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

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31:48No upfront fees or obligation to see how much you can save. Give American Financing a call, 800-685-5696. That's 1-800-685-5696 or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash Tucker, America's home for home loans. So one of the most interesting, I mean, it's minor, but it's interesting facts of this is that Crooks is on the roof. 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. That's pretty, that's like biathlon level shooting in that there's clearly lots of adrenaline. It's a quick turn and you see all these, you know, people on TV.

32:34Oh, 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. Like that's someone who is either like remarkably cool under pressure or who's done a lot of training. Yeah, Crooks, from what I can tell, was a really good shot. This wasn't his training at Clareton 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 in the class with Crooks. He's called by the FBI a couple of days later when 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 nine millimeter so many times that he blew a hole out of the target.

33:25So yeah, Crooks was really good. And 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 coming up to get you and you have to focus and keep your breathing under control. and he came within millimeters. I'm really struck by that. So then he sets in place he's prone, he's lying, and he gets off eight shots. What happens to those bullets? The 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. 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 rally goers. It actually, I think, split his liver. It was a pretty nasty shot. The third one, I'm not sure about. It was the second volley of five that one of them hits the firefighter Corey Comparatore. And then Jim Copenhaver, who generously wrote the forward to my book, he got shot twice, and one of those bullets is still in his body.

35:15It's like too close to the spine. I think he's in his mid-80s now, so they can't really extract it. So four 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 my son was grazed or something, but we haven't heard anything about that. I really don't know what happened there, but we know for sure of these four people. The man who was killed, who was he? Corey Comparatore. Yeah, he was a firefighter, a family man, a girl dad. He had two girls, a loving wife, Helen.

35:59By 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 entrust with your life. Just a real tragedy that we lost him. So there's been a lot of speculation about this being staged. It's fake. There are theological arguments for this that come out of the Old Testament. Apparently there's a part that suggests the pricking of the ear is necessary for a prophecy to be fulfilled, et cetera, et cetera. or 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.

36:44So I don't really understand that if his ear has to be pricked, but he didn't get shot in the ear. 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. 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.

37:27They'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 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. 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 his own doctor close to his side.

38:18They 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 three 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.

39:22He's now just a post standard manning the radios on the ground for a rally outside of his jurisdiction. I think the argument there was that they were short-staffed and needed help. And he's a senior guy who knows what he's doing. 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 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 he's kind of like the eyes and ears of the snipers on the rooftops.

40:09He goes to search for crooks when they're notified of the range finder. 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. 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 before the shooting starts.

40:56He actually had, you know, he was 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 your... And this is after eight shots have been fired. This is before any shooting started. Right, but I mean, the FBI sniper waited long enough that Crooks fired eight times before he was taken out. Yeah, and the eight shots happened in five seconds. He waited another 10 seconds before he put that final 10th shot through Crooks. And I could give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he wasn't prepared.

41:37He 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 eight 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 is heroic. He 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.

42:33And 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 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.

43:21I 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 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 correspondence dinner uh attack trump goes i tell david i love you david like acting like david's his hero um 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.

44:24So Trump almost kind of outed him. I searched David King's Secret Service. A LinkedIn immediately pops up showing this guy in the Special Operations Division of the Secret Service. I reached out to him. He declined to comment. And reporter Susan Crabtree has since corroborated that identity, the David King name. But he still works there. Again, yeah, I think Trump expresses appreciation for him. Was anyone fired? No. Kimberly Cheadle, the former director, resigned under bipartisan pressure. There were five or six suspensions that all came, most of them came from the local Pittsburgh field office, even though they were kind of thrown under the bus, in my opinion.

45:17But no, nobody was actually fired. Nobody was fired. unless you count Cheadle, but that's, 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' body? That's a great question. Crooks' body was actually left on the rooftop until 6 a.m. the next morning. And instead of taking him to the Butler County corner, he shipped to Allegheny County.

46:05I 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 cory comparatori's body to allegheny county because they the press was at the butler county coroner's office um and they wanted to avoid the press attention brooks was shot once correct i think the local cop hit him um first yeah i i definitely think uh the local cop hit him because you keep in mind crook stopped shooting after the local cop fired uh there's some speculation that uh aaron zalaponi might have hit the buttstock of the gun and shattered it but the thing is that the x-ray of crook shows that there's bullet fragments still in his shoulder and people, ballistic experts have told me that that 300 wind mag final shot wouldn't have fragmented like that.

47:07The Secret Service's 300 wind mag round went through Crooks' 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 Representative Clay Higgins went to go look at the body.

47:51And they said, well, you know, Mr. Higgins, the body doesn't exist. They 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 Zalopone didn't hit Crooks, which I just think all the evidence points to the contrary. Not only the bullet fragments, but reason would dictate that the shot did something because, you know, because he stopped shooting after Zalopone fired. So there's that. There's the releasing the body, I would argue, prematurely. But the biggest question I have is about this toxicology report, which I obtained, which, by the way, obtaining this report was kind of a, I guess, interesting story, at least to me in itself, because this was kind of my first big scoop in late 2024 when I got these documents.

48:49When I found out that the body was taken to Allegheny County, I requested it from them, and they said, well, 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 show games with the evidence. I went through a couple months long legal battle to get these documents and then actually got them in early October and put them up on our website, HeadlineUSA. So that was a big scoop, but I didn't think much of the documents, like they 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. So the medical examiner, Ariel Goldschmidt, collected eight specimens from Thomas Crooks, four tubes of heart blood, a tube of urine, some eye fluid, bile, and then an envelope of hair. And now these are numbered one through eight. And now if you look at the findings, you have the heart blood 1, 2, and then it's 4, 5, and 6. But there's three specimens that Goldschmidt, the medical examiner, collected and either didn't test or didn't include in the report. That's the bile, one tube of blood, and the envelope of hair. So I don't know what to make of it again, but these samples, you could argue they would have shown evidence of some kind of perhaps psychotropic drug use.

50:43I 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, 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. Okay. And that kind of is the question that hangs over all of this. Why are there no answers in a case that, according to the government, is open and closed? Lone gunman, crazy person, killed by a 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?

51:29Well, 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. You know, can't prove that. 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 ago that the investigation is closed, Crooks acted alone, nothing more to see here. So, oh, okay, great, the investigation's closed. Now they can comply with FOIA and make all this stuff public.

52:12I file 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 sensed cash 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 uh 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 that I agree with you, 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? Presumably, 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, he's got loyalists installed in most of the key positions. So yeah, I don't see any possible excuse for why. Right. So it's not just that, you know, Kash Patel's incompetent or Dan Bongino's incompetent. There's 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 don't see a non-sinister explanation for that.

53:48But maybe you have one. No, I mean, it's just total speculation. But sometimes I wonder, did they stumble onto some sort of like MKUltra program? I don't know. Are they threatening Trump's family? It does. And this is why 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 pieces of evidence that you have seen that suggest that crooks acted in concert with anybody else? I've seen nothing explicit. it uh no there is there's some unanswered questions about what happened on uh 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 uh the bomb squad allegheny county bomb squad initially responded to a van that was parked about a half mile away from the site.

55:02And the series of events raises questions in my mind. 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's, but they initially assumed it was.

55:52And most interestingly is this van. They searched the van with the bomb squad and tow it away, and we haven't heard anything about this since. And this is before they searched Crooks' car, which was parked right on the street by the AGR building. So I have questions of why they searched the van before the car. I did a FOIA on the van and was told that, yes, it was part of the investigation, but again, I was denied actual records about it. Is there proof that Crooks constructed bombs or a bomb? Yeah, 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. But again, I don't know why it's van, house, car. 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 racing fuel, which is used to make like for info bombs. Yes. The same material that McVeigh allegedly used in OKC.

57:31So, yeah, little tiny miniature info bombs found in his trunk. 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 going to 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.

58:13So, yeah, I don't know really what to make of that. Has his Google search history ever been released? Other than the limited release, 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. No, nothing. We've gotten assertions. Like he apparently Googled how far was Oswald away from Kennedy. He Googled RNC, DNC, Joe Biden, Donald Trump. 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 Okay.

59:10And shortly after, there was widely publicized claims that Iran had something to do with this. 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 Ted Cruz is like, actually, yeah, they hired two hitmen to take out Trump in 2024. 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, you know, at the very least, if not an actual plot to manufacture a phony case about Iran.

1:00:01So what happened here is somebody did a Pakistani man named Asif Mershan 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 Mershant 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?

1:00:47Yeah, 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, there's been years of them. The first such case was John Bolton in 2022, 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. The informant took photos of Bolden's house to try to pretend to be conducting surveillance. Bolden had full knowledge and was consenting to all this.

1:01:33They 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. 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. People have used the Mershant case as evidence that, yes, there was some sort of threat. But you've got to measure a threat by both intent and capacity.

1:02:14And here, there was absolutely no capacity. Like I said, they let Mershant 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. Apparently, the Biden administration was doing that with humans, where they're letting terrorists into the country on purpose to supposedly track where they're going. So Mershant's led 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.

1:03:03So 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 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 Mershant was plotting and he went to the feds and flipped and became an informant. And I could see your face. You'd probably find that dubious. We found out in court that the official story changed. Supposedly now he says that he's driving Mershant around and he sees unmarked cars following them everywhere they go.

1:03:58And 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?

1:04:40So again, this is the official story that came out in court. He agrees to become an informant. him and Mershant have a meeting in a hotel room in early June that's wired for surveillance. And keep in mind that Mershant has not proposed anything related to the assassination or otherwise illegal at this point, but there are already full-fledged surveillance of him. plan that looks like a 10-year-old would have drawn it about, this is the target, how will it die? Again, this is all in Urdu, so we just have an English translation of what was said. And I think the vape, he had a vape that he put down, and this is the target.

1:05:29So not really sophisticated stuff. The informant then introduces him to two undercover FBI agents, the The guys that Ted Cruz were arguing to you that were hitmen, the hitmen, the agents, take Mershant to a strip club. And they have some kind of vague conversation about possibly either assassinating politicians, stealing government documents, or staging protests. tests. Mershant tells them, you know, visit me in Pakistan in September and we'll give you the official target. 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.

1:06:24Initially, 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 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.

1:07:11Yeah, that's right. He supposedly has a family in Iran. and we should, you know, steel man the other side. When he's arrested, he was interrogated, and he did say that, yes, 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, where they're just, they weren't even looking to do anything, and it was totally provoked by the FBI. This, you appear to have a somewhat willing defendant, but again, absolutely no capacity, no means, no money, can't even speak English, surrounded by feds.

1:08:02Like there was definitely no true threat here. And no relationship to Butler that we know of. No, no. I've heard Joe Kent ask that question. Like, well, was Mershant in touch with Crooks? he didn't even speak English and I don't think he was playing with a full deck of cards so 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 but we'll probably never find out because there's actually classified information in the Merchant case over 1.6 million pieces of evidence that not even Mershon 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.

1:08:54So 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, Mershon's attorney allows him to testify. And again, he says that, yes, I was working for Iran. So he does think that. And I guess he said he was acting under duress. But it was pretty much just an admission of guilt. It's something that he should have said during the plea deal proceedings and not 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.

1:09:46I've seen it a number of times. Yeah. And so that may be part of the whole performance, but I don't know. Sure. And just to steal, 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, that Iran was plotting something. So why not let him into the country 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.

1:10:29But even more importantly, I don't think anybody's really realized that, is this case arguably is what almost got Trump killed. Because the reason that the Secret Service snipers were sent to Butler was because of a so-called Iranian threat. The head of Trump's detail, Sean Curran, was briefed about an Iranian threat. and he's getting briefed on the Mershant 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.

1:11:16And I would argue that if that phony Iranian threat never sparked 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, 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 offered to be done. Where is Sean Curran now? He's actually the director of the entire agency, which again is a totally baffling decision.

1:11:56So that's kind of the context that piques my interest. I 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. 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, two days before the Republican convention, he has not yet chosen a running mate. Everyone in, everyone in, up for consideration is a neocon except for J.D. Vance. Okay, so, and so that's when the assassination attempt takes place, before Trump has chosen a running mate, a vice president.

1:12:41The 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 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.

1:13:20And then you see Trump shut down the investigation into the shooting. According to reporters - Right, am I, like, what the hell? You're exactly right. And according to reporter Susan Crabtree, I guess Sean Curran is a favorite of Susie Wiles, which I don't know why Susie 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 if 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 2-2-3 round, you'd say, these guys have to go.

1:14:03Like, you failed. Your one job is to keep a sniper from shooting 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'm tormented by it. 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 Susie Wiles and Sean Curran were both involved in what I would argue like a psyop on Trump to make him think the Iranians were out to get him. And this is after the Ryan Ruth event.

1:14:43they 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 with, yeah, they used Steve Whitcoff's plane and him, Whitcoff and Susie Wiles would ride in Whitcoff's plane while the staff were serving his decoys on Trump Force One, which I'm not sure how they would feel about that. But I mean, it's pretty crazy.

1:15:23Like if you look at the reporting on this, the staff would be going to Trump Force One and the Secret Service would be like, keep your head down, like acting like a threat was out there. It really seemed like a total psyop to me. It's bizarre. Repertory 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 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 certainly what he said.

1:16:01I did, wasn't there rumors that he was about to launch a war in the last month of like his of the first presidency although 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 yeah his campaign uh in the 2024 race arguing against regime change we're attacking people who are 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 the shooting yeah who's ryan ruth uh ryan ruth was the second would-be assassin.

1:16:53And this happened on September 15th, 2024, just over two months after Butler. Trump's golfing on his Palm Beach golf course. He'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. He shoots five times at like point blank range, about from five or 10 feet away. Misses all five times, but causes Ruth to flee. Yeah. Yeah. I've, you know. He missed him five times at close range. And presumably the secret service officer had a rifle too.

1:17:40It's not like he pulled out his pistol or anything because he's on the advance, probably armed and ready. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, another security failure. Well, an embarrassing one too. Yeah, I guess he gets credit for at least not hesitating. But again, the gun's pointed at him. But he did cause Ryan to flee, and Ryan's caught 45 minutes later. He actually got away? Yeah, yeah. 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.

1:18:22And it was actually a witness who heard the gunshots and took down Ruth's license plate and gives it to the Palm Beach sheriffs who then put out a warning. Be on the lookout for this Xterra. And Ruth is pulled over on the I-95 in another county. And this is... No way. Yes, again, he had an escape plan. Well, how did the Secret Service agent allow, if he's that close to him, why didn't he chase him down? We've got even less details about the Secret Service's actions at Palm Beach than we do from Butler. So I don't know. I don't have an answer to that question. So then what happens? So they arrest the guy.

1:19:10And here's where the most tragic part of the whole incident happens is that there's a bunch of traffic backed up on the I-95 due to this unexpected arrest. And a lady slams into the backed up traffic with her three-year-old daughter in the back seat. The daughter was put into a coma and has permanent brain damage as a result. So regardless how you feel about Trump or anything else, 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.

1:19:51So 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. 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. We didn't act on that tip, but we're trying to be forthcoming and 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 polled local police reports about these criminal incidents from the early 2000s.

1:20:46It turns out that he was actually on the ATS radar since at least 2002. He was a construction worker and he had gotten, he owned a construction firm. He 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 workers of his. The workers call the police, and the police respond, and then they find that Ruth was in possession of dynamite illegally. and they put him in jail. While he's in jail, somehow he gets a cell phone in there.

1:21:36He calls somebody who was helping him run the business and says, get rid of the dynamite we have on the other sites because 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 six 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 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 take any action.

1:22:27How 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 U.S. government authorities? Well, he certainly had knowledge of it. And again, yeah, career criminal, just to put a bow on that, he's charged again with a scheme of paying crackheads to steal 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.

1:23:14But 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 he had to stand up for 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-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.

1:24:04A 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 all so crazy. Yeah, it is absolutely crazy. But 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. I mean, of course. Yeah. And he was in an Azov Battalion commercial, which of course Azov was sponsored by the CIA.

1:24:47The Nazi Battalion. Yeah. The Nazi Battalion. He was flagged by multiple people. At 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 sketchy things. he was reported to interpool 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.

1:25:50So 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. 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 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. 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.

1:26:35It's bizarre. I don't think Ryan was explicitly told to do this, 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 he was very easy to be influenced. 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. Hey, he goes off on a tangent to me about how he wants to punch J.D.

1:27:14Vance 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 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. That said, the biggest anomaly I have that suggests something darker is the fact that Ruth had been camping at the golf course for about 11 hours before the shooting actually happened.

1:27:56And 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 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 that was never explained. Actually, Ruth represented himself in the trial was 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 the importance of human rights and democracy.

1:28:47The 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, 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. 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. Now, why would a multiple convicted felon construction worker who tries to murder the Republican nominee have classified classified national security related intelligence anywhere near him?

1:29:36I assume there's probably FISA involved, perhaps, you know, surrounded by informants. So just to go back to the question of the classified information, I'm just baffled by this. What could that possibly, why would Ryan Ruth intersect? You said FISA, I'm not sure what that means. Can you explain that a little more? Yeah, sure. So again, like the Mershant 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.

1:30:20And I think the SEPA law was passed in the late 70s. And at the time, it was very select usage of it. It was to protect overseas informants and to protect certain FISA information. But increasingly, with the advent of text messages and chat groups, the DOJ is just using it to hide things. They might have an 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. Just to name a couple, the Pulse nightclub shooting where the shooter's father, Omar Mateem's father, was an FBI informant.

1:31:10The shooter himself may have been an informant, too. and that's according to Trevor Aronson. But classified, the SEPA law was used to cover up information there. 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. The cops arrested him, but it turns out that that was an undercover agent who was friends with the supposed terrorist.

1:31:57And 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. 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 Pat Con, which is like this undercover operation in the 90s. So 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.

1:32:46So 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? The first and foremost question I have in my mind is why, 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 testimony? And this is the one Trump is complimenting in public? That's right, yeah. And so July 14th, Crooks' body is still on the rooftop and Susan Crabtree reports, this is like a great reporter, she's very deeply sourced in the Secret Service.

1:33:38And she was told that the snipers were given instructions that you can't respond to a threat until that threat actually fires their weapons. 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 the Secret Service denies it, says that's not true. They were not under these instructions at all. Uh, and I almost, again, total speculation, but I, you know, 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 AB testing it, seeing if the public would buy this when the public acted like this is the craziest thing ever.

1:34:28They 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, eight shots have been fired and one that hit Trump, three 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. That's just bizarre. is. It's incredibly, incredibly bizarre.

1:35:06I mean, I would think this Aaron Zaloponi, the local heroic cop who actually shot crooks, like if I were Trump, I would make July 13th Aaron Zaloponi 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. 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 mean, trust me, I've brought this to a lot of different people.

1:35:45Like, what is this? 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 a fact. 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 see one either. No, absolutely not. No. 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.

1:36:28because 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, insists that Zaloponi never hit him, and then 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 in the front page of like the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. 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.

1:37:21Yeah, and Goldschmidt's standing right next to him. I guess he volunteered and went over there to help. And again, I'm not... And 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 of the report anyway of Crooks. Yeah, that's a hell of a nine or 10 month run for his career to go from responding to October 7th to autopsying Crooks. And yeah, again, I'm not necessarily suggesting anything, but because he's such a key player, we do need to know. And he is not the medical examiner that victims, dead people in Butler Township, Pennsylvania would normally go to.

1:38:10No, 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 toxicology. 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, 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, and then Thomas was supposedly sent there for the more advanced facilities. So the facilities that allowed him to be cremated with the fragments still in him and didn't list the testing of his hair.

1:38:53Okay. 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 Zaloponi's heroics. And Higgins is trying to press Goldschmidt about, like, how could you possibly say that Zaloponi didn't hit anything? And Goldschmidt just insisted that the Secret Service was the only person who shot crooks that day. That's really bonkers.

1:39:34Okay. So those are your top two questions. Mm-hmm. My top question is why the secrecy? Do you have any theories on that? Just total speculation. 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 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.

1:40:20Could be something darker. I don't know. Do you expect that you'll be like the last guy to look into this? Because 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 five years, you know, outside of the wars and things like that.

1:40:58And so 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 this story alive. So I'm hoping that the book, 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. 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 help find out, you know, some of the answers to these bizarre questions we have. We'll probably both be long dead when someone, you know, writes the book.

1:41:41I hope that's wrong, but that tends to be the way this stuff plays out. you know, 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.