local law enforcement is Responding here thinking that he ran all the way around when in fact he went in and up on the rooftop, and that was just one of the few mistakes made by the locals.
22:54603 is when he was first spotted.
22:56Well, that's an interesting question, because the local snipers in that building, there were three in there and one of them left around 420 p.m.
23:09And he texts his buddies inside the building and says, there's this guy sitting out on a parking bench, he's looking up in the building, I think he knows you guys are in there, and just flagging this for your situational awareness.
23:25And.
23:25It was initially reported in the wake of the shooting that that was like the first sighting of crooks.
23:31But then somebody released cell phone footage showing crooks walking on the other side of the site, like over a half mile away.
23:42So the question is like, who did these local snipers really see that they thought was suspicious?
23:50One of them not one of the snipers, but another one of the local cops on the ground.
23:55His name's Chris Copas.
23:56He insists that yes, that really was Crooks that we saw for 26 PM.
24:02I swear it was him, except he was wearing pants instead of shorts.
24:07But obviously, you know, Crooks can't be in two places at one time.
24:12So, uh, there was a lot of false sightings. Um, or I don't know if they were false sightings or not, but, uh another, a Goer said he saw somebody that looked like crooks carrying a long rifle north of the AGR building.
24:28And this would have been captured by that surveillance footage from the ice cream shop.
24:34And the reason I take this sighting seriously is because the rally goer who says he saw this was communicating with a Pennsylvania state police trooper with a body cam.
24:48And so he actually sues to get the footage of the body cam that would have shown this young man open carrying a rifle and he didn't tell anybody about this lawsuit. He like didn't want the attention, but a local newspaper uncovered the lawsuit and found out what he was doing.
25:05And, uh, the upshot of the lawsuit is that the state police said, well, we don't have any footage for you. Like it doesn't exist.
25:12Um, But again, the reason I think that's a legitimate sighting is because he didn't want attention.
25:18He was actually trying to prove his case. He's not just like talking, you know?
25:23So when was the shooting?
25:25What time did he pull the trigger?
25:266-11 p.m.
25:28So, putting aside those possibly false sightings or, you know, God knows what's going on, it's around 5-20 that a local sniper inside the building again sees Crooks.
25:43This time Crooks has a rangefinder.
25:46Now, instead of putting this over the radio, he texts some of his local counterparts including the command center leader.
25:55Butler, ESU commander Edward Lenz, and nothing's really done because I guess they're not checking their phones. It's not until like 540 that people finally see like, oh, this is like the infamous pictures of crooks sitting on a concrete wall by the AGR, said he's lurking around, he has a Change Finder.
26:15And they identified it correctly as a range finder.
26:18That's we've never seen a picture of the rangefinder, but they say they found that in crooks pockets after he was killed.
26:24So yeah, I think that's So if you're trying to protect the life of the principal somebody and someone at the scene has a rangefinder Could there be a clear indication of intent?
26:39And the locals did respond to it accordingly.
26:43The 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.
26:55He talks to a Pennsylvania state police trooper inside the Secret Services Command Center who then tells the command center leader, Jeffrey Burr.
27:06And instead of putting that out over the radios though, Jeffrey Burr then tells the counter drone guy, Castro about it.
27:15Castro calls some agents to go search for it, but they never put it out over their radios. And this by now is like 5.50 PM, about 21 minutes before the shooting.
27:27So we know Crooks is on the roof at 603. What happens between then and 6 11?
27:32Okay.
27:34So yeah, Crooks gets up on the rooftop.
27:37Meanwhile, all the cops are searching north of the building. Like they don't know.
27:43But then a local cop does spot Crooks on the rooftop around 6 0 6 PM says somebody's on the roof.
27:51He seems to be running around.
27:52Again, they still don't what exactly to make of this.
27:55I don't think they even knew it was the guy that had the range finder.
28:01Uh, passed on to the local command center, uh, Edward Lenz.
28:06And he puts it out over channel three at 6 0 8 PM that there's a guy on the rooftop, it's not one of ours, but the problem here is it's the local radios.
28:19And 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.
28:31He never switches over to channel four to inform the actual snipers in the building or his QRF team that was like ready to deploy in response to emergencies instead he Again calls the Secret Service Command Center and here's where things get especially controversial because He said Len says that he calls the PSP trooper in the Secret service center and then they both inform Jeffrey Burr.
29:04About somebody's on the rooftop now.
29:07Burr claims that he never heard this. So I've been 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.
29:25We should point out that Trump's on the stage at this point.
29:27He took the stage at 602, which is exactly.
29:31You know that sighting the crooks where they think he's running around but he goes up top.
29:36So things are getting serious And at some point, people in the crowd beneath Crooks notice him up there.
29:42Yeah, people notice him up there like around 608 and they're watching the locals kind of frantically scramble around seeing how they can get up on the rooftop.
29:55And yeah, it's kind of a spectacle and even some people inside the perimeter start to notice the commotion going on by the AGR.
30:03So then, um, a local cop tries to get on the roof, what happens and when.
30:08Yeah, so while all this is transpiring, Detective Collins, Tyler Collins, is actually at the Butler police station, maybe a mile away.
30:21And he's hearing all this chatter and he's, I guess he's a relatively younger and fitter guy.
30:26So he decides to go assist in the chase.
30:30He drives directly to the AGR building.
30:33And, you know, this is seen on body cam, He has one of his buddies.
30:37Boosts him up to try to get get up on the roof he gets up there he looks he says he saw crooks crooks swivels his rifle at tyler collins collins drops down and now he says the person on the roof is armed now now we're probably talking like 30 25 seconds before the shooting Inflation makes credit card statements particularly scary.
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32:06So one of the most interesting, I mean, it's minor, but it's interesting facts of this is that Crooks is on the roof, he's surprised by a local cop, aims his rifle at him, then pivots and starts firing within 30 seconds at over 100 yards and hits Trump's ear, famously.
32:25That's pretty, that's like biathlon level shooting in that there's clearly lots of adrenaline.
32:31It's a quick turn and you see all these people on TV.
32:34Oh, that an easy shot.
32:35That's not an easy for a man filled with adrenaline.
32:38He's just been confronted by a police officer. Like that's someone who is either like remarkably cool under pressure or who's done a lot of training.
32:48Yeah. Crooks, uh, from what I can tell was a really good shot.
32:53Um, this wasn't his training at Clariton sports club.
32:57He also took a pistol course at, I think it's called like the Keystone range out in Pennsylvania.
33:03And there was one other guy who was with the class in the class with Crooks.
33:08He's called by the FBI a couple of days later when, um, you know, the FBI finds that Crooks was training here.
33:15This guy gave an interview and said that Crooks once shot a target in the same spot with a nine millimeter so many times that he blew a hole out of the target.
33:25So yeah, Crooks was really good.
33:27And you know, I've heard you talk on your previous podcast about this with Sean Davis.
33:32Yeah, that's an incredibly difficult shot under that pressure situation where you see a local cop, you know coming up to get you and you have to focus And, you know, keep your breathing under control.
33:46And, and he came within millimeters.
33:47I'm really struck by that.
33:50So then he sets in place, he's prone, he lying, and he gets off eight shots.
33:57What happens to those bullets?
33:59The first one grazes Trump's ear, the second one flies over Trump's shoulder, and this is the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken by Doug Mills where Trump's beginning to bring his hand up to his ear, which is really strong evidence that this was like a legitimate shooting and that the bullets were real.
34:22Unless you want to make the argument that the New York Times are in on the conspiracy that this is staged.
34:28Uh, but yeah, it shows the bullet and it also shows that Trump doesn't have any kind of squib in his hand that, you know, for the fake blood.
34:36Um, but in any event, yeah.
34:37So the second one whizzes by his shoulder and I'm pretty sure that's the one that hits David Dutch, uh, who was one of the wounded rallygoers.
34:47Um, it actually, I think split his liver.
34:50It was a pretty, pretty nasty shot.
34:53Uh, the third one, I'm not sure about it was the second volley.
34:58Of five that one of them hits the firefighter Corey Comparatori and then Jim Copenhaver who generously wrote the forward to my book.
35:09He got shot twice and one of those bullets is still in his body.
35:14It's like too close to the spine.
35:16I think he's in his mid-80s now, so they can't really extract it.
35:20So four people are hit by bullets, including Trump.
35:23Yeah.
35:24Uh, yeah, that's, that that's right. Initially, this is weird, uh, Ronnie Jackson, who was once Trump's physician. Now he's in Congress.
35:32I think he initially said that like my son was grazed or something, but we haven't heard anything about that. I, I really don't know what happened there, but we know for sure of these, uh these four people.
35:45The man who was killed, who is he?
35:49Corey Comparatori.
35:50Yeah, he was a firefighter, a family man, a girl dad. He had two girls, a loving wife, Helen.
36:00By all accounts, just like an upstanding member of the community, the kind of guy you'd want to be friends with, the kind of guy that you'd entrust with your life.
36:08Just a real tragedy that we lost him.
36:10So that, there's been a lot of speculation about this being staged.
36:15It's fake.
36:17There are, you know, theological arguments for this that come out of the Old Testament.
36:24Apparently there's a part that suggests, you know the pricking of the ear is necessary for a prophecy to be fulfilled, etc., etc. There's a lot to talk about this.
36:35What's your view of that?
36:37Yeah, the same people that make that Biblical argument or prophecy argument also says that he wasn't really shot, so I don't really understand that if his ear has to be pricked, but he didn't get shot in the ear.
36:50It's hard to really argue with the people who think it's fake because I haven't really heard a coherent theory for how it possibly could have been staged.
36:59I mean, as we've discussed, the local response to the would be assassin was very much.
37:07Legitimate.
37:09The bullets were real, the blood was real, the bodies were real.
37:12This would require the complicity of the Biden FBI, Biden's secret service.
37:19Keep in mind that he's under investigation at the time or facing prosecutions.
37:25I'm sure he's surrounded by FBI informants.
37:27They're probably listening to his calls. I don't know when he would have been able to plan something like this.
37:34And then One of my favorite pieces of evidence that I found in the transcripts of Congress interviewing the local cops is that his personal physician was actually left behind in the chaos when he was shuttled off the stage and taken to Butler Hospital.
37:55So he had to have been examined by a Butler doctor who then, because his personal position was at the farm show, they take the Butler doctor on Trump Force One.
38:06To the next site.
38:07I think it was New Jersey.
38:09So I would imagine that if this was a staged event, it would have been something like he keeps his own doctor close to his side.
38:18They go to Butler Hospital.
38:20They say, no, nobody's allowed to see Trump's ear for national security reasons.
38:25But that wasn't the case.
38:26It was actually a local doctor who initially treated him and he would have had to been in on it too if this What?
38:31Well there are three other people shot so I mean it's hard to if it was fake you know no one told them yeah right yeah so okay I think that the evidence suggests it was entirely real someone was trying to kill Trump how did the Secret Service respond They really didn't respond.
38:52Again, we can go more into the failures leading up to it.
38:56I mentioned Jeffrey Burr, who by the way, he's the command center leader.
39:03And by the, he's also the special agent in charge of the Buffalo field office, which I found a little bit strange.
39:11I don't know much about the inner workings of the secret service, but it was kind of bizarre to me that this 25 year veteran, or 25 year veteran.
39:19Charge of an entire jurisdiction.
39:22He's now just a poststander manning the radios on the ground for a rally outside of his jurisdiction.
39:32I think the argument was there was that they were short staffed and needed help and he's a senior guy who knows what he's doing. But of course, he makes a lot of the key mistakes by never putting anything out over the radio. Another Secret Service blunder was when...
39:50They did call the secret service counter sniper response agent who is like the agent on the ground that the snipers can say, hey, go check this out and he'll go run over there.
40:04And then, you know, he's kind of like the eyes and ears of the snipes on the rooftops.
40:09He goes to search for crooks when they're notified of the rangefinder and he's actually turned away by another agent.
40:19Uh, which is really inexplicable.
40:21And this agent, uh, said like, Oh, we have the AGR building covered.
40:25There's people searching for the suspicious person, go to the south of the stage and look there, which didn't make any sense because everybody knew the action was happening by the A.G.R building.
40:38Um, but again, the granddaddy of them all is the fact that the secret service sniper waited up to 23 seconds before responding.
40:47I say 23 seconds because we have footage of him looking through his scope before the shooting starts.
40:57He actually had, you know, he's looking through the scopes. I don't know if he had crooks a sight or not.
41:03But he was looking in that direction.
41:04He was looking in that direction and yeah, I listen to your.
41:06And this is after eight shots have been fired.
41:09This is before any shooting started.
41:11Right, but I mean he, the FBI sniper, waited long enough that Crooks fired eight times before he was taken out.
41:19Yeah. And the eight shots happened in five seconds.
41:22He waited an entire, another 10 seconds before he put that final 10th shot through, uh, Crooks and you know, I could give him the benefit of the doubt.
41:36Maybe he wasn't prepared.
41:37Uh, 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.
41:53The sniper initially tells the house task force that he didn't see crooks until after all the shooting had stopped.
42:04He said he was like on his binoculars.
42:07The shooting started.
42:08By the time he finds crooks in his scope, crooks had already fired eight times.
42:14Then he tells a similar story to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, but a staffer I don't know who this is, but the staffer is heroic.
42:24He pulls out, this is almost like a Perry Mason moment.
42:27He pulls the sniper's own notes that they apparently got as part of a production from the Secret Service.
42:34And he says, well, you know, David, your own notes after the incident says that you saw Crooks quote, low crawling with an AR-15 into position and that you had seen him before, before the shooting started.
42:48I actually, I have.
42:50The exact notes, this is what the sniper, David King, wrote immediately after the incident, quote, I and my teammates positioned ourselves to observe that area that everyone was moving to.
43:01I noticed an individual white male, white or gray shirt, low crawling on the roof.
43:07I noticed a AR style weapon in his hands.
43:11As I moved to observe through my rifle scope, I heard weapon fire.
43:16I immediately got a laser rangefinder distance from my weapon mounted rangefinder.
43:21I looked up to see my engagement scope, looked back through the scope, observed the individual shooting and engaged.
43:28So there's a major contradiction there. I'm not necessarily suggesting that he waited on purpose.
43:36I think, 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 wanna admit that he did.
43:48Where is that sniper now, David King?
43:51Uh, he's still, uh, I, I believe he's still on Trump's detail because again, after the white house correspondence, dinner, uh attack, Trump goes, I tell David, I love you, David, like acting like David's his hero.
44:06Um, and by the way, that's how we were able to identify him.
44:10Uh, He had, he is on local police body cam footage with his patch that says D King.
44:17And then Trump says, I think he first told Miranda Devine about a year ago that his name is David.
44:24So Trump almost kind of outed him.
44:26I searched David King's Secret Service.
44:30A 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.
44:40And reporter Susan Crabtree has since corroborated that identity, the David King name.
44:47But he still works there.
44:48Again, yeah, I think Trump expresses appreciation for him.
44:53Was anyone fired?
44:56Kimberly Cheadle resigned, the former director resigned under bipartisan pressure.
45:03Uh, there were five or six suspensions that all came.
45:07Most of them came from the local Pittsburgh field office, even though, um, they, they were kind of thrown under the bus in my opinion, but no, nobody was actually fired.
45:19Nobody was fired.
45:21Unless you count Cheadle, but that's, uh, again, she resigned and she has, I don't know if she still has secret service protection, but she was given, uh tax fair taxpayer funded security after she was fired, uh I guess, you know, for the threats or whatever. Cause people thought she was in on it.
45:39So what happened next?
45:42Trump gets shot, he leaves, he goes to New Jersey with the local doctor.
45:46What happens to Crooks's body?
45:50Uh, that's a great question.
45:52Crooks's body was actually left on the rooftop until 6 AM the next morning.
45:59And instead of taking him to the Butler County coroner, he shipped to Allegheny County.
46:04Um, I guess we've gotten conflicting explanations.
46:08Uh, I Guess Alleghenie County is where Pittsburgh is.
46:11They have more advanced facilities, but then I also heard they took Corey comparator's body to Alleghanie County.
46:18Because the press was at the Butler County Coroner's office and they wanted to avoid the press attention.
46:25Brooks was shot once, correct?
46:28I think the local cop hit him first.
46:32Yeah, I definitely think, uh, the local cop hit them cause you keep in mind.
46:37Crook stopped shooting after the local cop fired, uh there's some speculation that, uh Aaron's all a pony might've hit the buttstock of the gun and shattered it, uh but the thing is that the X-ray of crook shows that there's bullet fragments still in his shoulder.
46:59Ballistic experts have told me that that 300 Win Mag final shot wouldn't have fragmented like that.
47:07The Secret Services 300 Win mag round went through Crooks' neck, out, back in the shoulder. Then it fragments into two pieces and makes two re-exit wounds.
47:19They actually recovered those fragments. It's this material on the shoulder.
47:24That was left in there, 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?
47:34How quickly after this event was his body cremated.
47:39I believe it was released for cremation a week or two after and we didn't find out about this until Representative Clay Higgins went to go look at the body and they said, well, you know, Mr. Higgens, the body doesn't exist, they gave it to the funeral home.
47:57How would you assess the thoroughness of the autopsy?
48:01Well, the medical examiner who did the autopsy insists that Aaron Zalepone 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, you know, because he stopped shooting after Zalopone fired.
48:24So there's that, there's the releasing the body, I would argue prematurely.
48:31But 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 my first big scoop in late 2024 when I got these documents.
48:49When I found out that the body was taken to Allegheny County, I requested it from them and they said, well, Uh, we did the autopsy and the toxicology, but this is Butler County jurisdiction.
49:02I then asked Butler County for it and they denied it too.
49:05It was almost like they're pointing at each other playing shell games with the evidence.
49:10I went through a couple of months long, uh, legal battle to get these documents and then, um, actually got them in early October and put them up on our website, headline USA.
49:22Uh, so that was a big scoop, but I didn't think much of the documents.
49:28They didn't really seem to show any scandal to me at first until a Twitter sleuth notified me a couple months later and said, if you looked at this toxicology report, it seems incomplete.
49:41And I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about.
49:45So.
49:46The 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.
50:03And now these are numbered one through eight.
50:05And now if you look at the findings, You have one the heart blood one two and then it's four, five, and six.
50:16But there's three specimens that Goldschmidt and the medical examiner collected and either didn't test or didn't include in the report.
50:26That's the bile, one, two of blood, and the envelope of hair.
50:32So 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? I don't know.
50:44Has he explained, the medical examiner explained why he didn't test or there's no record of him testing?
50:51No, 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.
51:05Um, and that it 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 lone gunman, crazy person killed by heroic secret service sniper.
51:19No accomplices.
51:20There's no reason to hide anything.
51:22Do you have any idea why the FBI is continuing to hide information about this case?
51:29Well, I hope you- I was hoping you could tell me, I- I- I have some theories about it.
51:34I mean, Joe Kent said it's directly related to, he believes directly related to our war in Iran, you know, can't prove that.
51:43But I, but just to establish clearly that they are hiding it, you've gone presumably to the Justice Department to ask for this information.
51:52What answer do you get?
51:53In fact, I did a FOIA request for all the 302s in this case, the day after Cash Patel said about a year ago that the investigation is closed, crooks acted alone, nothing more to see here.
52:06So, oh, okay, great.
52:07The investigation's closed.
52:08Now they can comply with FOIA and make all this stuff public.
52:12I filed my FOIA and get a response about a month later saying, we're not giving you these records because in fact, the investigation's still open.
52:21So it seems to me as they're playing legal games with these documents, they've sensed Cash Patel has changed his tune and said, well, the investigation is open, but not active.
52:33And in my mind, that's just an excuse they're using to avoid disclosure.
52:42So at the root of all of this is the question of Trump and his, you know, he was the target of the assassination attempt, which you have said that I agree with. He was real. Like someone tried to kill him, missed, killed somebody else.
52:56But if the president wanted this investigation to continue, it would continue, correct?
53:04Presumably, yeah, maybe in his first administration, you could argue that he didn't have total control over the deep state or whatever. But now, yeah.
53:12He's got loyalists installed in most of the key positions.
53:16So, yeah I don't see any possible excuse for why.
53:21Right. So it's not, it's not just that, you know, cash Patel's incompetent or damn Bon Gino's incompetant.
53:28This is a statement of fact, Trump shut down the investigation into Butler. So he shut down the investigation into his own attempted murder.
53:37And I think that's the most shocking facts to come out of this Trump term, because I don't see a non-sinister explanation for that, but maybe you have one.
53:50No, I mean, it's just total speculation, but sometimes I wonder, did they stumble onto some sort of like MK Ultra program?
53:58I don't know.
53:59Is this, are they threatening Trump's family?
54:01Um, it does.
54:03And this is why, like, I don't get too mad when people think he's faking it because he's so tight lipped. You know, you can't blame people for speculating.
54:13I think that's exactly right.
54:14It doesn't make any sense at all.
54:17Are there any pieces of evidence that you have seen that suggests that crooks acted in concert with anybody else?
54:26I've seen nothing explicit.
54:30No, there is, there's some unanswered questions about what happened on July 13th, 2024 that might point to others being involved on the scene.
54:42Of course we have the false sightings of crooks.
54:45Like if they saw somebody that looked like him, there were numerous such cases.
54:50So I have questions about that.
54:52And then, uh, the bomb squad Allegheny County bomb squad initially responded to a van that was parked about a half mile away from the site and the series of events, um, raise raises questions in my mind.
55:07Um, you know, Crooks is dead up on the rooftop.
55:10They find a transponder in his pocket that they believe might be used to set off IEDs.
55:17They evacuate the rooftop and after that point, the locals are never involved in the crime scene again. It's totally controlled by the FBI.
55:27They're searching underneath, inside the building with bomb sniffing dogs.
55:34And 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.
55:44They find a bicycle with a backpack.
55:47That wasn't Crooks's, but they initially assumed it was.
55:52And most interestingly is this van.
55:55They searched the van with the bomb squad and tow it away.
55:57And we haven't heard anything about this since.
56:01And this is before they searched Crooks' car, which is parked, it was parked right on the street by the AGR building.
56:08So I have questions of why they searched the Van.
56:12Uh... Before the car i did a foil on the van and was told that yes as it was part of the investigation but uh... Again i was denied actual records about it Is there proof that crooks constructed bombs or a bomb?
56:25Yeah, they eventually found bombs in the trunk of his Hyundai Elantra 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.
56:45That led to the search of the car supposedly.
56:48But again, I don't know why it's van or house car But we do know he made bombs.
56:55Yeah, we know for sure.
56:56And in fact, one of the community college emails, the only one that showed any possible evidence that he was planning this is him ordering racing fuel from a company.
57:08Um, I think almost everything he did would have had to have been on his encrypted emails, but this one order he places through his community college email that does show him in January, 2024, ordering a racing fuel.
57:23Which is used to make like for, uh, info bombs of the same material that McVeigh allegedly use in OKC.
57:31Uh, so like, yeah, a little, little tiny miniature info bombs found in his trunk and in the.
57:37But we have no idea why he made these bombs or what he planned to do with them.
57:41Yeah, my speculation is that again, he probably planned an attack that day. Maybe again, I can't get inside of his mind, but maybe he showed up thinking that I'm going to do a bombing and then realized that, wait, no, I could do a shooting instead.
57:56I don't know. He might've had multiple possible plans because the bombs weren't even set to go off in the trunk.
58:05Like even if he pressed the button on his transponder, he would have had to flip.
58:09Switches to activate the bombs inside of the trunk beforehand.
58:13So yeah, I don't know really what to make of that either Has his Google search history ever been released?
58:19Uh, other than the limited release, uh, well that you got from Well, I didn't release anything.
58:26I got that from a source who got it himself outside the federal government.
58:33Yeah.
58:34No, nothing.
58:35We've gotten assertions, like he apparently Googled how far was Oswald away from Kennedy.
58:42He Googled RNC, DNC, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, but nothing that would really shine light on the details that matter.
58:51Did they claim he was transgender too?
58:54Uh, no, they never claimed he was transgender.
58:56I think, uh, there were rumors about that.
59:00At one point the dad asked his son if he was gay, but that's just cause he didn't have a girlfriend, but no, this wasn't a trans type thing.
59:08Okay, shortly after there was widely publicized claims that Iran had something to do with this.
59:20Were those real?
59:21What was that?
59:22Yeah, I saw you actually debating Ted Cruz about this like a year ago saying there's no evidence that Iran the government of Iran.
59:31Yeah, the government of Iran tried to kill Trump and, and Ted Cruz is like, actually, yeah, they hired two hit men to take out Trump in 2024.
59:42Well, those hit men actually turned out to be undercover FBI agents.
59:46And there was never any serious threat to Trump.
59:48It appears to be totally controlled sting operations.
59:53You know, at the very least, if not an actual plot to manufacture a phony case about Iran.
60:01So what happened here is a Pakistani man named Asif Mershan was arrested July 12th, 2024, the day before Butler.
60:12And when the case was announced in August, everybody automatically assumed that it had to have been linked.
60:20Somehow.
60:21But if you look at the details, again, it's a totally controlled sting operation.
60:27They were actually monitoring Merchant before he even entered the country.
60:33And I think some intelligence may have been passed through Israel. That's what the New York Times reported a couple months ago, and so did Max Blumenthal.
60:44Information was passed through Israel. What does that mean?
60:47I, uh, yeah.
60:47I don't information about the Iranian plot against Trump came in part from Israel The New York Times specifically reports that the initial intelligence came from Israel.
60:59But the thing is, is these, I would argue again, phony cases have been, there's been years of them.
61:06The first such case was John Bolton in 2022, where the DOJ announced that Iran tried to assassinate him.
61:15And it turns out it was just some guy in Iran talking to an FBI informant the The informant took photos of Bolden's house to try to pretend to be like conducting surveillance.
61:28Bolden had full knowledge and was consenting to all this.
61:33They announced an indictment, but of course the defendants in Iran, so it's kind of like the Russia indictments where they never have to prove this case.
61:42It's almost just like a big press release.
61:45So, I mean, presumably considering that Trump launched a war against Iran in February of this year, if there was evidence that Iran was involved in this assassination attempt, the Department of Justice would be pursuing it vigorously and publicizing it in order to backfill a motive for this war.
62:03People have used the Merchant case as evidence that yes, there was some sort of threat, but you got to measure a threat by both intent and capacity.
62:14And here there was absolutely no capacity.
62:17Like I said, they let Merchant into the country in April 2024 on purpose as part of the sting operation.
62:25A reporter named John Solomon actually had sources tell him that this was similar.
62:30To Operation Fast and Furious, where the ATF was allowing illegal gun purchases to supposedly track where these guns were going.
62:40Apparently the Biden administration was doing that with humans, where they're like letting terrorists into the country on purpose to supposedly track where they are going. So Murchance led into the country and a leader at a local mosque.
62:57Connects him to a driver because he doesn't speak English, doesn't have a car, doesn't any means.
63:03So supposedly a friendly guy is driving him around just because that's part of their culture.
63:08They're trying to help each other.
63:10But this guy turned out to be an FBI informant and he's actually a Afghanistan, an Afghan who served in Afghanistan as a translator for the U S military.
63:25And the story about how he became an informant is unclear because in the DOJ's indictment, they say that he heard what Marchant was plotting and he went to the Feds and flipped and became an informent.
63:40And I could see your face, you'd probably find that dubious.
63:44We found out in court that the official story changed, supposedly now he says that he's driving Marchant around.
63:54He sees unmarked cars following them everywhere they go and he's worried because of his experience in Afghanistan that maybe some Taliban is out to get him or something like that so he happens to have the card of an FBI agent in his pocket who supposedly he had like a friend who died a few years earlier and he got a card from an FBI Agent from then he calls the FBI and says I think I don't know, the Taliban's out to get me or something.
64:24And they supposedly fill him in on the operation saying, no, we're monitoring Murchant because we think he's dangerous.
64:32Will you work for us?
64:33Will you just kind of be our eyes and ears and go along with whatever he says?
64:40So again, this is the official story that came out in court.
64:44He agrees to become an informant.
64:47Him and Murchat have a meeting.
64:49In a hotel room in early June that's wired for surveillance.
64:57And keep in mind that Merchant has not proposed anything related to the assassination or otherwise illegal at this point, but there are already full-fledged surveillance of him.
65:10He sketches out some plan that looks like a 10-year-old would have drawn it about, yeah, this is the target, how will it die?
65:18Again, this is all in Urdu, so we just have like an English translation of what was said.
65:24And I think like the vape, like he had a vape that he put down and like this is the target.
65:28So again, not really sophisticated stuff.
65:32The informant then introduces him to two undercover FBI agents, the guys that Ted Cruz was arguing to you that were hitmen. The hitmen, the agents, take Murchant to a strip club.
65:48And they have some kind of vague conversation about possibly either assassinating politicians, stealing government documents or staging like a protest.
66:01Marshant tells them, you know, visit me in Pakistan in September and we'll give you the, the official target.
66:11They want the undercover FBI agents want him to make a down payment to show that he's serious and he is trying to get $5,000, trying to scrounge it up from his family. Initially, he's turned down by his family in Pakistan and eventually finds, I guess, cousins in Tanzania who are willing to front him $5000 through the Huala system.
66:39Where he can pick it up in New York, but borrow on it in Tanzania.
66:43So the FBI informant actually helps him do this.
66:47The informant picks up the $5,000, gives it to Marchant, who then gives it to the FBI agents.
66:55Like instead of the informant just giving it, you could see they're really trying to set them up.
66:59And then it's when he is trying to leave the country on July 12th that he's arrested.
67:07He's not Iranian, by the way, just to restate, he's Pakistani.
67:11Yeah, that's right. He supposedly has a, um, uh, family in Iran and, uh we should, you know, steal man the other side and when he's arrested, he was interrogated.
67:23And he did say that, yes, uh I was working for Iran to try to do something.
67:30He wouldn't admit to the Trump assassination plot.
67:32So we could definitely, it's not like as egregious as the Whitmer plot for the supposed government kidnap plot, uh, where they're just.
67:41They weren't even looking to do anything, and it was totally provoked by the FBI.
67:47You 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 true and no relationship to Butler that we know of.
68:06Uh, no, no.
68:07I've heard Joe Kent ask that question. Like, well, was Murchant in touch with crooks?
68:13Um, he didn't even speak English.
68:16So, and I don't think he was playing with a full deck of cards.
68:20Um, so I, yeah, he definitely wasn't.
68:24Joe Kent's also asked, was the informant in touch with Crooks?
68:27And I think that's a far more interesting question.
68:30Uh, but we'll probably never find out because there's classified information in the Merchant case, over 1.6 million pieces of evidence that not even Merchant was allowed to look at.
68:46There's something called the Classified Information Procedures Act, which says, well, if discovery is classified, not even the defendant can get it.
68:54So it's not a real trial.
68:55No, it was a total show trial.
68:58And bizarrely again, they trot out all this dubious evidence, but on the last day, Merchant's attorney allows him to testify.
69:07And again, he says that, yes, uh, I was working for Iran.
69:14So he does think that.
69:17And I guess he said he was acting under duress.
69:20So, but it was pretty much just an admission of guilt.
69:23It's something that he should have said and during like the plea deal proceedings and not, you know, on the last day of his trial.
69:31And so, yeah, I have a hard, I don't know really what to make of that.
69:36It seems like Legal malpractice, to be frank. Don't let him say that.
69:39Yeah, well it's not uncommon to see defendants in cases like this represented by lawyers who are acting against their interests, which is interesting, I've seen it a number of times.
69:48Yeah.
69:48And so that may be part of the whole performance, but I don't know.
69:54And just to steal me, I guess I've argued with people online about this and they say, well, even though he didn't have any capacity, we knew because of what he says, that he thinks he was working for Iran, uh, that Iran was plotting something, so why not let him into the country, uh just to make this case and stick it to Iran and you know, there's a couple of responses to that, I think foremost it's like, while the FBI is constructing Fomenting this case they let crooks and ryan ruth totally slip under their noses um, but even More importantly, I don't think anybody's really realized that is this case
70:36Arguably is what almost got trump killed um because The uh, the reason that the secret service snipers were sent to butler was because of a so-called iranian threat uh the head of Trump's detail, Sean Curran, was briefed about an Iranian threat and he's getting briefed on the Mershon case a week before Butler and they decide to send Secret Service snipers to Butler as a result.
71:06It was the first time that a former president has ever had Secret Service sniper protection and the first that year that the Trump campaign had Secret Service snipers and I would argue that If that phony Iranian threat never sparked, you know, the notion to send secret service snipers to Butler, that it would have been local snipers up on those barns behind Trump, instead of the guys who waited 15 seconds to respond.
71:33And I could almost guarantee you that the local response would have done better because the locals, they would have and on the local radios.
71:42That's another thing about the Secret Service snipers at Butler's.
71:45They did not pick up the local radios that were.
71:48Where's Sean Curran now?
71:50He's actually the director of the entire agency, which again is a totally baffling decision.
71:56So that's kind of the context that piques my interest.
72:00I mean, I do think whenever you, I mean you've been a reporter for a long time, you know that when you press down on one specific story, you find anomalies, things are impossible to explain.
72:09You also find coincidences that are just bizarre, but maybe they really are coincidences.
72:14But big picture, it's truly crazy what we're looking at.
72:20So here you have Trump, two days before the Republican convention, he has not yet chosen a running mate.
72:27Everyone in, everyone in, up for consideration is a neocon except for JD Vance, okay?
72:34So, and so that's when the assassination attempt takes place before Trump has chosen a running mate, a vice president.
72:41The second this shooting happens, you see a bunch of high profile endorsements of Trump, and shortly after all of his legal problems go away, and ultimately in very short order, Trump becomes not just a neokon, but like the leading neokan in the world.
72:55Way more of a neocon than like Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol ever were.
73:00And so you see a complete change in Trump and in official Washington's view of Trump, like people who didn't like Trump endorsed Trump after this.
73:11And then you see Trump appoint the people who effectively allowed this to happen by their incompetence at best to positions of greater authority.
73:20And then, you see, Trump shut down the investigation into the shooting.
73:24According to reports Am I? Heh heh.
73:26Like, what the hell?
73:28You're exactly right.
73:29And according to reporter Susan Crabtree, I guess Sean Curran is a favorite of Suzy Wiles, which I don't know why Suzy Wiles would have the power to keep or promote him to be Secret Service Director after he was pretty much.
73:45But it's about Trump though.
73:46I mean, it's like.
73:47If you had bodyguards who were supposed to protect you with their lives, if necessary, and they allowed, again, by their incompetence at best, somebody to hit you in the ear with a two, two, three round, you'd say, these guys have to go. Like you failed.
74:03Your one job is to keep a sniper from shooting me at me and you failed, but instead of doing that, Trump promotes the guy.
74:12I have no good answer for you as far as that goes.
74:15I mean- It's formatted by it.
74:17Especially considering what happened after, where Trump gets effortlessly elected and then becomes this crazed neocon, he becomes the one thing he said he hated.
74:28There's a total change in Trump.
74:30It is worth mentioning that Susie Wiles and Sean Curran were both involved in what I would argue like a Psi-op on Trump to make him think the Iranians were out to get him.
74:40And this is after the Ryan Routh event.
74:43They actually tell Trump that the Iranian's have smuggled missiles into the country and they want to shoot down your plane, which there's absolutely no evidence for that.
74:52I mean no actual documentation, no witnesses, no arrests were made.
74:56Is that word true?
74:58The war would have started a lot earlier, but in any event, they actually put Trump on a decoy plane with I remember.
75:06Yeah, they used Steve Witkoff's plane and him, Witkooff and Suzy Wiles would ride in Witkof's plane while the staff were serving his decoys on Trump Force One, which I'm not sure how they would feel about that.
75:21But I mean, it was pretty crazy.
75:23Like 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, like a threat was out there.
75:32Like it really This seemed like a total psy-op to me.
75:36Bizarre.
75:36Preparatory to this war, of course.
75:39I would think so, yeah.
75:41I mean, you can make the argument that Trump was already an Iranian hawk, but this certainly didn't help.
75:49You can't make the argument that Trump was in favor of a regime change war with Iran since he was explicitly against a regime-change war with Iran, like, for a decade.
75:59Yeah, that's certainly what he said.
76:02Wasn't there rumors that he was about to launch a war in the last month of like his...
76:06Of the first term? First presidency, yeah. Well, those, yeah, I mean, those were more than rumors that he was under a lot of pressure to do that, but the fact is he didn't, and then he spent his campaign in the 2024 race arguing against regime change, were attacking people who were in favor of it, and then, he launched it, and not just launched it but became this kind of enthusiastic tool of the government of Israel.
76:32So, I means, maybe those are all organic Changes of heart.
76:37Uh, but he's never explained how or why, and the demarcation, the change point, the pivot seems to be the shooting.
76:46Yeah.
76:47Who's Ryan Ruth?
76:49Ryan Ruth was the second would-be assassin and this happened on September 15th, 2024.
76:56Just over two months after Butler, Trump's golfing on his Palm Beach golf course.
77:03He's on the fifth hole and the Secret Service is doing an advance on the next hole and an agent spots Ruth hiding in the bushes with an SKS rifle. The agent initially thinks this is a homeless guy until he sees a rifle pointing right at him.
77:20He shoots five times at like point blank range about from five or 10 feet away.
77:25Misses all five times, but causes Ruth to flee.
77:30Yeah. Yeah, I've, you know.
77:33He missed him five times at close range?
77:36And presumably the Secret Service officer had a rifle too.
77:40It's not like he pulled out his pistol or anything because he's on the advance, probably armed and ready.
77:46So, wow, I didn't know that.
77:48Yeah, another security failure.
77:51Well, an embarrassing one, too.
77:52Yeah, I guess he gets credit for at least not hesitating.
77:55But again, the gun's pointed at him.
77:59But he did cause Ryan to flee.
78:04Ryan's caught 45 minutes later in another.
78:07He actually got away?
78:08Yeah. Yeah.
78:09And so this isn't the Secret Service that caught him either.
78:11And he could have been at large, this could have been another like Tyler Robinson situation with the Kirk case where he gets in to his daughter's nesonic stare and speeds off.
78:22And it was actually a witness who heard the gunshots and took down Roos license plate and gives it to the Palm Beach sheriffs who then put out a warning, be out on be on the lookout for this Xterra and Ruth is pulled over on the I-95 in another county.
78:42And this is- No way.
78:44Yeah. Yes. Again, like he had an escape plan.
78:48Well, how did the Secret Service agent allow, if he's that close to him, why didn't he chase him down?
78:55That's, we've got even less details about the secret services actions at Palm Beach than we do, um, from Butler.
79:04So I, I don't know, I, don't have an answer to that question.
79:07So then what happens?
79:08So they arrest the guy.
79:10Here'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 due to this unexpected arrest and a lady slams into the backed up traffic with her three-year-old daughter in the back seat.
79:27The daughter was put into a coma And has permanent brain damage as a result.
79:32So Regardless how you feel about Trump or anything else like it's it's very sad and a lot of people Actually think Ruth is kind of like a clownish buffoonish guy But I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for him because this narcissism led to this little girl's permanent brain damage So what do we know about Ryan Ruth?
79:53We know a lot more about him than we do about crooks.
79:56I mean, by like midnight of that day, people had already dug up articles about him being in Ukraine and recruiting foreign fighters.
80:08The FBI holds a press conference the next day and says that we actually did receive a tip about him in 2019 that he was a felon in possession of a firearm.
80:22We didn't act on that tip, but we're trying to be forthcoming and, you know, we'll do better in the future, I guess, is what they were trying to present.
80:31But it's actually far, far worse than that.
80:36One of the things I did, because I live close to where Ruth grew up in Greensboro, I pulled local police reports about these criminal incidents from the early 2000s.
80:46It turns out that he was actually on the ATS radar since at least 2002.
80:51He was a construction worker and he owned a construction firm, he had gotten into a dispute with illegal immigrants who he was hiring.
81:04Apparently he wasn't paying them.
81:06He threatens one with a 410 shotgun.
81:10They wrestle the shotgun away from him. He gets in his truck and escapes and almost runs over these workers of his.
81:18They The the workers call the police and the police respond and then they find that Ruth was like possessed in possession of dynamite illegally and They put him in jail while he's in jail. Uh, somehow he gets a cell phone in there.
81:36He calls, uh, somebody who was helping him run the business and says, get rid of the dynamite we have on the other sites because, uh they're about to probably search those sites too, uh prison snitch tells the police about this.
81:52He gets charged with having that dynamite too.
81:56He gets let out on bail about six months later.
82:00He's in a police, uh, he gets pulled over, he's got a machine gun in his passenger seat.
82:07He runs away from the police, gets into a standoff.
82:10Um, and finally, after a couple hours, he was arrested again.
82:15And the upshot of that is that after all that he was only, uh given probation.
82:21Uh, but this case was reported to the ATF, which declined to take any action.
82:26How did that guy wind up, I think you said recruiting foreign fighters in Ukraine?
82:32Yeah.
82:33So can you recruit foreign fighters in Ukraine without the knowledge and participation of US government authorities?
82:40Well, he certainly had knowledge of it. Uh, and again, yeah, career criminal, just to put a bow on that he's charged again with a scheme of paying crackheads to steal, uh, stuff from construction sites gets caught in 2010 with like $30,000 worth of stolen equipment.
83:01That triggers a probation violation from 2002, but that gets waived the next day and then he gets another round of probation.
83:10So very bizarre of how his cases were handled.
83:15But to answer your question, I don't know how he became so politically radicalized.
83:22In 2016, he was a Trump supporter.
83:242019, he briefly jumped on the Tulsi Gabbard bandwagon.
83:29And then when Putin invades, apparently he felt like, you know, he had to stand up for global freedom or democracy or something like that.
83:38So he winds down his construction business, takes a flight to Poland, tries to cross the border and volunteer to serve in the international Legion.
83:50He's a 58 year old construction worker with no combat experience.
83:54So they say, no, we can't really make use of you.
83:57So he turns to recruiting foreign fighters, as you say.
84:04Little interesting factoid in his self-published book, which is still available on Amazon.
84:09He said his best partner, quote, best partner in this venture was an Israeli guy.
84:14I was never able to track down who that partner was.
84:19This is all so crazy.
84:20Yeah, it is, it's absolutely crazy.
84:21But if you're, I mean, if you've got an extensive criminal record for violent crimes and you wind up in Poland trying to join the Ukrainian foreign legion and then recruiting foreign fighters like CIA knows because they're running Ukraine and the war, they know you exist to their, I'm mean, of course.
84:41Yeah. And he was in an Azov battalion commercial, which of course Azof was sponsored by the CIA.
84:47The Nazi battalion.
84:48Yeah. The Nazi battalion.
84:50Um, he was flagged by multiple people.
84:53At one point, I think I counted seven federal or international agencies that were aware of what he was doing because a travel nurse, I think her name is like Chelsea Walsh, initially reported him to the FBI, the state department and customs and said, Hey, this guy's got really dangerous rhetoric and he's doing sketch sketchy things.
85:18He was reported to Interpol.
85:21A former CIA officer named Sarah Adams flagged him, too.
85:24So of course the CIA was aware.
85:28And this State Department actually opened up an investigation for him violating international arms trafficking regulations.
85:36Not that he was trafficking in actual arms, but that also covers the human fighter element of it.
85:43So there was actually an open State Department investigation at the time. Of the September 2024 assassination attempt.
85:50So in September of 2024, Trump was telling me and everybody else that I'm going to end this war between Russia and Ukraine and I can do it.
85:58I can't do it in one day.
85:59And I know Putin and I know Zelensky and I can do this.
86:03This happens on his golf course, fast forward now almost two years and Trump has done nothing to end the war and in fact has kept it going with American tax dollars to this day. We're lying about it, but that's a fact. And That's like a big change.
86:21No, yeah another broken promise The guy who is in an Azov battalion commercial tries to kill Trump with an SKS rifle, and then lo and behold, all of a sudden, Trump is for the Ukraine war.
86:35It's bizarre.
86:36I don't think Ryan was explicitly told to do this.
86:40Uh, cause keep in mind, he was put on trial and he actually represented himself.
86:46And I think at any time he could have blurted out, well, Hey, you know, the FBI told me or whatever.
86:52I think it's a little more subtle.
86:53I did talk to a lot of people who knew him in Ukraine and I think he was very easy to be influenced.
87:01Uh, he was around a lot of virulent anti-Trump people.
87:05At one point, I'm talking to a guy who knew him.
87:08This guy thinks like the Russia P-tapes are real.
87:11Hey, he goes off on a tangent to me about how he wants to punch JD Vance in the face.
87:15So it's like these type of turbo, turbo liberals were like Ruth's friends over there. And moreover, this isn't like your wine drinking aunt that hates Trump. These are more high status people.
87:27Live. They come from money.
87:29They have state department connections.
87:31Ruth probably thought like, oh, these are really important people.
87:34I could be a hero.
87:36They hate Trump. I could save the day by doing this.
87:39Uh, that said the biggest anomaly I have that suggests something darker is the fact that Ruth had been travel or been camping at the golf course for about 11 hours before the shooting actually happened.
87:56And if you read the house task force, final report, Trump actually made a last minute decision to go golfing.
88:05And the secret service was informed at 2 a.m.
88:09And look at the state search warrant. It says that according to geolocation data pings, Ruth showed up at like 2 30 a.
88:17M.
88:17No way.
88:19And that, yeah, that's.
88:20Are you serious?
88:21I'm absolutely serious 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.?
88:31That was never explained.
88:33Actually, Ruth represented himself and the trial was a disaster. So we didn't get any helpful information.
88:40I mean, during his opening statement, at one point, he goes off on a tangent about like the importance of human rights and democracy.
88:47The judge says, Mr. Ruth, this has nothing to do with your case.
88:50If you keep doing this, you're going to forfeit your own opening statement. He says, you know, yes, Your Honor.
88:57Immediately delves right back into the same tangent, and he forfeits his opening statement.
89:01So it was a real shit show is that, there's also classified information like the Merchant case, there's classified information in the Ryan Ruth case, and Judge Cannon sealed the information on the grounds that it could quote, harm national security.
89:20Now, why would a multiple convicted felon construction worker who tries to murder the Republican nominee have classified national security-related intelligence anywhere near him?
89:36I assume there's probably FISA involved, perhaps, you know, surrounded by informants. So just to...
89:44Go back to the question of the class of information.
89:48I'm just, I'm Just baffled by this.
89:51What could that possibly, why would Ryan Ruth intersect?
89:55You said Cicid FISA.
89:56I'm not sure what that means.
89:57Can you explain that a little more?
89:59Yeah, sure.
90:01So again, like the Marchant 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.
90:20And I think the SEPA law was passed the late 70s and at the time there was very select usage of it.
90:29It was still like 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.
90:45They might have an informant overseas, but that person's life isn't in jeopardy.
90:50It's just all chat room stuff.
90:51They might also be orchestrating crimes And there's major, major scandals that this classified information procedure law has been used to cover up.
91:02Just to name a couple, the Pulse nightclub shooting where the shooter's father, Omar Mateem's father was an FBI informant, the shooter himself may have been an informant too, and that's according to Trevor Aronson.
91:17But classified, the SIPA law was used to 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.
91:35They went there to shoot up the contest, which was like at a local fair, I think.
91:40And they were stopped right away, but there was a third guy who was behind them who went to run away, the cops arrested him, but it turns out that that was an undercover.
91:50Agent who are friends who was friends with the you know, the supposed terrorist and And also in that case, I don't know if it was the same agent or another informant actually told the shooters to quote, tear up Texas.
92:06So it was a clear case of provocation.
92:10And to top it off, they had guns that were purchased at the lone wolf gun store that was involved in Operation Fast and Furious and Pat Con, which was like this undercover operation in the 90s.
92:24So that's that's a really dark one.
92:26It's so dark, but what makes the two assassination attempts that you wrote a book about different is that they, I think, changed world history.
92:39My suspicion is that the changed world history and that they changed Trump.
92:44The President of the United States.
92:46So if you, and I know this book is in some ways like a list of unanswered questions, but if you could pick some number of top questions, the most pressing questions that the Department of Justice could answer, the Trump administration could answer but won't, what would they be?
93:05First and foremost question I have in my mind is why did this sorry to keep harping on this? But why did the Secret Service sniper wait?
93:13Up to 23 seconds before responding.
93:16Why does he have contradictory?
93:18Testimony And this is the one Trump is complimenting in public.
93:22That's right.
93:23Yeah.
93:24And so July 14th, some, you know, Crooks' body is still on the rooftop chop and Susan Crabtree reports and she, this is like a great reporter. She's very deeply sourced in the secret service.
93:38And she was told that the, um, the snipers were given instructions that you can't respond to a threat until that threat actually fires their weapons.
93:48This report from Crabtree sparks outrage.
93:52People are like, that's preposterous.
93:54How could they have to wait until the threat actually starts shooting?
93:57Until the principal gets killed before they respond.
93:59Yeah. And then the secret service denies it says that's not true.
94:04They were not under these instructions at all.
94:08And again, total speculation, but safe to say that Crabtree was really told this by a legitimate source.
94:16I think they were almost like trying to float an excuse out there and seeing like AB testing and seeing if the public would buy this when the public acted like this is the craziest thing ever. They walked it back.
94:29And then we just haven't gotten any good, uh, answer, you know, pretty much.
94:33But that's your number one question is why did the Secret Service sniper wait 23 seconds after the volleys two different volleyes eight shots have been fired and one that hit Trump three other people killed one he did not respond.
94:49That's the number one question and I would follow it up by asking if that's the number one question why is this the number one guy Trump is complimenting praising a year and a half later.
95:01Your guess is as good as mine.
95:02I mean, that's just bizarre.
95:03It is. It's incredibly, incredibly bizarre.
95:06I mean, I don't think this Aaron Zalopony, the local heroic cop who actually shot crooks, like if I were Trump, I would make July 13th, Aaron's Zalapony day, but he doesn't even acknowledge this guy's existence.
95:19I mean, so on one level, it's just kind of sad and a little bit disgusting that he's not honoring the true heroes. But, you know, I think you're suggesting, you know something more disturbing going on.
95:31I'm suggesting a known fact pattern that has no non-sinister explanation that I can think of.
95:40That's all I'm saying.
95:42I mean, trust me, I've brought this to a lot of different people, like, what is this?
95:49Very knowledgeable people.
95:51And I've never had one person say, well, actually, what you're missing is this.
95:55Here's why Trump shut down the investigation, which he did, fact.
96:00Obviously, but it is also fact.
96:02I've I've, I know it and So I've never had any person say, you know, don't jump to conclusions actually there's a good explanation I still don't see and you just wrote a book on it. You don't say one either No, absolutely not.
96:17No.
96:18Another big unanswered question I have has to do with this seemingly incomplete toxicology report, which I hesitate to mention this because I don't know the significance of this, but the person who wrote this report, the medical examiner in Pittsburgh who autopsied crooks, released the body for cremation with fragments and still side, insisted Zalopony never hit him.
96:43Then either doesn't test certain specimens from crooks or didn't put them in his report.
96:50This guy is actually a dual Israeli citizen who was in Israel after October 7th, helping identify the bodies there.
97:01So, you know, again, actually, actually. Yeah.
97:04This is in the front page of like the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.
97:08He's actually pictured.
97:10He's standing next to a guy named Chen Kugel.
97:13Who is an Israeli and a source of a lot of these dubious claims about beheaded babies.
97:21And Goldschmidt's standing right next to him. I guess he volunteered and went over there to help.
97:26And again, I'm not he is a dual citizen.
97:28He is a dual citizen.
97:29Yeah, that's correct.
97:31And he's the medical examiner who did at best an incomplete job with the autopsy, or of the report anyway, of Crooks.
97:42Yeah, that's a hell of a 9 or 10 month run for his career to go from, you know, responding to October 7th to autopsying crooks.
97:53And yeah, again, I'm not necessarily suggesting anything, but because he's such a key player, we do need to know.
97:59And he is not the medical examiner that victims, dead people in Butler Township, Pennsylvania would normally go to.
98:10Uh... No not at all i mean again the excuse was that they had more advanced facilities but then they do this kind of run of the mill autopsies and talk to the fire So the fireman who was killed at Butler went to the local medical examiner, but Thomas Crooks went to this medical exam, or the dual citizen.
98:25Well, actually, Corey Comparatory was taken to Allegheny County as well, but they've got contradictory excuses where they say they took Corey there to avoid the press attention at the Butler office.
98:37And then Thomas was supposedly sent there for the more advanced facilities.
98:44The facilities that allowed him to be cremated with the fragments still in him and didn't list the testing of his hair.
98:55That's really, really interesting.
98:56And he has not spoken to you, this medical examiner.
98:59No, he hasn't.
99:00He did testify at an open hearing where, uh, Clay Higgins pressed him.
99:06Uh, Clay Higgens, you know, say what you will about him, but I think he's been pretty good on this story.
99:10He's the only guy in government who's emphasized Aaron Zalopony's heroics and Higgings is trying to press Goldschmidt about like, how could you possibly say that, um, Zalapony didn't hit anything and, uh Goldschmitt just insisted.
99:26The Secret Service was the only person who shot crooks that day.
99:32That's really bonkers.
99:34Um, okay.
99:35So those are your top two questions.
99:40My top question is why the secrecy?
99:43Do you have any theories on that?
99:46Just total speculation.
99:48Um, you know, I do think Crooks was probably almost certainly manipulated, possibly in contact with the feds, you know, based on these violent comments that you disclosed a few, uh, months ago, you know, openly calling for assassinating politicians on YouTube, that gets you flagged to law enforcement.
100:11So there could be some kind of cover up telling like, Mr. Trump, if this is revealed.
100:15It'll be the end of the FBI.
100:17You can't do this.
100:17You have to keep your mouth shut.
100:20Could be something darker.
100:21I don't know.
100:24Do you expect that you'll be like the last guy to look into this?
100:29Cause that, cause the, the coverup or the secrecy or the studied lack of curiosity doesn't sort of end at the justice department, it extends into the media, like what is this?
100:39Like, however you feel about Trump, everyone has an opinion.
100:43It's just an amazing story.
100:45And I just don't know why I'm ending where I began.
100:48Why are you the only guy doing this?
100:51I thought, yeah, I thought that was probably one of the biggest stories to happen in the last five years, you know, outside of the wars and things like that.
100:58And so it's been really puzzling that I don't have much competition nor do I have much interest.
101:05I mean, you're again, you are one of the only guys keeping the story alive. So I'm hoping that the book, you know, unfortunately, it doesn't have like a big smoking gun.
101:15This is the guy who did it or this is the institution behind it is the best in most.
101:21Complete picture of what happened. I'm hoping it could be a starting point for future researchers, people who want to jump on board and help find out, you know, some of the answers to these bizarre questions we have.
101:36We'll probably both be long dead when someone, you know, writes the book.
101:41I hope that's wrong, but that's tends to be the way this stuff plays out.
101:47You know, it's a hundred years after the Lusitania and it was like, actually there were armaments on the boat.
101:51The Trump assassination plots, what the investigations missed and why it matters.
101:58Ken Silva, thank you very much for doing this.
102:00Thanks again.
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