It has been almost two weeks since a 20-year old lone shooter attempted to assassinate former president and presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. While the Secret Service, the ATF and other federal agencies are conducting their own investigations, the FBI is taking the lead in investigating a case that they have classified as an attempted political assassination and an act of domestic terrorism.
So far the results of these official investigations have been rather dismal and sparse. Not so much in terms of the timeline of what happened that day, but in regards to determining how the Secret Service failed to investigate or eliminate a known threat before a shooter open fired on Donald Trump. On Monday July 22nd the director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, appeared before the House Oversight Committee to ostensibly fill Congress in on the progress of the investigation and to answer their questions about what went wrong that day. What Congress and the American people got were vague answers, obfuscations, falsehoods and a lot of outright stonewalling by Cheatle.
In a rare showing of bipartisan unity, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) released a joint letter afterwards saying that Cheatle “failed to answer basic questions” and to reassure the American people that the “Secret Service has learned its lesson and begun to correct its systematic blunders and failures.” Bowing to the the intense pressure from both sides of the aisle Cheatle resigned on Tuesday July 23rd.
The Lack of an Official Narrative Leaves Americans in the Dark
The investigations by the FBI and other federal agencies is still ongoing, and as of this posting we still do not have an “official” account or narrative of what happened on July 13th. In fact most of the revelations about the shooter or the events that day have come from independent news and social media sites. This is why we are still left with numerous unanswered questions and other oddities about that day. None of us here at The Everyman are experts on sniper tactics, the Secret Service, or law enforcement, but we have been around the block a few times and know a bit how the world works. So while we clearly we do not have all of the answers, we do have a few questions:
The Rally
1. Why wasn’t the security staff at the rally properly resourced? Is the Secret Service (SS) and the Government running out of money? Can twenty-two SS agents adequately monitor a crowd of twenty to thirty thousand?
2. Why were many on the security staff not SS agents (they were from the Department of Homeland Security)? Is the Secret Service running out of people?
3. Why wasn’t the roof that was used by the shooter secured in advance of the event? After looking at an aerial map of the site, wouldn’t almost anyone (including non-experts) have highlighted this roof as a potential source of risk?
4. If authorities were present inside of the building that the shooter used before and during the rally, why didn’t they secure it?
5. Why wouldn’t the SS have placed a sniper, or a police officer (or a at least someone with a radio that might include a member of the press or even a volunteer), on one of the roofs of the nearby buildings (or at least around the buildings), in order to keep people from using air conditioner units to crawl onto roofs, particularly those who might be carrying weapons?
6. Does the SS usually completely concede the area outside of their security zone to local law enforcement? Is this typical behavior for the SS as it seeks to protect high-value individuals?
7. Why weren’t the people living in the nearby houses contacted by the SS before the rally? Doesn’t that seem strange?
8. Why didn’t the SS make use of drones (with cameras) to monitor rooftops in the surrounding areas? After all, the shooter did, which is something that is typically prohibited in sensitive sites. Aren’t drones now a common way to monitor an area from above, particularly for important security purposes? Is it normal SS policy not to make use of drones? If so, why doesn’t the SS use drones? Does anyone else besides writers from The Everyman think that they should?
9. Why didn’t the SS make use of canines (who can detect explosives, which the shooter was thought to have handled just before the assassination attempt)?
10. Why didn’t the identification hours before the rally of a person making use of a rangefinder cause a higher level of concern?
11. Given that the police spotted a potential threat on a rooftop 150 yards away at least 20 minutes prior to the beginning of the rally, why didn’t the rally get shut down just before the deadly shots were fired?
12. Did the police convey this information to the SS? Assuming they did, why did the SS leadership allow the former president to take the stage?
13. Immediately before the shooting, why wasn’t the reaction to pointing and shouting (and begging) by multiple civilians trying to call attention to seeing a shooter on the roof with a gun, dealt with in any meaningful way? Why didn’t a person with a rifle on a roof located just outside of the security perimeter cause a greater reaction from the authorities? Given that witnesses expressed shock that the law enforcement officers seem confused, why were they confused (or rather, what were they confused about)?
14. Why didn’t the policeman, who we were told attempted to confront the shooter by climbing up to the roof, rush the shooter? Was the policemen unarmed? If yes, why was the officer unarmed? Why wouldn’t the policeman have gone up to the roof with his weapon drawn, since he would have (or should have) been aware that the suspect had a rifle?
15. Why didn’t the SS officers surround the former president in order to protect him once a man with a gun was noticed on a roof nearby?
16. Did the multiple groups that were working together that day to protect the former president have radios? If yes, why didn’t they use them to communicate with one another?
17. Were the SS snipers required to wait for the shooter to shoot the person that they were protecting before they could return fire? Is this really the procedure that is now followed by the SS (i.e., to let shooters kill their targets, then “take them out” afterwards)? If yes, when did the policy/procedure change at the SS?
18. Why were there so many short-statured SS officers protecting the former president? If part of their job is to use their body to shield the former president from harm when there is danger, wouldn’t these officers only be able to protect his legs and his midsection? Did anyone at the SS give any thought to this? If no, why not?
The Shooter
1. How does a relatively unsophisticated and young (20-year-old) person outsmart an entire team of sophisticated/experienced trained professionals?
2. How did the shooter manage to hide his rifle in advance and have it remain unnoticed by law enforcement and the SS? Don’t the authorities conduct sweeps prior to the event? Was the shooter really that good at hiding things such that he was able to outwit an entire team of professionals?
3. Why did his parents call law enforcement in advance of the shooting in order to report him (a grown man) missing? Isn’t this a bit strange?
4. The shooter was a registered Republican? Has anyone considered that he might have registered as a Republican in order to ensure that he would be able to gain admittance to the Trump rally? Do most Republicans donate their money to left-leaning organizations (such as the Progressive Turnout Project)?
5. The shooter didn’t have any digital footprint? Really? An account of him has been linked to him on the social media site Gab, did the SS not think to check sites other than Facebook?
6. Why is it taking so long to determine a motive? Why does it seem that motives for right-wing shooter are immediately identified, but motives for left-wing shooters are left in limbo and almost never identified?
The Aftermath
1. We were told that the shooter had explosives in his vehicle. What kind were they? And do they indicate anything about how the shooter was able to obtain them?
2. The shooter was found with two phone that were using encrypted apps, yet before all of the interviews have been conducted and before his phones were analyzed, we were told almost immediately that the shooter had acted alone. Does the FBI know this for sure? How?
Comments from the SS Director
1. When asked about the building that the shooter used in his attempt to kill Trump, Kimberly Cheatle answered that the roof of that building was too sloped (i.e., too dangerous) to serve as a placement for SS snipers. But didn’t the roof in question barely have a slope, and wasn’t it almost flat? If this is truly the case, why were government snipers set up on another roof with a steeper slope?
A Lack of Answers Fuels a Lack of Trust
It would be an understatement to say that we are living in contentious and highly polarized times, as polls have consistently shown that trust in our federal institutions is at an all time low. Moreover, Gallup Poll has shown that a similar lack of trust applies equally to the legacy media with about one in three having “very little” or “none at all” trust in them (which strangely enough is the same percentage of Democrats who believe Trump faked his own assassination attempt).
It is at this time that an assassination attempt is made on a former president and the current front runner in the upcoming election. The federal agencies tasked with protecting him and investigating the assassination attempt, when asked for answers and information, presented an air of disinterest and contempt for Congress and the American people. This attitude and lack of transparency is emblematic of exactly why Americans mistrust the government and the media. Granted, we should not rule out Hanlon’s Razor and not mistake "incompetence for malice” when it comes to July 13th, since our key federal agencies are rife with incompetencies in everything from train derailments to the open southern border.
Nonetheless, after seeing Kimberly Cheatle’s and the FBI’s basic lack forthrightness when asked to explain themselves, Americans have every right to suspect malice since they all but basically validated every conspiracy theory, from Q-anon on the right to Blue-Anon on the left, running rampant in our contemporary culture.
In fact, some have even made a cogent case as to why it is not out of the question to think that certain figures in federal agencies would act with ill-intent against former president Trump. Former CIA operative and host of the Wright Report Bryon Dean Wright has stated that whatever the results of the federal investigation end up being, they should not be trusted at face value because of the following reasons,
1. In terms of the Secret Service and Kimberly Cheatle, she stonewalled and lied (and awfully so) in her testimony before the House Oversight Committee, such as her statement about the roof where the shooter was, being too steep for a counter-sniper team there. Moreover, in 2022 the Secret Service was investigating the January 6th riots and when the DHS Inspector General asked the Secret Service for all of their staff’s text messages on that day, and the Secret Service responded by erasing those text messages.
2. When it comes to the FBI, Special Counsel John Durham said in 2023 that the Russian collusion case against Donald Trump should never have been brought against him, and that there were agents in the FBI that were politically biased against Trump. Also when former FBI director James Comey leaked information to the media he set a dangerous example for other FBI employees who had access to confidential information, in that they could also target Trump (or anyone else for that matter) by leaking information without fear of being prosecuted (as Comey was not).
3. Finally, the FBI and the Secret Service are answerable to Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland. Do they have any bias against Trump? We have whistle blowers from the IRS, DOJ, FBI, and the CIA who have all said “yes” they have a bias against Trump and are not averse to targeting him.
Thus, according to Wright, the same agencies that have been charged with investigating the events of July 13th, are the same ones that have (in the past) destroyed evidence in the past (in fact we now know that Cheatle and other SS agents were using encrypted communication apps on that day), are filled with people who are extremely prejudiced against Trump and are aware that if they leak sensitive information they will not be punished. So is it logical to think that they would fail to enact or deliver a truthful analysis of the attempted assassination of Trump? Yes it is.
This is something that is ultimately dangerous to our republic, as it highlights how dysfunctional and decrepit out federal institutions are. It, as is the case with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, begs the question of who is running things. Whoever they are, they most likely to be a group of elected officials who are more concerned with their power, prestige and their pensions than they are serving their country. And while some may see the resignation of Kimberly Cheatle as an important first step in reversing this trend, it is actually not. Again recall that James Comey was never prosecuted for his leaks and even though he was fired, he is now retired and enjoying his federal pension. What is required is the truth and accountability, with dismissal for incompetence and prosecution for malice and corruption.
This is why the upcoming election is so pivotal and why the entrenched deep state is so intent on keeping Trump out of it, because he is upsetting the system which rewards corrupt officials like Comey. Even if that means (as has already been written about on this site) willfully or not, taking or failing to protect the life of Trump. A conclusion that most of us simply do not want to entertain, and yet, here we are. Suffice it to say, it will be a long three months to the election.
Photo Credit- USNews. com