Transcript of The Attempts on Trump’s Life, Why He Shut Down the Investigations & How It Altered History Forever New

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Ken Silva, thank you very much for doing this. So you've written a book on the Trump assassination plots, uh, the two from the summer of 2024, uh, about which there are more unanswered questions than answered questions. And they're so transparently ridiculous, the stories that we have been told, um, that it— my first question is, what— where are all the other books on this topic? Why did this fall to you?

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, uh, yeah, there were a couple books published, um, 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. It's not really like a forensic investigation. This is the, the first of that kind.

Does Zito's book have a conclusion? Does 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?

Yeah, it's more or less an affirmation of the official story. And again, just like the political fallout, that's, that's more of the book. Uh, she was there that day, so there is like a bi— uh, autobiographical account of what happened, you know, from when she got there. But Uh, it doesn't go into like the details about what happened over on the AGR building or the security failures or who, who Thomas Crooks was.

So 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 that day. So the official account is there's this weird kid, local kid, who, um, really hates Trump 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. 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 sightline to Trump, and nobody notices this because there are just these unaccountable holes in security. It's just amazing. It's just a failure of security. And he takes the shot, he misses, he kills someone in the stands, a fireman, and then he's killed by a US government sniper. And he had no accomplices. He's just a crazy person, one of many, and that's all we know. Case closed.

And that's bad enough.

Is it? But is that a fair representation of the— to this day, the story of what happened in Butler?

Uh, the biggest issue I would take with the official story about just what happened that day is that a lot of people think the Secret Service sniper actually saved the day. Um, you 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 of people say, well, at least the Secret Service sniper stopped it from being a lot worse. In fact, Donald Trump said that a couple weeks ago after this most recent White House Correspondents' 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. He was— he's the sniper. His name's David King. And Trump says he responded in 4.2 seconds from 400 yards away. Uh, neither 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. In fact, it was a local cop who saved the day.

It was the alleged would-be assassin. Crooks fired 3 well-measured, discreet shots, and then there's a short pause, and then he starts rapid firing 5 shots. And then the 9th shot comes immediately after that 8th shot. All in the span of 5 seconds, uh, from the local cop on the ground. His name's 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 Crooks.

Thomas Crooks fired 9 shots.

He fired 8 shots, and then the 9th shot came from the ground, uh, from Zalopony.

Fired 8 shots. Yeah, so let's, let's just start at the beginning. Um, who was Crooks?

Well, that's still an unanswered question. My book does have the most complete, uh, biographical account of Crooks, um, but he's still an aberration. He almost seemed like he was kind of leading a double life. Uh, all 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. He was a straight-A student in high school, well-liked by his classmates and teachers, graduates with a 4.0, goes to a community college for engineering. While there, one of his projects was actually 3D printing a chessboard and a Rubik's Cube that were inscribed with Braille, and his mother's legally blind, so it seemed like a pretty sweet thing to do for his mother. I 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, um, and he was planning on going to Robert Morris University that fall to get his 4-year degree. Uh, that's the public-facing.

As of when was he planning on going to college?

Well, that's a great question because 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 because he had just graduated, but apparently he didn't get actual proof and he needed that to go to Robert Morris that fall. So less than a month before he winds up dead on a rooftop, he's asking about the 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. Now, it doesn't sound like a man planning to die, you know.

It certainly doesn't sound like a man planning to die. It's like the death row inmate asking if he can, you know, save some for later. His final meal. Um, does anybody around him later say, yes, he was radical and crazy and violent?

Nobody that knew him. His father, uh, 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. He liked to play the contrarian. 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. Uh, he was a registered Republican, but he made a donation to ActBlue, like the left-wing PAC, on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration. 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. But, uh, yeah, we don't know for sure. Probably the best evidence of his political leanings comes from the trove of data that you published a couple months ago in your documentary about, you know, the violent comments and kind of showed his political transformation in 2019 and 2020. But that was when he was like 16, 17. So we don't really know what happened those last 3, 4 years of his life. He started using more encryption, VPNs,, there's not much of a data trail there.

I did obtain his community college metadata. Uh, 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. It doesn't show the contents of any of his messages or anything. But, you know, he voted— he visited like a Game of Thrones fan site. He seemed to be a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Twitter.com, Reddit.com, nothing very unusual. I mean, he went to like AR15.com, but that doesn't really tell you that much. So yeah, he's a total cipher when it comes to the last few years of his life.

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

Uh, that's absolutely right. So 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. 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. A couple of months later, we get another status report saying we found another 30,000. So now it's up to 75,000 And they started making monthly productions to Judicial Watch, but it's like a couple dozen. It's been 4 months and it's been a couple dozen pages apiece. So like 200 in total out of 75,000. Yeah. So at that rate, we'll all be dead before all the records are produced. It's pretty egregious, which—

and also pretty revealing. Like, what is that? Right? If the lone— if it's a crime committed by a lone gunman who's deceased, no one else involved in this case at all, then, then that's the official story. Then what would be the motive to hide it?

Yeah, 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. And you'd think they'd be able to do something like that with the Crooks Files so people could just type in any word and it'll pull all the records with, you know, that word on it. You know, one of Kash 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. But that's not— that's not a legal thing. Like, that's not covered in FOIA. Of course, they could redact Donald Trump's name, But they can't just say, oh, because Trump's a victim, we're not gonna comply with FOIA. It's pretty ridiculous.

And of course, no individual, even president, owns the U.S. justice system. Justice is effected on behalf of the entire country. It's supposed to be rule of law, and right, that belongs to the American people. These documents belong to the American people. The FBI belongs to the American people. So that's like, it's a nonsensical, uh, argument. It's a grotesque argument, actually. So, um, tell us about that day. So this guy about whom we know very little, who seems pretty normal, shows up at this Trump rally, and what happens?

Yeah, so I guess the story starts 8 AM that morning. There's a Secret Service site counterpart, her name's Dana Dubré. She shows up and none of her colleagues are there, and apparently there's rumors that they had been out drinking late the night before at a Pittsburgh bar called Tequila Cowboy. So she's kind of upset that her supposable ostensible partner isn't helping her with the setup. They finally start trickling in around 10 a.m. and they hold a briefing. And 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. So, uh, it seemed pretty insular. We don't know exactly why that is.

So the briefing would be the, 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.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I guess one of the reforms to come out of this whole fiasco is they 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.

So how did Crooks get there? How did he get in? How did he get to this spot? Like, what do we know about all that?

Uh, he first showed up around 10 AM when they're holding this secret briefing where they're keeping out the locals in the statees. And Crooks shows up, and apparently he just drives around and kind of cases out the place, and he later goes home, to Bethel Park, which is about a 45-minute drive. He lived closer to Pittsburgh, Butler's more out in the country. So, um, yeah, Crooks goes home, uh, and meanwhile we have the first security failure at the site before anything even happens. The counter-drone operator, an agent named Eduardo Castro, uh, just can't get his drone detection equipment working. Uh, he's initially by the stage. He tries to move it. He thinks it might be some kind of signal issue. Uh, he even calls like a 1-800 number for troubleshooting, and he doesn't get it working until about 4:20 PM, which is when Crooks finally returned. Uh, Crooks flies a drone over the site for about 11 minutes, and this is like 3:50 to 4:01. And then he returns with the drone, and then the drone detection equipment gets up and working, which is, uh, an unfortunate coincidence, I guess.

What does Crooks, uh, get at his house? Do we know?

Uh, well, he got his rifle, which apparently belonged to him, but his father was in possession of it. So he asked his dad for his rifle, and, uh, he goes to a local shop. He buys some ammunition. Uh, he also bought a ladder that morning. And I think a lot of people think that he got up on the rooftop on a ladder, which isn't the case. He actually scaled some air conditioning, uh, unit and the ladder was found in Bethel Park in the woods later. So, uh, 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. He could use the air conditioning and then just abandoned it in the woods. And like I said, uh, supposedly the rifle belonged to him, but the father was possessing it. But, uh, the ATF would eventually track the rifle to the father, and the father said that he, uh, sold it informally to his son a couple years ago, but there's no paperwork for that. So the paperwork shows that the rifle belonged to the father, and I guess there's a loophole in Pennsylvania a state law where you can transfer long guns.

Uh, two Pennsylvania residents can do that with each other without any kind of paperwork. So we don't know for sure. I mean, that's the story that he transferred it, but there's no paperwork to that.

How does Crooks get a rifle onto the grounds of a Trump event?

It was probably broken down in his backpack. Yeah, that's— we don't know that for sure. There is, uh, surveillance footage that the FBI's 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, the thousands and thousands of records that the FBI has refused to disclose, including the footage of Crooks training on a, on a local firing range that might give us insight into how this kid was able to get off the shots that he did?

Yeah. Claretown Sports Club. He went there 43 times in the span of maybe 10 months. I did find with those records that there were 4 times where he signed in with somebody else at the exact same time and for the exact same range. So you could go to either the pistol club, pistol range, or long rifle range. And every time that somebody else signed in at the exact same time, they would go to the same range. There was even a day where he went to pistol and rifle and this mystery person, it could have been his dad, but the name's redacted in the records. So the person that signed in at the same time also went to the pistol and rifle. Another interesting thing I found as far as that goes is, is again, back to the community college emails. November 9th, 2023, he actually emails his teacher saying that he's going to be late to class. And 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 anytime. Thomas was, again, a model student.

I think he missed class maybe like 3 or 4 times his whole career. So, 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 he was going with someone else, obviously. Sure, yeah. But you know, the deeper question, like, why, why was it urgent that day, or what, you know, why they needed to go that particular time?

He was, uh, at one point like in contact with security at the event, correct? Uh, he, he got a rangefinder through.

Well, he never went through the mag— magnetometers, uh, 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 then he never went through, uh, went inside. So I don't know what his original plan was. Again, he might have gone there that morning and realized like, well, shoot, this is easy. I don't even have to go through security. Like, there's a clear line of sight there. Um, but yeah, he never went into the perimeter.

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He gets up on the roof. Do we know how long he was there?

He was up on the roof?

Yes.

Yeah, he was up on the roof since about 6:03 PM. And this is actually a pretty bad local security failure. I do believe it was a mistake and not something intentional. And I could actually show you and I'll try to articulate what's going on here., for people just listening. But so this is the AGR building, and a local sniper spots him here. And the local sniper, uh, Crooks runs off when he's spotted, and the local sniper says he's going all the way around the building when in fact he went into this alcove and climbed up. So this is like 6:03. 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.

6:03 is when he was first spotted.

Well, that's an interesting question because the local snipers in that building, there were 3 in there and one of them left around 4:20 PM., and 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. And it was initially reported in the wake of the shooting that that was like the first sighting of Crooks. But then somebody released, um, cell phone footage showing Crooks walking on the other side of the site, like over a half mile away. So the question is like, who did these local snipers really see that they thought was suspicious? Uh, one of them, not one of the snipers, but another one of the local cops on the ground, his name's Chris Kopis. He insists that yes, that really was Crooks that we saw at 4:26 PM. I swear it was him, except He was wearing pants instead of shorts. But obviously, you know, Crooks can't be at two places at one time. So there was a lot of false sightings, or I don't know if they were false sightings or not.

But another rallygoer said he saw somebody that looked like Crooks carrying a long rifle north of the AGR building. And this would have been captured by that surveillance footage from the ice cream shop. And the reason I take, take this sighting seriously is because the rallygoer who says he saw this was communicating with a Pennsylvania State Police trooper with a body cam. And 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. And 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. But again, the reason I think that's a legitimate sighting is because he didn't want attention. He was actually trying to prove his case. He's not just like talking, you know.

So, uh, when was the shooting? What time did he pull the trigger?

Uh, 6:11 PM. Uh, so putting aside those possibly false sightings, or, you know, God knows what's going on, uh, it's around 5:20 that a local sniper inside the building again sees Crooks. This time Crooks has a rangefinder. Now, instead of putting this over the radio, he texts, uh, some of his local counterparts, including the command center leader, uh, Butler ESU Commander Edward Lenz. And nothing's really done because I guess they're not checking their phones. It's not until like 5:40 that people finally see like, oh, this is like the infamous pictures of, uh, Crooks sitting on a concrete wall by the AGR. Yeah, uh, said he's lurking around, he has a rangefinder.

And they identified it correctly as a rangefinder?

That's— we've never seen a picture of the rangefinder, but they say they found that in Crooks's pockets after he was killed.

So Yeah, I think that's, uh, so if you're trying to protect the life of the principal, somebody, and someone at the scene has a rangefinder, I mean, could there be a clear indication of intent?

And the locals did respond to it, um, accordingly. The local, uh, command center leader Edward Lenz says that he called the Secret Service command center, who, by the way, they're separate, command centers, which is a huge issue. He talks to a Pennsylvania State Police trooper inside the Secret Service command center who then tells the command center leader, uh, Jeffrey Burr. And instead of putting that out over the radios though, Jeffrey Burr then tells, uh, the counter-drone guy Castro about it. Castro calls, uh, some agents to go search for it, but they never put it out over the radios. And this By now it's like 5:50 PM, about 21 minutes before the shooting.

So we know Crooks is on the roof at 6:03. What happens between then and 6:11?

Okay, so yeah, Crooks gets up on the rooftop. Meanwhile, all the cops are searching north of the building, like they don't know, uh, but then a local cop does spot Crooks on the rooftop around 6:06 PM. Says somebody's on the roof. He seems to be running around again. They still don't know what exactly to make of this. They, I don't think they even knew it was the guy that had the rangefinder. Um, this gets, uh, passed on to the local command center, uh, Edward Lenz, and he puts it out over Channel 3 at 6:08 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, 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. He never switches over to Channel 4 to inform the actual snipers in the building or his QRF team that was like ready to deploy in response to emergencies. Uh, instead, he again calls the Secret Service Command Center. Uh, 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 about somebody's on the rooftop now.

Burr claims that he never heard this. 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. You know, we should point out that Trump's on the stage at this point. He took the stage at 6:02, which is exactly, you know, that sighting of Crooks where they think he's running around, but he goes up top. So Things are getting serious now.

And at some point, people in the crowd beneath Crooks notice him up there.

Yeah, people notice him up there like around 6:08, and they're watching the locals, um, kind of frantically scramble around seeing how they can get up on the rooftop. And yeah, it's kind of a spectacle. And even some people inside the perimeter start to notice, you know, the commotion going on by the AGR.

So then, um, a local cop tries to get on the roof. What happens and when?

Yeah. So while all this is transpiring, Detective Collins, Tyler Collins, is actually at the Butler Police Station, maybe a mile away. And he's hearing all this chatter and he's— I guess he's a relatively younger and fitter guy. So he decides to go assist in the chase. He drives directly to the AGR building. And, you know, this is seen on body cam. He has one of his buddies boost 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.

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At over 100 yards and hits Trump's ear famously. That's like biathlon-level shooting in that there's clearly lots of adrenaline. It's a quick turn, and you see all these people on TV, oh, that's an easy shot. That's not an easy shot for a man filled with adrenaline who's just been confronted by a police officer. That's someone who is either remarkably cool under pressure or who's done a lot of training.

Yeah, Crooks, uh, from what I can tell, was a really good shot. Um, this wasn't his training at Clariton Sports Club. He also took a pistol course at, I think it's called like the Keystone Range out in Pennsylvania. And there was one other guy who was with the class, in the class with Crooks. He's called by the FBI a couple days later when, um, you know, the FBI finds that Crooks was training here. And this guy gave an interview and said that Crooks once shot a target in the same spot with a 9mm so many times that he blew a hole out of the target. So, yeah, Crooks was really good. And, you know, I've heard you talk on your previous podcast about this with Sean Davis. Yeah, 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. And, and yeah, he came within millimeters.

Really struck by that. Um, so then he sets in place, he's prone, he's lying, and, and he gets off 8 shots. What happens to those bullets?

Uh, the first one grazes Trump's ear. Uh, the second one flies over Trump's shoulder, and this is the, um, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken by Doug Mills where, uh, 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. Um, unless you want to make the argument that the New York Times are in on the conspiracy that this is staged. Uh, 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. But in any event, yeah. So the second one whizzes by his shoulder, and I'm pretty sure that's the one that hits David Dutch, who is one of the wounded rallygoers. It actually, I think, split his liver. It was a pretty, pretty nasty shot. The third one, I'm not sure about. It was the second volley of 5 that one of them hits the firefighter, Cory Comparatore. And then Jim Copenhaver, who generously wrote the foreword to my book, he got shot twice and one of those bullets is still in his body.

It's like too close to the spine. I think he's in his mid-80s now, so they can't really extract it.

So 4 people are hit by bullets, including Trump.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Initially, this is weird. Ronnie Jackson, who was once Trump's physician, now he's in Congress. I 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, the, these 4 people.

The man who was killed, who was he?

Uh, Cory Comparatore. Uh, yeah, he was, uh, you know, a firefighter, a family man, a, a girl dad. He had 2 girls. A loving wife, Helen. Uh, by 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 you'd, uh, entrust with your life. Just a real tragedy that we lost him.

So that— um, there's been a lot of speculation about this being staged, it's fake. There are, you know, theological arguments for this that come out of the Old Testament. Apparently there's a part that suggests, you know, the pricking of the ear is necessary for a prophecy to be fulfilled, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of talk about this. What's your view of that?

Yeah, 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 then, but he didn't get shot in the ear. Um, it'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. I mean, as we've discussed, the local response to the would-be assassin was very much legitimate. Uh, the bullets were real, the blood was real, the bodies were real. This would require the complicity of the Biden FBI, Biden Secret Service, Keep in mind that he's under investigation at the time or facing prosecutions. I'm sure he's surrounded by FBI informants. They're probably listening to his calls. I don't know when he would have been able to plan something like this. And then one of my favorite pieces of evidence that I found in the transcripts of interview— Congress interviewing the local cops. Is that his, um, personal physician was actually left behind in the chaos, uh, when he was shuttled off the stage and taken to Butler Hospital. So he had to have been examined by a Butler doctor, who then, because his personal physician was at the farm show, they take the Butler doctor on Trump Force One to the next site.

I think it was New Jersey. So I would imagine that if this was a staged event it would have been something like, he keeps the low— he keeps his own doctor close to his side. They go to Butler Hospital, they say no, nobody's allowed to see Trump's ear for national security reasons. Uh, but that wasn't the case. It was actually a local doctor who initially treated him, and he would have had to been in on it too if this was—

well, there are 3 other people 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, 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. Again, there, um, we can go more into the failures leading up to it. I mentioned, uh, Jeffrey Burr, who, by the way, he's the command center leader, and by the way, he's also the special agent in charge of the Buffalo field office, which I found a little bit strange. I don't know much about the inner workings of the Secret Service, but it was kind of bizarre to me that this 25-year-old veteran, or 25-year veteran, in charge of an entire jurisdiction, he's now just a post stander out manning the radios, um, on the ground for a rally outside of his jurisdiction. I 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, uh, he makes a lot of the key mistakes by never putting anything out over the radio. Another Secret Service blunder was when they 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 And then, you know, he's kind of like the eyes and ears of the snipers on the rooftops.

He goes to search for Crooks when they're notified of the rangefinder, and he's actually turned away by another agent, which is really inexplicable. And this agent said like, oh, we have the AGR building covered. There'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 AGR building. Um, but again, the granddaddy of them all is the fact that the Secret Service sniper waited up to 23 seconds before responding. And I say 23 seconds because we have footage of him looking through his scope, uh, before the shooting starts. Uh, he actually had Uh, you know, he's looking through his scopes. I don't know if he had Crooks in his sight or not, but he was looking in that direction. He was looking in that direction.

And yeah, I listened to you, and this is after 8 shots have been fired.

This is before any shooting started, right?

But I mean, he— the FBI sniper waited long enough that Crooks fired 8 times before he was taken out.

Yeah, and the 8 shots happened in 5 seconds. He waited an entire another 10 seconds before he put that final 10th shot through Crooks. And, you know, I could give him the benefit of the doubt. 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. The sniper initially tells the House task force that he didn't see Crooks until after all the shooting had stopped. He said he was like on his binoculars. The shooting started. By the time he finds Crooks in his scope, Crooks had already fired 8 times. Then he tells a similar story to the Senate Homeland Security Committee. But a staffer— I don't know who this is, but the staffer's heroic. He, uh, pulls out— this is almost like a Perry Mason moment— he pulls out the sniper's own notes that they apparently got as part of a production from the Secret Service. And 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.

I actually, I have the 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. I noticed an individual, white male, white or gray shirt, low crawling on the roof. I noticed an AR-style weapon in his hands. As I moved to observe through my rifle scope, I heard weapon fire. I immediately got a laser rangefinder distance from my weapon-mounted rangefinder. I looked up to see my engagement scope, looked back through the scope, observed the individual shooting, and engaged. So there's a major contradiction there. I'm not necessarily suggesting that he waited on purpose. I 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 want to admit that he did.

Where is that, that sniper now, David King?

Uh, he's still, uh, I, I believe he's still on Trump's detail because again, after the White House Correspondents' Dinner, uh, attack, Trump goes, I tell David, I love you, David, like acting like David's his hero. And by the way, that's how we were able to identify him. Uh, he had— 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. So Trump almost kind of outed him. I searched, uh, David King Secret Service A LinkedIn immediately pops up showing that he, uh, this guy in the Special Operations Division of the Secret Service. I reach out to him, he declined to comment, and, uh, reporter Susan Crabtree has since corroborated that identity, uh, the, the David King name.

But he still works there again.

Yeah, I think Trump, uh, expresses appreciation for him.

Was anyone fired?

No. Uh, Kimberly Cheadle resigned, the former director resigned under bipartisan pressure. Uh, there were 5 or 6 suspensions that all came— most 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. Nobody was fired unless you count Cheeto, 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, taxpayer-funded security after she was fired, I guess, you know, for the threats or whatever, because people thought she was in on it.

So what happened next? Trump gets shot, he leaves, he goes to New Jersey with the local doctor. What happens to Crooks's body?

Uh, that's a great question. Crooks's body was actually left on the rooftop until 6 AM the next morning, and instead of taking him to the Butler County coroner, he shipped to Allegheny County. Um, I guess we've gotten conflicting explanations. Uh, I guess Allegheny County is where Pittsburgh is. They have more advanced facilities. But then I also heard they took Corey Imperatori's body to Allegheny County because they— the press was at the Butler County coroner's office. And they wanted to avoid the press attention.

Crooks was shot once, correct?

I think the local cop hit him first. Yeah, I definitely think the local cop hit him because you keep in mind Crooks stopped shooting after the local cop fired. There's some speculation that Aaron Zaloponyi might have hit the buttstock of the gun and shattered it. But the thing is that the X-ray of Crooks shows that there's bullet fragments still in his shoulder. And people— ballistics experts have told me that that .300 Win Mag final shot wouldn't have fragmented like that. The Secret Service's .300 Win Mag round went through Crooks's neck, out, back in the shoulder, then it fragments into two pieces. And makes two re-exit wounds. They actually recovered those fragments. It's this material in the shoulder that 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?

How quickly after this event was his body cremated?

I believe it was released for cremation a week or two after. And we didn't find out about this until, uh, Representative Clay Higgins went to go look at the body, and they said, well, you know, Mr. Higgins, the body doesn't exist. We gave it to the funeral home.

How would you assess the thoroughness of the autopsy?

Well, the medical examiner who did the autopsy insists that Aaron Zalopony didn't hit, uh, 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, um, you know, because he stopped shooting after Zalopo fired. So, uh, there's that. There's the releasing the body, uh, I would argue prematurely. Um, but the biggest question I have is about this toxicology report which I obtained, uh, 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. When 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. I then asked Butler County for it and they denied it too. It was almost like they're pointing at each other, playing shell games with the evidence. I, I went through a couple months long legal battle to get these documents, and then, um, actually got them in early October and put them up on our website, Headline USA.

So that was a big scoop, but I didn't think much of, uh, the documents. Like, they didn't really seem to show any scandal to me at first until a Twitter sleuth notified me a couple of months later and said, have you looked at this toxicology report? It seems incomplete. And I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about. So the medical examiner, Ariel Goldschmidt, collected 8 specimens from Thomas Crooks: 4 tubes of heart blood, a tube of urine, some eye fluid, bile, and then an envelope of hair. And now these are numbered 1 through 8. And now if you look at the findings, you have 1, the heart blood, 1, 2, and then it's 4, 5, and 6. But there's 3 specimens that, uh, Goldschmidt, the medical examiner, collected and either didn't test or didn't include in the report. That's the, the bile, 1 tube of blood, and the envelope of hair. So I don't know what to make of it again, but these samples, uh, you could argue they would have shown evidence of some kind of perhaps psychotropic drug use. I don't know.

Has he explained— has Goldschmidt, the medical examiner, explained why he didn't test, or there's no record of him testing?

No, I, I reached— 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, you know, why this is.

Okay. Um, and that it kind of is the, 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, no accomplices. There's no reason to hide anything. Do you have any idea why The FBI is continuing to hide information about this case.

Well, I hope you— I was hoping you could tell me.

I have some theories about it. Yeah. I mean, Joe Kent said it's directly related to— he believes directly related to our war in Iran. Um, you know, can't prove that, but I, uh— but just to establish clearly that they are hiding it, you've gone presumably to the Justice Department to ask for this information. What answer do you get?

In fact, I did a FOIA request for all the 302s in this case the day after Kash Patel said about a year, a year ago that the investigation is closed. Crooks acted alone. Nothing more to see here. So, okay, great. The investigation's closed. Now they can comply with FOIA and make all this stuff public. I 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. So it seems to me as they're playing, uh, legal games with these documents, uh, they've since— Kash Patel has changed his tune and said, well, the investigation is open but not active. And in my mind, that's just a way— they're— an excuse they're using to avoid disclosure.

So 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, I agree with you, is real. Like, someone tried to kill him, missed, killed somebody else. But if the president wanted this investigation to continue, it would continue, correct?

Presumably, yeah. Maybe in his first administration you could argue that he didn't have total control over the, the deep state or whatever, but now, yeah, he's got loyalists installed in most of the key positions. So it— yeah, I don't see any, uh, possible excuse for why.

Right. So it's not, it's not just that, you know, Kash Patel's incompetent or Dan Bongino's incompetent. This is a statement of fact. Trump shut down the investigation into Butler. So he shut down the investigation into his own attempted murder. And I think that's the most shocking fact to come out of this Trump term. Because I, I don't see a non-sinister explanation for that. But maybe you have one.

No, I mean, it's just total speculation, but I sometimes I wonder, did they stumble onto some sort of like MKUltra program? I don't know. Is this— are they threatening Trump's family? Um, it does. And 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.

I think that's exactly right. It doesn't make any sense at all. Are there any, uh, pieces of evidence that you have seen that suggest that Crooks acted in concert with anybody else?

I've seen nothing, uh, explicit. Uh, no, there is— there's some unanswered questions about what happened on July 13th, 2024, that might point to others being involved on the scene. Of course, we have the false sightings of Crooks, like if they saw somebody that looked like him. There were numerous such cases. So I have questions about that. And then 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 raises questions in my mind. You know, Crooks is dead up on the rooftop. They find a transponder in his pocket that they believe might be used to set off IEDs. They evacuate the rooftop. And after that point, the locals are never involved in the crime scene again. It's totally controlled by the FBI. They're searching underneath, inside the building with bomb-sniffing dogs. 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. They find a bicycle with a backpack that wasn't Crooks', but they initially assumed it was. And most interestingly is this van.

They searched the van with the bomb squad and towed away. And we haven't heard anything about this since. And this is before they searched Crooks's car, which is parked— it was parked right on the street by the AGR building. So I have questions of why they searched the van, uh, before the car. I did a FOIA on the van and was told that yes, it was part of the investigation, but the— again, I was denied actual records about it.

Is there proof that Crooks constructed bombs or a bomb?

Yeah, they eventually found, uh, bombs in his, uh, in the trunk of his Hyundai Elantra. And this was after they searched his home and found, um, some empty ammo canisters and some racing fuel and other bomb-making equipment in his bedroom. Uh, that led to the search of the car, supposedly. But again, I don't know why it's van, a house, car.

Um, but we do know he made bombs.

Yeah, we know for sure. And 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. 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, uh, racing fuel, which is used to make like, for, uh, ANFO bombs. Yes, the same material that McVeigh allegedly used in OKC. Uh, so like, yeah, little, little tiny miniature ANFO bombs found in his trunk. And in the—

but we have no idea why he made these bombs or what he planned to do with them.

Yeah, 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 gonna do a bombing and then realized that, wait, no, I could do a shooting instead. I don't know. He might have had multiple possible plans because the bombs weren't even set to go off in the trunk. Like, even if he pressed the button on his transponder, he would have had to flip switches to activate the bombs inside of the trunk beforehand. So Uh, yeah, I don't know really what to make of that.

Is his Google search history ever been released?

Uh, other than the limited release, uh, well, that you got from—

well, they didn't release anything. I got that from a source who got it himself. Yes, outside, to misphrase that, outside the federal government.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, no, nothing. Uh, we've gotten assertions like he apparently Googled how far was Oswald away from Kennedy He Googled RNC, DNC, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, um, but nothing that would really shine light on, you know, the details that matter.

Did they claim he was transgender too?

Uh, no, they never claimed he was transgender. I think, uh, there were rumors about that at one point. The dad asked his son if he was gay, but that's just because he didn't have a girlfriend. But no, this wasn't a trans type thing.

Um, okay, shortly after, there was widely publicized, uh, claims that Iran had something to do with this. What were— were those real? What was that?

Yeah, I saw you actually debating Ted Cruz about this like a year ago, saying there's no evidence that Iran—

the government of Iran—

yeah, the government of Iran tried to kill Trump and And Ted Cruz is like, actually, yeah, they hired two hitmen to take out Trump in 2024. Uh, well, those hitmen actually turned out to be undercover FBI agents, and there was never any serious threat to Trump. It appears to be totally controlled sting operations, uh, you know, at the very least, uh, if not an actual plot to manufacture a phony case about Iran. So what happened here is somebody did— a Pakistani man named Asif Merchant was arrested July 12th, 2024, the day before Butler. And when the case was announced in August, everybody automatically assumed that it had to have been linked somehow. But if you look at the details, again, it's a totally controlled sting operation. They were actually monitoring Mehrshad before he even entered the country. And 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.

Information was passed through Israel. What does that mean?

Yeah, I 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. But the thing is, is these— I would argue again, phony cases have been, um, there's been years of them. The first such case was, uh, John Bolton in 2022, uh, where the DOJ announced that Iran tried to assassinate him, and it turns out it was just some guy in Iran talking to an FBI informant Uh, the, um, the informant took photos of Bolton's house to try to, uh, pretend to be like conducting surveillance. Bolton had full knowledge and was consenting to all this. They announced an indictment, but of course the defendant's in Iran, so it's kind of like the, the Russia indictments where they never have to prove this case. It's almost just like a big press release.

So 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.

Well, people have used the Mershant case as evidence that yes, the— there was some sort of threat, but you got to measure a threat by both intent and capacity. And here there was absolutely no capacity. Like he's— like I said, they let Marchand into the country in April 2024 on purpose as part of the sting operation. A reporter named John Solomon actually had sources tell him that this was similar to Operation Fast and Furious, where the ATF was allowing illegal gun purchases to supposedly track where these guns were going. Uh, apparently the Biden administration was doing that with humans, whether you're like letting terrorists into the country on purpose to supposedly track where they're going. Uh, so Mershant's let into the country, and a leader at a local mosque connects him to a driver because he doesn't speak English, doesn't have a car, doesn't have any means. So supposedly a friendly guy is driving him around just because that's part of their culture. They're trying to help each other. But this guy turned out to be an FBI informant. He's actually an Afghanistan— an Afghan who served in Afghanistan as a translator for the U.S. military.

And the story about how he became an informant is unclear because in the DOJ's indictment, They say that he heard what Merchan was plotting and he went to the feds and flipped and became an informant. And I could see your face. You probably find that dubious. But we found out in court that the official story changed. Supposedly now he says that he's driving Merchan around and he 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. And they supposedly fill him in on the operation saying, no, we're monitoring Mershant because we think he's dangerous. Will you work for us? Will you just kind of be our eyes and ears and go along with whatever he says? So again, this is the official story that came out in court.

He agrees to become an informant. Him and Marchand have a meeting in a hotel room in early June that's wired for, you know, surveillance and Keep in mind that Mehrshad has not proposed anything related to the assassination or otherwise illegal at this point, but they're already, you know, full-fledged surveillance of him. He sketches out some plan that looks like, like a 10-year-old would have drawn it about, yeah, this is the target, how will it die. Again, this is all in Urdu, so we just have like an English translation of what was said. And I think like the vape, like he had a vape that he put down and like, this is the target. So like, you're not, not really sophisticated stuff. The informant then introduces him to two undercover FBI agents. The guy, the guys that Ted Cruz was, were arguing to you that were hitmen. The hitmen, the agents take Marchand to a strip club and they have some kind of vague conversation. About possibly either assassinating politicians, stealing government documents, or staging like a protest. Mirchand tells them, you know, visit me in Pakistan in September and we'll give you the, the official target.

Um, they 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 $5,000 through like the hawala system where he can pick it up in New York but borrow on it in Tanzania. So the FBI informant actually helps him do this. The informant picks up the $5,000, gives it to Mershant, who then gives it to the FBI agents. Like, instead of the informant just giving it, you could see they're really trying to set him up. And then it's when he is trying to leave the country on July 12th that he's arrested.

He's not Iranian, by the way, just to restate, he's Pakistani.

Yeah, that's right. He supposedly has a, um, a family in Iran. And we should, you know, steel man the other side. And when he's arrested, he was interrogated, and he did say that, yes, uh, I was working for Iran to try to do something. He wouldn't admit to the Trump assassination plot. So we could definitely— it's not like as egregious as the Whitmer plot the supposed government kidnap plot, uh, where they're just— they weren't even looking to do anything and it was totally provoked by the FBI. 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, uh, surrounded by feds. Like, those Definitely no, no relationship to Butler that we know of. Uh, no, no. I've heard Joe Kent ask that question, like, well, was Marchant in touch with Crooks? Um, he didn't even speak English, so— and I don't think he was playing with a full deck of cards. Um, so I— yeah, he definitely wasn't. Joe Kent also asked, was the informant in touch with Crooks? And I think that's a far more interesting question. Uh, but we'll probably never find out because there's actually a classified information in the Merchan case, uh, over 1.6 million pieces of evidence that not even Merchan was allowed to look at.

There's something called the Classified Information Procedures Act which says, well, if discovery is classified, not even the defendant can get it.

So it's not a real trial.

No, it was a total show trial. And bizarrely, again, they trot out all this dubious evidence, but on the last day, uh, Mehrshad's attorney allows him to testify. And again, he says that, yes, uh, I was working for Iran. So he does think that, um, and I guess he said he was acting under duress. So, but it was pretty much just an admission of guilt. It's something that he should have said, and during like the plea deal, uh, proceedings, and not, you know, on the last day of his trial. And so yeah, I have a hard— I don't know really what to make of that. It seems like legal malpractice, to be frank.

Yeah, 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.

Yeah.

And so that may be part of the whole, uh, the whole performance. But I don't know.

Sure. And just to steelman, 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 Roos totally slip under their noses. Um, but even more importantly, I don't think anybody's really realized that is this case arguably 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 Marchand case a week before Butler, and they decide to send Secret Service snipers to Butler as a result. It was the first time that a former president has ever had Secret Service sniper protection, and the first time 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. And I could almost guarantee you that the local response would have been better because the locals, uh, they would have been on the local radios. That's another thing about the Secret Service snipers at Butler is they did not pick up the local radios that were—

where's Sean Curran now?

He's actually the director of the entire agency, which again is a totally baffling decision.

So that, that's kind of the context that piques my interest. I mean, I, 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. You also find coincidences that are just bizarre, but maybe they really are coincidences. But big picture, it's truly crazy what we're looking at. So here you have Trump, 2 days before the Republican convention. He has not yet chosen a running mate. Everyone in, everyone in up for consideration as a neocon except for J.D. Vance. Okay. So, um, and so that's when the assassination attempt takes place before Trump has chosen a running mate of a vice president. The 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 neocon, but like the leading neocon in the world. Way more of a neocon than like Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol ever were. And 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.

And then you see Trump appoint the people who effectively allowed this to happen by their incompetence at best to positions of greater authority. And then you see Trump shut down the investigation into the shooting.

According to reports, right?

Am I like— what?

You're exactly right. And according to reporter Susan Crabtree, I guess Sean Curran is, um, 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—

but it's about Trump though. I mean, it's like, yeah, if you had bodyguards who are 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 .223 round, you'd say, these guys have to go. Like, you failed. Your one job is to keep a sniper from shooting me at me, and you failed. But instead of doing that, Trump promotes the guy.

I have no good answer for you as far as that goes.

I mean, I'm tormented by it.

Yeah.

Especially considering what happened after, where Trump gets effortlessly elected and then becomes this crazed neocon. He becomes the one thing he said he hated. There's a total change in Trump.

It is worth mentioning that Suzy Wiles and Sean Curran were both involved in what I would argue like a, a psyop on Trump to make him think the Iranians were out to get him. And this is after the Ryan Roos event Uh, they actually tell Trump that the Iranians have smuggled missiles into the country and they want to shoot down your plane, which there's absolutely no evidence for that. I mean, no actual documentation, no witnesses, no arrests were made. If that were true, the war would have started a lot earlier. But in any event, they actually put Trump on a decoy plane, uh, with— I remember, yeah, they used Steve Whitcoff's plane, and him, Whitcoff, and Suzy Wiles were ride in Whitcoff's plane while the staff were serving as decoys on Trump Force One, which I'm not sure how they would feel about that. Um, but I mean, it's pretty crazy. 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, like a threat was out there. Like, it really seemed like a total psyop to me.

It's bizarre.

Preparatory to this war, of course, right?

I would think so, yeah. I mean, you could make the argument that Trump was already an Iranian hawk, but, um, you know, this certainly didn't help.

You 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.

Yeah, that's, that's certainly what he said. I did— wasn't, wasn't there rumors that he was about to launch a war in the last month of his first presidency.

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 or 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. So, I mean, maybe those are all organic changes of heart, uh, but he's never explained how or why. And the demarcation, the change point, the pivot seems to be this shooting.

Yeah.

Who's Ryan Ruth?

Uh, Ryan Ruth was the second would-be assassin, and this happened on September 15th, 2024. Uh, just, just over 2 months after Butler, uh, Trump's golfing on his Palm Beach golf course. He's on the 5th 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. He shoots 5 times at like point-blank range, about from 5 or 10 feet away, uh, misses all 5 times but causes Ruth— what? Yeah, yeah, uh, I've, you know, he missed him 5 times at close range. And presumably the Secret Service officer had a rifle too. It's not like he pulled out his pistol or anything because he's on the advance, probably armed and ready.

So Wow, I didn't know that.

Yeah, another security failure.

Um, well, an embarrassing one too.

Yeah, I guess he gets credit for at least not hesitating.

He—

yeah, but again, the gun's pointed at him, so, um, but he did cause Ryan to flee. And, um, Ryan's caught 45 minutes later in another—

actually got away.

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. 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 out on— be on the lookout for this Xterra. And Ruth is pulled over on the I-95 in another county. And this is— this is no way. Yes, again, like, he had an escape plan.

Uh, he— well, how did the Secret Service agent allow— if he's that close to him, how do you— why didn't he chase him down?

That's— we've got even less details about the Secret Service's actions at Palm Beach than we do, um, from Butler. So I, I don't know. I don't have an answer to that question.

So then what happens?

So they arrest the guy, and here's where the most tragic part of the whole incident happens, is that, uh, 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 3-year-old daughter in the back seat. The daughter was put into a coma and has permanent brain damage as a result. So Um, 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?

We know a lot more about him than we do about Crooks. I mean, by like midnight of that day, people had already dug up articles about him being in Ukraine and recruiting foreign fighters. Uh, the 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. Uh, we 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. But it's actually far, far worse than that. One 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. And it turns out that he was actually on the ATF's radar since at least 2002. He was a construction worker and he had gotten— he owned a construction firm. He had gotten into a dispute with illegal immigrants who he was hiring. Apparently he wasn't paying them. He threatens one with a .410 shotgun. They wrestle the shotgun away from him. He gets in his truck and escapes and almost runs over these, these workers of his.

They, the, uh, the workers call the police and the police respond, and then they find that Ruth was like, uh, 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. He 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. A prison snitch tells the police about this. He gets charged with having that dynamite too. He gets let out on bail. About 6 months later, he's in a police, uh, he gets pulled over. He's got a machine gun in his passenger seat. He runs away from the police, gets into a standoff. Um, and finally, after a couple hours, he's arrested again. And the upshot of that is that after all that, he was only, uh, given probation. But this case was reported to the ATF, which declined to, uh, take any action.

How did that guy wind up— I think you said recruiting foreign fighters in Ukraine?

Yeah.

So can you recruit foreign fighters in Ukraine without the knowledge and participation of US government authorities?

Well, 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. That triggers a probation violation from 2002, but that gets waived the next day 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. 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, you know, he had to stand up for, you know, global freedom or democracy or something like that. 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— he's a 58-year-old construction worker with no combat experience. So they say, no, we can't really make use of you. So he turns to recruiting foreign fighters, as you say. Uh, a little interesting factoid: in his self-published book, which is still available on Amazon, he said his best partner, quote, best partner in this venture was an Israeli guy.

I was never able to track down who that partner was.

This is also crazy.

Yeah, it is absolutely.

But if you're run— 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. They're— I mean, of course.

Yeah. And he was in an Azov Battalion commercial, which of course Azov was sponsored by the CIA.

The Nazi battalion.

Yeah, the Nazi battalion. He was flagged by multiple people. At one point, I think I counted 7 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 sketchy, sketchy things. Uh, he was reported to Interpol. Yeah, a former CIA officer named Sarah Adams flagged him too, so of course the CIA was aware. And this, uh, State Department actually opened up an investigation for him violating international arms trafficking regulations. Not that he was trafficking in actual arms, but that also covers the human fighter element of it, so there was actually an open State Department investigation at the time of the September 2024 assassination attempt.

So 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. I can do it in one day. And I know Putin, and I know Zelensky, and I can do this. This happens on his golf course. Fast forward now almost 2 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.

No. Yeah. Another broken promise.

The guy who was 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.

It's bizarre. I don't think Ryan was explicitly told to do this, uh, because keep in mind he was put on trial and he actually represented himself. And I think at any time he could have blurted out, well, hey, you know, the FBI told me, or whatever. I think it's a little more subtle. I did talk to a lot of people who knew him in Ukraine, and I think it was very easy to be influenced Uh, he was around a lot of virulent anti-Trump people at one point. I'm talking to a guy who knew him. This guy thinks like the Russia pee tapes are real. He goes off on a tangent to me about how he wants to punch J.D. Vance in the face. So 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, right?

High-status people.

They have—

they come from money. They have State Department connections. Ruth probably thought like, oh, these are really important people. I could be a hero. They hate Trump. I could save the day by doing this. Uh, 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. And if you read the House task force final report, Trump actually made a last-minute decision to go golfing. And the Secret Service was informed at 2 a.m. And look at the state search warrant. It says that according to geolocation data pings, Ruth showed up at like 2:30 a.m. No way. Yeah. And that—

yeah, that's— are you serious?

I'm absolutely serious.

Ruth at trial ever explain why he, since Trump hadn't been planning to golf, decided to show up at 2:30 AM?

That was never explained. Actually, Ruth represented himself, and the trial was a, a disaster, so we didn't get any helpful information. I mean, during his opening statement, at one point he goes off on a tangent about like the importance of human rights and democracy. The judge says, Mr. Ruth, this has nothing to do with your case. If you keep doing this, you're going to forfeit your own opening statement, he says, you know, yes, your honor. And he immediately delves right back into the same tangent. He forfeits his opening statement. So it was a real shit show. Is that, uh, there's also classified information, like the Marchand case, there's classified information in the Ryan Ruth case, um, and Judge Cannon sealed the information on the grounds that it could, quote, harm national security.

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?

I assume there's probably FISA involved, perhaps, uh, you know, surrounded by informants.

So just to go back to the question of the classified information I'm just, I'm just baffled by this. What could that possibly— why would Ryan Ruth intersect— you said CISA and FISA, I'm not sure what that means. Can you explain that a little more?

Yeah, sure. So again, like the Marchand 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. And I think the CIPA law was passed in the late '70s, and at the time there was very select usage of it. It was to 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. They might have an informant, of course, informant overseas, but that person's life isn't in jeopardy. It's just all chat room stuff.

Well, they might also be orchestrating crimes.

And there's— yeah, there's major, major scandals that this classified information procedure law has been used to cover up. Uh, just to name a couple, the Pulse nightclub shooting where the shooter's father, Omar Mateen's father, was an FBI informant. The shooter himself may have been an informant. Too, and that's according to, uh, Trevor Aaronson. But, uh, classified— the SEPA law was used to cover up information there. Uh, 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. They went there to shoot up the contest, which was like at a local fair, I think., and they were stopped right away. But there was a third guy who was behind them who went to run away. Uh, the cops arrested him, but it turns out that that was an undercover agent who were friends, who was friends with the, you know, the supposed terrorists. Um, and also in that case, I don't know if it was the same agent or another informant actually told the def— or the, the shooters to quote, tear up Texas. So it was a clear case of provocation.

And 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, uh, PATCON, which was like this undercover operation in the '90s. Uh, so that's, that's a really dark one.

It'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. My suspicion is that they changed world history and that they changed Trump, the president of the United States. So if you— and I know this, this book is in some ways like a list of unanswered questions. Yeah. 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?

The first 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 up to 23 seconds before responding? Why does he have contradictory, uh, testimony?

And this is the one Trump is complimenting in public?

That's right, yeah. And so July 14th, some, you know, Crooks's body is still on the rooftop And Susan Crabtree, uh, reports— and she— this is like a great reporter. She's very deeply sourced in the Secret Service. And she was told that this, um, the snipers were given instructions that you can't respond to a threat until that threat actually fires their weapons. Uh, this report from Crabtree sparks outrage. People are like, that's preposterous, how could they have to wait until the threat actually starts shooting, until the principal gets killed before they respond.

And then—

nuts. The Secret Service denies it, says that's not true. They weren't— they were not under these instructions at all. And I was— again, total speculation, but I, you know, can— safe to say that Crabtree was really told this by a legitimate source. I think they were almost like trying to float an excuse out there and see, like, A/B testing it, seeing if the public would buy this. When the public acted like this is the craziest thing ever, they walked it back. And then we just haven't gotten any good, uh, answer, you know, pretty much.

But that's your number one question, is why did the Secret Service sniper wait 23 seconds after the volleys— two different volleys, 8 shots have been fired, and one that hit Trump, 3 other people killed, one he did not respond. That'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?

Your guess is as good as mine.

I mean, that's just bizarre.

It is. It's, it's incredibly, incredibly bizarre. I mean, I would think this Aaron Zalopony, uh, the local heroic cop who actually shot Crooks— like, if I were Trump, I would make July 13th Aaron Zalopony Day. But he doesn't even acknowledge this guy's existence. I mean, so on one level It's just kind of sad, 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.

And I'm suggesting a fact pattern, a known fact pattern that has no non-sinister explanation that I can think of. That's all I'm saying. Sure. I can't— and I've— I mean, trust me, I've brought this to a lot of different people. Like, what is this? Include, you know, people, very knowledgeable people. And I've never had one person say, well, actually what you're missing is this. Here's why Trump shut down the investigation, which he did. Fact, obviously. But it is also fact. I've, I've, I know it. And, uh, 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 see one either.

No, absolutely not. No. Um, I guess another big unanswered question I have has to do with this seemingly incomplete toxicology report, which, you know, I hesitate to mention this because I, 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 inside insisted Zaloponyi never hit him and then doesn't either— doesn't test certain specimens from Crooks or didn't put them in his report. This guy is actually a dual Israeli citizen who was in Israel after October 7th helping identify the bodies there. So, you know, again, this actually— actually, yeah, this is on the front page of like the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. And he's actually pictured— he's standing next to a guy named Chen Kugel, who is an Israeli and a source of a lot of these dubious claims about beheaded babies. Um, yeah, and Goldschmidt's right standing right next to him. I guess he volunteered and went over there to help. And again, I'm not—

he is a dual citizen.

He is a dual citizen. Yeah, that's correct.

And he's the medical examiner who did at best an incomplete job with the autopsy, or of the report anyway, of Crooks.

Yeah, that's a hell of a 9 or 10, 10-month run for his career to go from, you know, responding to October 7th to autopsying, uh, Crooks. And yeah, again, I'm not necessarily just suggesting anything, but because he's such a key player, we do need to know And, you know, he is not the medical examiner that victims, dead people in Butler Township, Pennsylvania, would normally go to. 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 autopsy and talk.

So the fireman who was killed at Butler went to the local medical examiner, but Thomas Crooks went to this medical examiner, the dual citizen.

Well, he actually— Corey Comparatore 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, and then Thomas was supposedly sent there, uh, for the more advanced facilities.

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 you, this medical examiner?

No, he hasn't. He did testify at an open hearing where Clay Higgins pressed him. Clay Higgins, you know, 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 Zaloponyi's heroics. And Higgins is trying to press Goldschmidt about like, how could you possibly say that Zaloponyi didn't hit anything? And Goldschmidt just insisted that the Secret Service was the only person who shot Crooks that day.

Oh, that's really bonkers. Um, okay, so those are your top two questions.

Mhm.

My top question is, why the secrecy? Do you have any theories on that?

Just total speculation. Um, 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. So there could be some kind of cover-up telling like, Mr. Trump, if this is revealed, it'll be the end of the FBI. You can't do this. You have to keep your mouth shut. Um, could be something darker. I don't know.

Do you expect that you'll be like the last guy to look into this? Because that— because the, the cover-up 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? Like, however you feel about Trump, everyone has an opinion. It's just an amazing story. And I just don't know why. I'm ending where I began. Why are you the only guy doing this?

I thought— yeah, I thought it was probably one of the biggest stories to happen in the last 5 years, you know, outside of the wars and things like that. And so, um, it's been really puzzling that I don't have much competition, nor do I have much interest. I mean, you're— again, you're one of the only guys keeping the story alive. So I'm hoping that the book Um, you know, unfortunately it doesn't have like a big smoking gun— this is the guy who did it, or this is the institution behind it. Uh, it is the best and most complete picture of what happened. I'm hoping it could be a starting point for future researchers, people who want to jump on board and, and help find out, you know, some of the answers to these bizarre questions we have.

We'll probably both be long dead when someone writes the book. I hope that's wrong, but that tends to be the way this stuff plays out. It's 100 years after Lusitania, and it was like, actually, there were armaments on the boat. The Trump Assassination Plots: What the Investigations Missed and Why It Matters. Ken Silva, thank you very much for doing this.

Thanks again.