There’s so much Trump news this week that I need to do a separate roundup or the LinkSwarm will end being bigger than Hunter’s coke habit.
A team of snipers were inside the building where Donald Trump’s would-be assassin climbed onto the roof and opened fire after being spotted 26 minutes earlier, bombshell new reports claim.
Cops at the scene noticed Crooks, 20, clambering into place in plain sight just 130 yards away from the rally stage and took two photos of him because he was acting suspiciously, sources told WPXI.
Meanwhile a counter-sniper team was inside the building that was being used as a ‘watch post’ during the event when Crooks pulled the trigger, The New York Post reported.
It’s not clear if he had the AR-style rifle on him when he was first seen scaling the AGR International Inc. factory or if he stayed on the roof for the whole time.
The shocking new allegations surfaced as authorities and the U.S. Secret Service face mounting questions over how Crooks was able to shoot the former president and kill a member of the rally crowd.
A horrifying video shows witnesses pointing at the roof and shouting at officers trying to warn them. MAGA fans also say they alerted law enforcement to Crooks as he crawled to his shooting position, but he was still able to shoot.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
5:10 p.m. Crooks was first identified as a person of interest
5:30 p.m. Crooks was spotted with a rangefinder
5:52 p.m. Crooks was spotted on the roof by Secret Service
6:02 p.m. Trump takes the stage
6:12 p.m. Crooks fires first shotsFrom the time Crooks fired his first shot to the gunman being killed was just 26 seconds, according to law enforcement officials. Eleven seconds after the first shot, Secret Service counter snipers acquired their target — and 15 seconds after that, Crooks was shot dead.
So the early summaries were wrong, and the Secret Service response was orders of magnitude worse than we initially believed. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Nobody wants to hear this because of the implications, but oh well, because it needs to be said: Joe Biden’s security regime deliberately and with malice aforethought created the conditions that led to an attempted assassin shooting Donald Trump in the head. It is by the grace of God that he lived and our nation is not currently in the midst of a violent civil war.
They deliberately starved Trump’s security team of the resources it needed. And they did it repeatedly, over many weeks and months.
With Trump’s security detail understaffed, under-resourced, and stretched to its limits, Biden’s security regime reportedly diverted even more resources to a hastily planned Jill Biden event that just happened to be in the area.
Biden’s security regime then ordered the most obvious assassination perch in the entire area to remain outside the main security perimeter.
Furthermore, Biden’s Secret Service director ordered law enforcement and counter-snipers OFF the roof the assassin used.
If that weren’t enough, Biden’s security regime also refused to block the line of sight from the assassin’s perch to Trump’s location. When law enforcement radioed in a suspicious person using a laser range finder at the building and even took photos of him, nothing was done to detain the assassin.
The assassin was so obviously a threat that bystanders at the event begged law enforcement to stop him, but nothing happened. And even as snipers on the roof near Trump saw a gunman on the other roof, Biden’s security regime refused to have agents immediately surround Trump or remove him from the stage to protect him from being shot.
Given the lies and nonsense from both Biden’s Department of Homeland Security secretary and his Secret Service director, it’s increasingly difficult to believe this was just a series of independent mistakes (Secret Service director Kim Cheatle at one point this week claimed snipers couldn’t be on the roof because it was sloped and they might fall and hurt themselves). In contrast, when you look at the entire picture, what you see better resembles a deliberate plan to make Trump vulnerable but to appear at first glance to be just a couple of innocent mistakes.
And when you add in how little information we’ve been given about the shooter — apparently the only person on Earth not on the internet — you begin to wonder if maybe a group of people at a different three-letter agency might have been working on a parallel track to find and encourage people to take action against Trump at the very same time he was kept vulnerable by Biden’s regime.
We know this happens because the FBI did it with Gretchen Whitmer: It recruited and urged disturbed individuals to buy weapons and put together a plan to kidnap her. In that case, the FBI wanted a story it could use to slime right-wingers. So it created the story itself.
What happens when an agency like that, or maybe even another three-letter agency, decides instead that it’s had enough of Trump? Some former FBI employees might even call it an “insurance policy.”
Did the Biden Administration want Trump assassinated? That may be a bridge too far, but I think it’s fair to say that the Biden Administration didn’t go out of their way to ensure Trump’s safety. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
There are basically four competing narratives or theories about what led to the assassination attempt against Donald Trump:
1) Through a combination of incompetence and innocent mistakes and garden-variety bureaucratic ineptitude, a gunman was able to penetrate security and take…
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 17, 2024
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
A former classmate of the man who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump recounted a heated political discussion with the shooter, according to Fox News.
Vincent Taormina told Fox News Digital in an interview posted Wednesday that the shooter, Thomas Michael Crooks, considered him “stupid” for supporting Trump. Trump was slightly wounded Saturday during the attempted assassination at a Butler County, Pennsylvania, rally, which left former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore dead and two other attendees wounded. (RELATED: Liberal Media Outlets Claim Trump Contributed To ‘Violent Rhetoric’ After Assassination Attempt)
“I brought up the fact that I’m Hispanic and, you know, I’m for Trump. And he said, ‘Well, you’re Hispanic, so shouldn’t you hate Trump?,’” Taormina recounted. “No. He’s great. He was a great president. He called me stupid – or insinuated that I was stupid.”
“He said, ‘Well, that’s kind of stupid.’ He was a know-it-all,” Taormina continued. “So, like, once again, if he was passionate about something, he would just talk, talk, talk and acted like he knew everything, especially politics-related. He would say it in a tone that was, like, ‘I’m better than you,’ in a type of way, and meanwhile, it’s like, dude, we’re in the same classes.”
So he was the living embodiment of those WE BELIEVE IN SCIENCE signs…with a gun.
Liberal accounts are celebrating the assassination attempt and saying they're sad the shooter missed
This is what we're up against pic.twitter.com/o9lwBjUT8b
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) July 13, 2024
The opening of my comedy show last night a few hours after the shooting if anyone wants to know my thoughts…. pic.twitter.com/bMov0INLEr
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) July 14, 2024
- He “unequivocally” denounced the attempt. “Not funny.”
- “Whoever did this has done so much damage to the left.”
- “They lost a lot of moral high ground in the ‘You’re the violent people.'” (The left hasn’t had that “high ground” for quite some time, as Steve Scalise and Rand Paul can attest.)
- “I’ve got to say this: Trump is the luckiest motherfucker ever to walk the face of the earth.”
- “Biden can’t get through a debate and a bullet can’t stop Trump.”
Joe Scarborough reportedly threatened to quit if MSNBC pull the show again.
US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed Donald Trump’s classified documents case, ruling that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional.
“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon wrote in her decision. “He can be appointed and confirmed through the default method prescribed in the Appointments Clause, as Congress has directed for United States Attorneys throughout American history.”
“Dismissal of this action is the only appropriate solution for the Appointments Clause violation.”
The Democratic Media Complex’s push to derail Trump by any means necessary has all but ensured his election.
I’ve barely touched on the Republican National Convention going on now, but this roundup is already pretty lengthy…
Tags: 2024 Presidential Race, Ann Althouse, Bill Maher, Donald Trump, Elections, FBI, J. D. Vance, Jack Smith, Joe Scarborough, Media Watch, MSNBC, Republican National Convention, Sean Davis, Secret Service, Social Justice Warriors, Thomas Matthew Crooks, Trump Assassination Attempt, Vincent Taormina
The whole sequence of events is so ludicrously unlikely as to indicate near-certainty that it was, at the very least, “allowed” to happen.
Which opens up a whole host of other questions, being as there have to have been several parties involved in making this happen. Some of whom almost have to be close to Trump, or at the least, working within his security detail. He never should have been on that stage, given all the earlier alerts that were supposedly noted.
This cannot possibly be explained as entirely accidental; there are too many interlocking moving pieces that had to be made “mistakenly” for it to be anything else, and at this point? Other than knowing something is seriously very much “off” with this whole thing, I can’t say much beyond “This doesn’t add up…”
Trump’s private personal security guys, who I think he still retains, should have been putting a big red “X” on his taking that stage, given all the screaming deficiencies we’re being told about. Be interesting to know if he has them, still, or if it’s all Secret Service. If that’s the case, he needs to get them back before something even worse happens to him.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Albeit, I’m leaning towards malice myself.
The thing is, this goes way beyond incompetence.
I mentioned it before, but I’ve seen the usual Presidential security setup along with the measure they took, on a goddamn secure military base. That was maybe 15-20 years ago, and I cannot imagine that the Secret Service has lost that much of the bubble, so… WTF?
The other thing you have to marvel at is how perfectly all these things are lining up to make Trump unstoppable in November. It’s almost as if the morons doing all the nefarious planning are actually conspiring on his behalf, which just confuses the hell out of me. Things just do not line up like this, in my experience, without someone’s hand on the scale.
The whole thing is just unfathomably weird, on so many levels. You present me with evidence either way, that this was a massive deliberate conspiracy including MKULTRA brainwashing of the shooter, or that the whole thing was a false-flag put-up job by people behind Trump, and so long as it was convincing and verifiable, I’d have no trouble believing either way.
What I’m having trouble with is accepting that all this “just happened”. The odds against everything lining up “just so”, such that it did? Totally out of the realm of believable. One variable, going another way, and none of this goes down the way it did.
And, the level of “Well, not our problem…” in terms of securing the buildings the shooter used? T-totally un-f*cking-believable. About all they failed to do was offer the little twerp concierge service to get him and his weapon up onto that roof, and if you were to tell me that someone gave him a boost up on to it with his rifle in hand, I’d almost be able to believe it.
Given: our major institutions have failed us for years
Some people’s solution: set up alternative institutions, such as:
… The Univeristy of Austin (started in part by Bari Weiss)
… Twitter (transmogrified by Elon Musk)
Prediction: Trump may decide to forego Secret Service in the future, instead using his own privately funded security team. Various corporations will compete for his detail, the media will describe them as dirty mercenaries (and might even be right), and some VIPs will quietly (or loudly) choose Trump’s security instead of the US Secret Service.
It might be a party-line issue, yet another thing red and blue will squabble over. Leglisators will perform for the cameras, bills will be suggested and maybe passed (to allow as well as to prevent this option), it’ll go to SCOTUS, and the political landscape will have one more way to be messy.
… and *if* he did this, could you really blame him?
I’m not saying I like the idea. Just one of many predictions I hope doesn’t come true.
Off Topic:
Reuters has just posted an investigation of U.S. and NATO shell production which is worth posting to your LinkSwarm tomorrow:
‘Years of miscalculations by U.S., NATO led to dire shell shortage in Ukraine’
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-artillery/
The U.S./NATO production of three major components of artillery ammunition: shell bodies, explosives, and propellants are all bolloxed up. Reuters neglected fuse production, which is another black comedy which has been obscured by security classification.
This investigation only looks back to the late Obama Administration, but it does present a reasonable current sitrep. The current collapse of America’s military industrial base actually commenced during the Clinton Administration.
Kirk, they were trying to fully withdrawn Trump’s Secret Service protection due to his ‘conviction’. Trump isn’t in power, his oppositions are. Are you trying to say that the intelligence institutions that has been against him since day 1 of his administration, the ones that goes hard on propagating the Steele dossier all the suddenly decided to collectively go hard for him?
You have to go back even further on the collapse of US military production: The disastrous “Peace Dividend” years under the first Bush.
I was in the Army at the time, and working for and around a couple of senior ranking guys that had been in the Technology Transfer office at the Pentagon. The Colonel would sit there in his office (his actual position was a place-holder for a Reserve command back East…) and read things like the Early Bird (news digest produced by DOD of all defense-related news), and the various military “trade magazines”. You could hear the gnashing of teeth, as they cut one thing after another, and BRAC, where they cut down bases and facilities, was another.
Clinton rightfully gets a lot of the blame, what with Al Gore selling off parts stocks we later had to buy back for ten-twenty times what we’d sold them for, but the process started under Bush I and his administration of weevils. Many of the decisions made by that set of ass-clowns came back to bite us, and they still are. It wasn’t just Bush and his appointees, either–Congress played a role, particularly in the highly suspicious manner that Loral was first driven into bankruptcy by having all of its contracts zeroed out, and then bought up out of receivership by a bi-partisan group of connected financial types, so they could be sold with all the taxpayer-funded IP to the CCP. That didn’t happen just because a couple of Bush admin people screwed the pooch… This was all the product of what almost had to be deliberate planning, indistinguishable from enemy action. The Clinton admin just put their foot on the accelerator.
Other issue? The number of people that took the early outs during the downsizing. The policies they put in place for that were egregiously bad; the people they should have been keeping? They all got out, leaving behind the dregs. The good ones, the people we needed to have stay in for careers? They saw the coming policies going into place, and voted with their feet. Not the least of the issues was the cuts in the Army’s training/operations budget.
You can see the same thing going on right now, what with how they cut the Army’s fleet of ships and so forth down to the bone. That causeway they screwed up in Gaza? Even fifteen-twenty years ago, it would have been a piece of cake. They cut those ships and units out of the budget, zeroing out the Army’s ability to supply over a beach. They did the same thing to the Army’s rail units back during the Bush/Clinton years.
Sheer idiocy. I don’t really even want to know what they did at places like Watervliet and Rock Island… No doubt, hollowed them the hell out for artillery barrel production and the like. The shells are almost a long-term secondary issue… The real issue is the barrels and the production machinery, both of which have years of lead time to produce.
This is also a product of deliberate stupidity: Even during the height of the Cold War, they never invested enough in the precision ammo stocks or the production facilities for same. When they canned the F-22, for example? They did the same thing; they should have been paying to keep those lines open, if only as a strategic threat. Instead, what’d they do? Shut it all down. Lots of that, back then… They’d cut the forces on the theory that the new systems would enable reductions in manpower, but then they’d never, ever buy enough of the new stuff to be able to make it work. I watched that all during the 1980s, and it goes back to the 1970s and the post-Vietnam Army.
Go take a look at the current size of the basic infantry unit, the squad. When I enlisted, it was 11-13 men, depending on type of unit. When I retired? 7-9, and even lower when you factor in all the people in schools, injured, or whatever else. A lot of units were coming to the NTC with the same actual set of soldiers, just shuffled between units at home station. I remember one guy who’d been to the NTC three times in one year, in three different units.
Hollow forces ain’t new; they’re not just something that started with Clinton, that’s just where they put the pedal to the metal and gutted everything they could get their smarmy little hands on.