The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Secret Service and the Assassin

Read only. No audio. Maybe I’ll turn it into a podcast if I have time.

A lot is going on, and the news cycle is fast-moving. I can barely keep up with everything. I find one story and plan to read it, but then I run out of time. I see one great podcast and want to listen, but then I run out of time. Every outlet is covering the convention and I want to listen to all of them, but then I run out of time.

This story — of the Secret Service and the Assassin — is big. There is no shortage of coverage. It’s everywhere. And though I am doing the Convention stories here, I wanted to briefly (ha, not so briefly) give a few quick thoughts on this story.

Kimberly Cheatle should be fired or forced to resign.

Cheatle will face a congressional committee hearing on July 22, but who are we kidding? Nothing will happen until the Democrats are out of power. Then, heads should roll.

Especially considering there was already an assassination plot underway:

They’re gaslighting us, yet again, that what we saw we didn’t see.

The blame lies squarely on the Secret Service and the United States government. Period. Not the local police. Not Trump. Not his supporters, who were pointing out the shooter long before he fired a single bullet.

Conspiracy theories are blooming all over the internet. On the Left, they believe it was “staged,” and on the Right, it was an inside job. It obviously wasn’t staged. People on the Left believe that means they can never accuse anyone of pushing conspiracy theories again.

As to whether it was an inside job, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, it was.

The Assassin - Lone Gunman or Part of a Larger Plot?

An account of what happened by someone who was there:

If it was just a loser guy with a gun who had a plan and carried it out, outsmarting the keystone cops, otherwise known as the Secret Service, his motive would be similar to other shooters just like him — to quote the King of Comedy, “better King for a Day than schmuck for a lifetime.”

Had he succeeded, he would have been Lee Harvey Oswald, talked about, remembered, obsessed on for decades into the future.

Trump has wandered around places like the Bronx and East Palestine—he’s always been greeted with love and applause. The media will never tell you how beloved Trump is by the people. But it also seems like there were plenty of opportunities to take him out before July 13th. So why then?

It looked like he could not be stopped any other way, and that became the accepted reality across all spectrums of American life. For the Democrats, a second Trump victory is nothing less than the complete and total failure of the Democratic Party, not to mention its collapse.

It's not that hard to see a motive for some sad sack loser whose mother was a Democrat and his father was a Libertarian. Maybe he wanted to be a hero for my mother.

Motives for shooters like this are usually fairly simple. They are nobodies who slip through the cracks. They’re bullied in school. They have no girlfriends or even friends. They are drawn to gaming and guns. Usually, a shooting like this is a suicide mission. Some of them just want to kill a bunch of people before killing themselves, and there is no motive beyond that. They want to kill, and they want to die at the same time.

He was a loser of the highest order and was even nicknamed “School Shooter” by his classmates because he fit the stereotype so well, reports TMZ.

The reason there is so much speculation on this shooting is that to say mistakes were made is putting it mildly. Just as it seems highly implausible they would leave the Capitol unprotected on January 6th, how do you relax security on a guy who is already the target of an assassination plot and has been treated as Hitler himself by the media?

Profiler Pat Brown was asked by a producer to profile the shooter, and they wanted her to say he was a psycho, a lone assassin, but she found she could not, as she explains here:

So let’s say, just for the sake of it, that the CIA or some other shady group wanted to get rid of Trump - their “greatest threat to democracy.” How would they have roped in this sad sack to do their bidding?

The FBI, as we know, has only been focused on “MAGA extremism,” so they have their pick of wayward men lost in the wilds of the internet. So how would they rope in one of them to kill Trump? It would not be easy. That’s problem number one.

What do we know so far:

When it came to the kidnapping plot of Gretchen Whitmer, the FBI informants were digging around specifically in Michigan. Why? Possibly to deliver Michigan to Biden in November.

Informants were also busy bees around the time of the Stop the Steal protest in January 6th. Hundreds were embedded in the operation. January 6th was essential as propaganda to wage war on Trump and MAGA. That one seems almost too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel.

Then there is David DePape, a story that has always seemed off to me. Yes, there are psychos everywhere in America. One of them wanted to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh. But showing up at the Pelosi home with zip ties, screaming “Where’s Nancy,” knowing to go to the back door with no security present seemed to be, in my view, advance knowledge they wouldn’t know unless there was an informant tey were talking to online feeding them that info.

And the timing. It happened just ahead of the 2022 midterms and did impact the vote.

With Thomas Matthew Crooks, it strikes me as similar. He knew too much. He knew to climb on a sloped roof and there would be so Secret Service agents there. He knew to buy a ladder. He knew exactly where to position himself to be at just the right angle to be both out of sight but also able to shoot Trump.

How does he know all of this? He’s smart, okay. He likes to shoot, sure. But for there to be absolutely no footprint online, not even google searches about the location, seems suspicious.

Here is what I would guess if I were speculating on how this would have gone if it was a government-orchestrated assassination, with the caveat that I’m not saying it was. I’m exploring how it might have been carried out.

• Find the mark. Look for someone who is a loner and plays many online games, like first-person shooters. Crooks lives in a small town in Pennsylvania and is very young, but he likely lived in virtual worlds online. He was probably a heavy gamer and spoke with many other users while playing games.

• Befriend the mark and build trust. Flatter him, then start talking about politics. Find out what his leanings were. If he’s pro-Trump, move on. If he’s anti-Trump, keep going.

• Maybe you aren’t even a man. Maybe you are a pretty girl and maybe you flirt with him and make him see himself as the hero and protector of the world if he just does this one thing.

• Or you fill his head with fantasies about how evil Trump is and how if only we could have taken out Hitler before the war. Who wouldn’t want to be that kind of hero? And would you be willing to give your life to save the world? Yes, the answer comes back. Yes. Now you have a potential plan.
  
  It would look something like this true crime story where this stupid girl talked this young man into suicide.
  

• Drop details. Next, you’d have to feed him info as though you yourself were doing the detective work. You pretend you are just “discovering” the rules for the Secret Service (they can’t shoot unless you shoot first), and the sloped roof rule.

• Ah, it just so happens there is a building with a sloped roof. What else would you need? A ladder? A scope and a rifle? It just so happens he has all three. He tries to beef up his shooting skills in preparation for his one-in-a-million shot.

• The informant or CIA operative or whomever it is feeding him info also has to have someone embedded within the Secret Service, maybe. That might explain this odd video:

So what went wrong? Divine intervention? According to Ben Shapiro, yes.

And this column in the Federalist:

It’s clear by now that the U.S. Secret Service is not a very elitesecurity detail. Random, weaponless rallygoers paid more serious attention to the would-be assassin before he fired than the allegedly professional team assigned to Donald Trump on Saturday. Trump’s security detail did not secure him. Someone else did.

The Person who saved Trump’s life — and our nation from dangerous social unrest — is Jesus Christ. It is not random that wind gusts were present in just the right amount to have shifted the bullet’s course from fatal to flesh wound. It is not accidental that Trump turned his head at precisely the right second to avoid sudden death.

To the Left, that sends them into hysterics of “Christian Nationalists!” But they’re better served in moments like this. They can pray.

Anyway, just a few thoughts on the assassination…what do you think?

Dan Bongino’s take:

Bongino was on Ben Shapiro’s show, saying that a local law enforcement sniper was supposed to be on that specific roof, but he did not show up that day.

Joe Rogan:

And a compilation of Tik Tok videos analyzing the shooting:

I’ll probably write more later on this but wanted to just drop in and open it up for discussion.