#429 - "Netanyahu Link" Suspicious NEW Details in Trump Assassination Plots | Ken Silva

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BJ's, home of the save. - It feels like the last couple years have been, we've been living the script of a bad movie. And the whole Butler assassination attempt seemed to be like the opening act to all of this stuff. And ever since then, it's just like a never ending procession of crazy events that have transpired. And it seems to wipe our memory of the previous event that happened. And it's just like a never ending procession of crazy events that have transpired. And like we were just talking about before we started the show, you did this great investigation into the Butler shooting that happened to Trump in 2024, right? - July 13th. - July 13th, 2024. And no one's really looked into this as far as I'm aware. I know that Tucker did an incredible documentary on this on his YouTube channel that opened up a lot of the questions that were being asked that were not being answered by the FBI. They were being very, they were holding back a lot of the evidence, not being transparent about any of the things that, any of the questions that the public had. I know Joe Kent was kind of involved in this. He kind of questioned what was going on. He got stonewalled. But why don't you just tell people, like first of all, what is your background and how did you get into investigating the Butler assassination? - Yeah, sure. So I've been a reporter actually for almost 15 years, a full time. But the vast majority- - Well, I think I'm a little bit closer. - Yeah. The vast majority of my career, I've been working local news and overseas. Started doing local news in Ohio. Saw a job advertisement to be a crime reporter in the Caribbean. Thought that would be fun. - Caribbean? - Yeah. Moved to the British Virgin Islands in like 2014. - Oh shit. - Thought I'd just spend a year or two there before I go back to the U.S. and try to make my bones as a journalist. Ended up spending vast majority of my 20s down there. I didn't come back to the U.S. until late 2021. And started working in, you know, alternative/conservative libertarian media. So by then, you know, I had missed Russiagate, COVID, 2020 election, January 6th. All these major stories that have defined, you know, the last decade of our political landscape. And so, you know, I did some coverage on those issues, but I was by no means the lead reporter on any of those stories. So when Trump was shot in Butler, grazed by a bull, he's by a bullet, I was watching it at the time. I immediately latched onto it. I said, "Hey, this is kind of the story I want to be the lead guy on." And, you know, just over two years later, the product of that is this book, "The Trump Assassination Plots: What the Investigations Missed and Why It Matters." So yeah, that's my story. - So how did you initially go about digging into this? Did you go contact people that were there that day, on the scene? Did you try to send any FOIAs to people in the government? Like, how did the whole process start out? - All of the above. Yeah, basically I mentioned, you know, I was watching the rally when it happened. I was immediately hooked. And then I'm watching the reporting with the rally goers. They're leaving the site. And I think it's like an ABC reporter asked one of the attendees about what happened. And the attendee mentioned that somebody had mentioned to her, that there were two shooters. There was one up in the water tower that law enforcement also killed. Like two shooters, this is crazy. - Somebody that was on the site said that? - Yeah, somebody that was on the site said that. I've, you know, I've since moved away from the two shooter theory. I don't think there's much to it. But I, you know, I typed up a quick story, you know, reports of a second shooter that went, you know, semi-viral. That's like, this is the night of July 13th. And ever since then, I was hooked. - I was the director of records requests. I was the one who first obtained Thomas Crooks' autopsy and toxicology reports. That was kind of a story in itself about how I got those because his body was sent to another county, Allegheny County, that's where Pittsburgh is. And they conducted the autopsy and toxicology reports. When I found that out, I did FOIAs to both Allegheny County and Butler County. We're kind of pointing at each other. Butler County said, you'll have to get that from our sister county. Allegheny County tells me that, well, we did the autopsy and toxicology, but this is Butler County jurisdiction, so you can't have it from us either. So that was a several month legal battle. Finally won on appeal. I got the reports actually around October 5th when I went to Butler. That's when Trump returned, like, a return rally where Elon Musk was there and it was a lot of fanfare. But I got those reports around that time when I was in Butler. We published those and it's been, you know, a continuous process ever since then. We got the radio communications, transcripts, and a number of other documents that underpin this book. - Oh, wow. I definitely want to get into that toxicology report and that autopsy 'cause that's fascinating. I had not heard about that. - So explain for folks the years before 2024. I think it was starting like as early as 2018 or 2019 when the FBI maintains that there was like no footprint, they found nothing, not even his phone. But essentially what Tucker's investigator found out was that not only did he have a YouTube channel with lots of videos of himself practicing shooting saved in his Google Drive and tons of YouTube comments of him saying crazy, extreme violence. Shit. But they were able to basically uncover that stuff. - Yeah, Tucker published a documentary about this in November 2025 after the FBI had been saying for over a year that Crooks hadn't really communicated with anybody online. There's a little bit of a misconception. People think that the FBI said that he didn't have any online footprint. That's not true. They admitted he had social media accounts and things like that, but they said he was, he didn't communicate with anyone. But the trove of data that Tucker and some other journalists, Miranda Devine, Brianna Morello, they all obtained the same archive that showed that Crooks is openly talking on YouTube videos about things like assassinating politicians, which obviously portend, you know, what he would end up allegedly doing. - Yeah, he's talking about like quote hanging Democrats and like executing politicians in the streets, marching on, walking on Washington and arguing in YouTube comment sections about this stuff. - Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it shows his political transformation such that it was, he was initially, you know, a pro-Trump guy, kind of- - Like militant pro-Trump. - Yeah, talking about like deporting Ilhan Omar, kind of like these cliche boomer talking points. And then COVID hits in 2020. He almost flips where now he's supporting mail-in ballot, you know, lockdowns. You know, people are bashing Trump for how Trump handled the pandemic. - Right. - And so that was bizarre, but, you know, to your point, the more significant comments are the openly terroristic ones. And so that, you don't get to comment that kind of rhetoric on a platform like YouTube without that being flagged by Google. - Or the NSA. - And so it tells you, yeah, he had to have been reported to law enforcement in some capacity, whether that was like an email that just sat in the FBI's database that the agents never followed up on. We don't know. Again, this is him at 16, 17 years old, four years before the shooting. So the significance is unclear, but it does, you know, it tells you a little bit. And moreover, he was communicating with another account called Willie Tepes, who turned out to be operated by an open neo-Nazi in Norway, a member of the Nordic resistance movement, which was flagged by the state department as a terrorist organization. So that's more reason to believe that Crooks had to have been on law enforcement's radar. You don't communicate about violence. Like they're discussing how to overthrow the government. I think Crooks is talking about openly attacking or like doing assassinations and the Nazis, like, no, we can just revolt. Like we have the numbers. And so that kind of conversation gets you flagged And also, isn't it notable that earlier that year, year when he was doing all those crazy commenting on YouTube and connecting with that guy connected to the neo-Nazi group, that the Pentagon rolled out some crazy contracts to a bunch of private sector companies to monitor and like mass surveil social media sites looking specifically for this type of stuff. Sure. And that's been, you know, an initiative that has only expanded from that time through 2024. I mean, when there's a separate case of a guy with a similar profile as Crooks, Jack Teixeira, he was a 20-year-old Air Force, enlisted in the Air Force, and he had access to these classified documents about the war in Ukraine, pretty much, this is early 2022, showing that, you know, it wasn't going as well as what the Biden administration was initially saying. It was showing stuff like, we're spying on Zelensky, we have boots on the ground there. And he leaks that on Discord, kind of just to impress his buddies. But after that, they arrested him for leaking classified information. And they announced like a partnership with Discord. The FBI got involved, like they ramped up their surveillance even more. And we know Crooks did have a Discord, a lot of these mass shooters and school shooters do. So it just, you know, they heavily monitor this. Mm. Do you see any patterns with this flip in political ideology with a kid as young as 16 years old and some of the other things that he's doing, like behavior-wise, with anyone else that we've seen in history who's been involved with, you know, publicly violent events like this? I can't think of anything off the top of my head. It's hard to tell. Because again, this is four years before the shooting. He's a teenager. Teenagers tend to flip. Flip-flop and get radical on certain things. So yeah. I mean, even before I saw Tucker's investigation piece on this, I, the first, my first reaction was like, how is it possible that the NSA or the CIO, whoever surveils social media sites or the internet has not been flat, seen this guy and had a flag pop up in their database? Like that's totally insane. Not even just completely putting aside all this information. I mean, that's the, that's the, that's totally insane. All the events that happened on the ground that day in Pennsylvania. Yeah. I think they would tell you that they're drowning in noise. There's hundreds of people just like crooks that make similar types of comments and it's hard to find the signal from the noise. But of course, you know, even if we're not going to be conspiratorial, it's like, what's the point of living in this surveillance state if they can't stop these kinds of events? Were you ever, were you ever able to learn anything more or was anyone able to learn anything more about this, um, this Tepe, whatever, the guy who was sort of like, you know, like, the guy who was sort of like goading him into or encouraging him to be more violent? Yeah, I, I did track him down. He declined to be interviewed. He did threaten to sue Tucker Carlson, which he never followed up on. And he says that, you know, they never took the conversation in private, which I think is what a lot of people speculate that maybe crooks joined a telegram group or something that he was on and they further conspired. But he said, you know, I, uh, you know, I had this brief interaction. I totally forgot about it. And didn't even realize it was him until Tucker brought it up. So that's his story. And I guess he's sticking to it. Now what do we know about what was going on in Crook's life months leading up to July 2024? You know, by all accounts, he was just preparing to go to a four year university. Uh, he was a very high IQ kid. He graduated high school with a 4.0, went to a community college for engineering, excelled at that. Um, you know, he kind of almost seemed like a sweet kid. He, like one of his projects was printing a 3d chessboard that he inscribed with braille and his mother's legally blind. So I think that's kind of a nice thing to do for your mother. I've got, I obtained some of his community college speeches where he says like, my favorite thing to do is cook with my mother, my sister. He seemed close with them. And one of the most bizarre things that I've heard from him, I don't know if it's true or not, but he was one of the first people that I found was a community, um, community college email that he wrote on June 14th, 2024, asking about the status of his diploma. He had just graduated in May. Again, he was planning to go to a four year university that fall. And he's saying, Hey, I need my diploma. I need proof of graduation. Uh, so I can go to school this fall. This is a less than a month before he turns up dead on a rooftop, uh, really inexplicable. Uh, there are a couple other things that have been, uh, published by the FBI. They started leaking out or trickling out records, thanks to a FOIA lawsuit from judicial watch. Uh, after my book was published, uh, for instance, he was hospitalized in May. Uh, we don't know what's really going on there. This is an FBI memo. This is around the time he graduates. And one of the neighbors says that they see an ambulance pulled up to the crooks household. He walks out following the paramedics. And then the neighbor says that his light was off for the next two weeks with the neighbor, which the neighbor took to mean that he was gone hospitalized for two weeks. And then she's asking crooks when he finally gets home, you know, what happened? I saw you go into the hospital that one night and he tells her that it was for dehydration, which is incredibly bizarre. I, again, this isn't an FBI memo. I don't know what to make of it for two weeks. Why were the lights out? It doesn't, don't his parents live there? His Oh, the lights on his bedroom. Oh, on his bed. I think of like the house, you know, had a vantage point of crooks, his bedroom. So everybody else is around, but that bedroom light stayed off for two weeks, according to the neighbor, according to the FBI agent who interviewed the neighbors. So it's unclear. Annual checkups usually mean weeks of waiting for 10 rushed minutes with your doctor, followed by someone telling you everything looks fine. See you again next year. But normal doesn't answer all the questions that you might have about sleep, hormones, injury, and energy, or even what could become a problem years down the road. That's why I started using superpower. 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Yeah. Yeah. That's just doing my due diligence. I'm sure probably a hundred reporters did. They probably got- Taking a hornet's nest, bro. Yeah. I was with my friend James Rogers, who's actually a documentarian, working on a documentary about the Whitmer kidnap case. But he helped me out on this and I joked, I'm like, make sure to get it in 4k of like the shotgun blast through the stomach. But no, I knew he was home because the, his truck was in the driveway, but he's just hunkering down. I'm sure they're getting bothered. Not anymore, but at the time constantly. There was like, I think TMZ or some paparazzi site caught them going to the grocery store at midnight. It looked like him and possibly Crooks' sister. There was a mask covering it up and he made- Yeah. Find the video of Crooks' sister and dad, right? Going to the grocery store at night. Yeah. That was odd. It would make sense they would want to go at night to avoid people, right? Yeah. I think so. Or something to get up to. And he made like a flipping joke, like, do you have anything to say? And he says, well, I got to pee. But, so that's an odd thing to say, but I can't really read too much into it. Yeah. Were there any public statements they made to investigators or officers that were documented after it, right after it happened? Yes. Do you want me to go into that now or do you want to watch this? Yeah, let's see this. So that's his dad right there. And then that's one of his siblings. That's one of his siblings wearing the hoodie. Yeah. Yeah. So what were the public statements? Yes. He didn't make any public statements, but he was obviously interviewed by law enforcement. On record. Yeah. Basically, you know, the shooting happens, which we'll get into all that later, but he's on the rooftop. They trace his rifle. The ATF does. Using some emergency system. You know, the ATF denies that they have a central registry on everybody who owns a gun. Their story is that they were able to track this rifle in 30 minutes based off of emergency system where they send it to some office in West Virginia that keeps records on gun sales. They traced it to a gun shop that had closed, but they found the records that Crooks' father, Matthew, had bought the rifle, I think in 2013, so, you know, they start their investigation and determination that this is probably Thomas Crooks. They pull his license. Hey, the guy on the roof looks like, you know, the guy on a license. And then they start surveilling the father's house around 9 p.m. that night. Finally, an ATF agent knocks on the father's door around, I believe, 11.50 p.m. And the father opens the door and says, is it true? Is my son the one who tried to kill Trump? And the ATF agent is like, initially taken back, like, that's a weird thing to say. How did you even know that's why we're here? And the father goes, oh, well, CNN just called me 10 minutes ago and asked me about it. So it seems like somebody leaked to the media that this is Thomas. And he finds out about it before law enforcement even knocks on his door. So the ATF agent talks to him for about 20 minutes about Crooks. He says he doesn't really know much about his son or his politics. The son would play the contrarian, just kind of take the opposite side of an argument. Whatever the father and mother would say, he would go against it. He was into history. They were firearms enthusiasts. They would go to the gun range a lot. But that's pretty much all he knew. I think at one point he told the agent, I even asked my son, well, are you gay? Because like, you don't have a girlfriend. And he was kind of offended by that. But that's pretty much the what the father told the ATF agent. And then the FBI shows up and they take over the investigation. And we don't know anything after that. The only reason we know about this with the ATF is because Congress interviewed the ATF agent and published a transcript of that interview. But the FBI has not been interviewed by Congress. So we don't know anything that the father told them other than it's been reported by anonymous sources that the father told the FBI that his son was having a mental breakdown in the last months of his life, which I found odd. First of all, why wouldn't you tell that to the ATF in the first 20 minutes that you guys are talking? And second of all, Crooks actually got that rifle from his father that day, like a couple hours before the shooting. And so it's like, well, if your son is having this mental breakdown, why do you just give him a rifle? Yeah. There's so many parallels between him and the Charlie Kirk shooter. It seems like almost the same ingredients go into both of their backstories, right? They seem both come from families that are gun enthusiasts, shooters, and both have extreme political, allegedly with the Charlie Kirk guy. I don't think that's proven. Political. Political beliefs and backgrounds and both like similar age, right? And it's just so strange. Tyler Robinson was an engineering student too. Both very bright, young men who had like futures ahead of them. And it just, man, it's so strange how similar those guys are. Yeah. I don't know nearly as much about the Charlie Kirk case because I was finishing up my book at the time, but there are some parallels there. Although I will say, that by all accounts, Tyler Robinson was much more sociable. He had friends. We've seen some of his discord chats. He seemed to have a lot of friends. He had this boyfriend, this Lance Twiggs character, where Crooks was a complete loner and really nobody knows anything about Crooks. So he didn't have any friends or anything like that that we know of? Not that we know of. He was friendly with certain people, certain high school classmates, a community college classmate. He was a good friend. He was a good classmate. He worked at this as a dietary aid at a nursing home. They said he was a good worker, but nothing that nobody that would be considered like an actual friend friend. Is that BlackRock thing real? Isn't a BlackRock commercial? It's real. I don't, I wouldn't put too much significance. Just a crazy coincidence? Yeah. So that, you know, BlackRock, they manage teachers' pensions funds, and they did a commercial about that. This again is in like around the 2020 era. And they just go to Bethel Park High School. I guess the teacher asked Crooks, like, are you okay with this? He said, yeah, I'll be in the commercial, sure. And yeah, that's that. I think a number of people have kind of read into that because they think that the second would be Trump assassin, Ryan Ruth, was also in a BlackRock commercial. That would be a hell of a coincidence, but that's not true. That was one of those internet memes that has spread around the world. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true. Everybody thinks it's true, kind of like the Mandela effect. But actually, Ryan Ruth, the second guy, was in an Azoff battalion commercial when he was over volunteering in Ukraine, which we'll get into all that. But I find that actually more interesting than the BlackRock angle with Ruth being in an Azoff commercial. But yeah, the Crooks thing, that is true. Senator Josh Hawley wrote a letter in the aftermath of the shooting to BlackRock saying, seeking more answers. I don't think he ever got a response. What do you got here? Oh, this is the commercial. This is the video. Yeah. He shows up in the first, like, 20 seconds. Yeah, go ahead and play it. There he is. Look at him. Wow, that's crazy. Is he in it again, or is that only that one shot? I haven't checked. Oh, it's only 30 seconds. Look at him. Pause it on. So freaking strange, man. So strange. So to you, like, on the day of the shooting, what was it, July 13th? On the day of July 13th, to you, like, what are the biggest red flags? Yeah, the security failures are pretty, well-documented. So there's, like, two prongs of this case. There's what happened that day with the Secret Service and the local police, and then Thomas Crooks. We don't know hardly anything about Thomas Crooks other than what we just discussed. The security failures are pretty well-known, and they're all highly egregious, borderline suspicious in my view. Let's start, I guess, by the actual site itself. And, Steve, I sent you a diagram. Maybe we can refer to that. Because the first thing to note is that this was at the Butler Farm Show, about 20 acres of open fields. And then there's that complex, the AGR building next door, which is about within 200 yards of where Trump was standing. Right. And that's technically outside of what the Secret Service would consider the site. The actual perimeter. So you can walk around. The AGR building is just a little bit north of where Trump was. And so if you're outside of that chain link fence, you could have a rifle, you could have- Where's the AGR building? It's where, it says shooter. Okay, that's the building he was on. That's where Thomas Crooks was. The one that was really slanted, too dangerous to stand on. Yeah. I think that's what most people remember from this case, is just that absurd excuse by the former Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheadle, that, well, we didn't have snipers posted there because the roof was too sloped, which was, of course, ridiculous. She walked that back, resigned in disgrace. But a lot of people have taken that to be like, well, they didn't have that building covered at all. And that's a little bit untrue. There were Secret Service snipers who were stationed behind Trump. If you're imagining, you're watching that YouTube video of Trump speaking, there was a team behind his right shoulder and a team behind his left shoulder. The team behind his right shoulder, Secret Service sniper team one, they did have responsibility for that AGR building that was eventually used by Crooks as a perch. But you see, there's a real problem here because there were trees in between that team and Thomas Crooks. So that team that had responsibility for the rooftop never actually saw Crooks at all. Now, the other Secret Service sniper team two, which is a little bit south, it would be over Trump's left shoulder. That was the team that eventually put the final bullet through Crooks 15 seconds after the shooting started. And they had a clear view, but their responsibility, as my arrows indicate. So team two was farther away than team one. Yeah. And they're the ones that took him out because they weren't obstructed by trees. That's right. And they had the clear view, but their area of coverage was to the south. So the team, the leader who made this plan was actually suspended for this because it was a pretty shoddy plan. They should have had cross coverage responsibilities where that team two should have been responsible for the rooftop and for north and team one should have been facing south. Although team two did face north over a minute before the shooting and they were aware of what's going on, which is pretty much the biggest scandal of it all. And I'll get to that in about five minutes. But just real quick, noting the perimeter, you know, that rooftop is outside of the actual site. And like I said, you don't have to pass through metal detectors or security or anything to be up there. I mean, I could hit Trump with my driver from that roof. Yeah, that's exactly right. And what we've heard the excuse is, is that the campaign was supposed to park a number of like Penske trucks and farm equipment that would have blocked the line of sight. And the excuse is that the Secret Service shows up that morning, that equipment's not there. And it's just like a lack of leadership initiative where they just let the event go on, even though the campaign didn't do its part. Which, you know, nobody should. Nobody should accept that excuse. It's not sufficient, but that's what they'll tell you for why the line of sight wasn't obscured. Really, the Secret Service agent who planned the security also said that local police told her that the building and that AGR property would be fenced off and posted with law enforcement and that the public wouldn't be allowed onto at all. But local law enforcement denies that. They said, we never told the Secret Service that. So it's literally like a he said, she said situation as far as that goes. So like all leading up to the shooting, you know, the public would go to the chain link fence, watch Trump. Some manager on the property would try to shoo him away and say, you're not allowed to be here. But then, you know, five minutes later, a new group would come and eventually they gave up. And so there were, you know, as the cell phone camera footage has shown, there were like a bunch of people watching from there when the shooting went down. So let's see the security failure. Let me ask you this real quick. Sorry to interrupt. Was the water tower covered? The water tower was covered. Yeah, there were two local cops posted there. Yeah, the water tower in the northeast corner of this diagram. Yeah, the top right. And there were those initially rumored to be another shooter there. But the trajectory just doesn't match. They wouldn't have had a clear shot at Trump. He'd be shooting. Almost straight down. When you were looking at the YouTube video of Trump speaking and when this all went down, that water tower in the background looked a lot farther away than what it actually was. When you go to the property, you're like, whoa, that thing's right there. Like, there's no way somebody could have gotten up there, taken a shot and escape without it being seen. I mean, there's a residential neighborhood behind. And again, like I said, the trajectory doesn't match. But there were rumors, like even law enforcement initially thought that somebody might have been up on the water tower, which is odd in itself. So, and this is why I think something deeper is going on here. Somebody did. My overall thing with this is like the one thing that just keeps me away from like 100% certainty that this was some crazy inside job is that if like a legitimate intelligence thing, like a legit intelligence, military service was combined to the, you know, behind all of this and setting it up, Trump would not be alive. Yeah, that's a good point. And I've kind of waffled on whether this was like if it was a sheer incompetence or something deeper. Could have been some sort of failed sting operation where they were prodding crooks along and monitoring him and then he slipped unnoticed. Maybe they wanted to let him slip unnoticed. Somebody infiltrated the sting operation and intelligence. Agent infiltrated the FBI sting operation. There could be so many layers to it. Yeah, they could be layered. Yeah, I haven't gotten to the bottom of that by any means. I've been using nicotine pouches for a very long time until the negative side effects started to show up. 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After you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. And please support our show and tell them we sent you. And the weird thing about the water tower, not to get too far off on a tangent, is that somebody did call Butler 911 before the shooting to say they saw somebody up on the water tower. And I've, to me, yeah, it's very odd. There was never anybody actually. Up there, like the ladder was with, was, um, the ladder to get up there was raised the whole time. But for, to me, that almost seems like an op, again, total speculation, but like they almost wanted to see some sort of hangout. Yeah. Some sort of misinformation, misdirection to make everybody look at the water tower. Like why, why would you call before the shooting? And that's one of the reasons why the rumor spread is like after the shooting, the dispatcher calls the police on. The site and say, Hey, we had somebody call us before the shooting and say that somebody is up on the water tower. And now law enforcement has to respond to that. They flew a drone over the water tower to like checked it out. Turns out nobody was up there. The whole story doesn't make sense again. Like it doesn't have a clear shot at Trump. But to me, I always thought that that had to have been, uh, some sort of strategic diversion. Yeah, I would think so. Uh, getting back to the security failures. Uh, so crooks got there that morning and we think he probably scoped the place out. And then he drove back to the Pittsburgh area where he picked up the rifle. I mentioned, you know, why would the father have given him the rifle if he was having a mental breakdown, uh, putting that aside, he comes back to Butler and parks North of the AGR building, uh, on a street and then flies a drone for about 15 minutes overhead. Uh, presumably he was kind of getting an aerial. View seeing where the security was and kind of getting the lay of the land. And then he returns the drone to his car. And then about 10 minutes later, the secret service, uh, drone counter drone operator finally gets his equipment up and running. Uh, he had drone detection equipment that was having trouble all morning and early afternoon. Uh, he was initially stationed by the stage. He moves it to secret service command center. Still can't get it working. He calls a one 800 helpline, still no luck. Then he realizes, according to him, uh, the guy, the guy's name is Ed Castro, uh, that the ethernet cable was messed up. So he switches out the cables. All of a sudden the drone detection equipment is up and running about 10 minutes after crooks had just flown his drone, which is the first in a series of, uh, I guess, unfortunate security failures, if we want to call them that. So, and that was, that was about 3:50 PM. Uh, so this parking lot behind the building, the shooter was on, anyone could just park there without going in through any kind of security. Yep. Yep. That's exactly right. That's crazy. Yeah. And a lot of people were parking there, like a lot of rally goers, just because it was like an easier place to park than all the way south, more open parking. Uh, the first reported law enforcement sighting of. Crooks is at 4:26 PM where one of those local snipers, if you see just north of the shooter, there were two local snipers in that one building on the second floor, or there were three initially, and one leaves to go home. And while he's leaving, he sees somebody allegedly lingering on a park bench nearby the parking lot, kind of looking up at where the snipers had been stationed and the local sniper tells his buddies, like, Hey, there's a sniper there. There's this guy down here. He's suspicious. He knows you guys are up there just for your situ situational awareness. You know, this is what's going on. They were on that roof. Uh, they were, they were inside the building inside the second floor. The building crooks was on is one floor. And then that building behind it is the, is a two story building. And those local snipers were in inside. Uh, so this third local sniper. Who's going home, sees the suspicious person. It gets a reported after the shooting that this is the first time they saw crooks, but then cell phone footage emerges that shows crooks walking on the south side of the site at the exact same time that they initially said he was on the park bench. He was walking along vendors row and literally the exact same time. And so one person can't be in two places at one time. And it's never. Been answered. Well, who did they really see lingering on the park bench? Why did they think that was Thomas crooks? It seemed to have been like a lookalike. Why did they view him as suspicious in the first place? Uh, and that's just never been explained other than. then they corrected the record and say, well, no, at 4 26 PM crooks was actually all the way on the other side of the site. Um, one of many false sightings of crooks, like there's a bunch of rally goers who swear that they saw him here, there, and everywhere. And there were some like undercover state police that kind of looked like crooks. There was cell phone footage of him climbing up onto the roof, right? Uh, not climbing onto the roof, but kind of crawling into position with a rifle. Uh, yeah, that was published by TMZ and you know, you hear a lady screaming like he's, he's got a gun, right? Yeah. This is like seconds before the shooting and it actually shows a casing eject from crooks is rifle, which is evidence that the shooting was authentic, but yeah, we'll get to that too. Um, so the first confirmed sighting of Thomas crooks is shortly after five o'clock. And this time he's lingering again, outside of those local snipers, AGR building, uh, the local snipers look down and see somebody lingering around. And this time he has a range finder and the local snipers found this incredibly suspicious. You know, you only have a range finder for a couple of reasons. And, you know, he wasn't there to go golfing. So, uh, they, the local snipers texted the person in the local command center about this. But the local command center leader didn't get the text or didn't read it for maybe another 20 minutes. Finally, they get the text and then they put it out over the radios that, Hey, there was a suspicious person with a range finder. Let's find them. But this is 20 minutes later. Now they don't know where he is. He's kind of disappeared again. Now we're the snipers on that radio channel. Uh, they were on the local radios. The local snipers were, there was channel three, which was like for the traffic cops and the sheriffs and the people on the ground. And then channel four was for those local snipers and like the SWAT team. What about the special forces guys, the special forces, uh, secret service guys? No, they had totally separate radios and a totally separate communication center, which is another egregious failure. Uh, you know, you shouldn't have your local radios totally segregated from the federal radios. They should all be in the same room so they could talk to each other in real time. But what happened is that the local guy would have to call a state trooper in the secret service command center on the cell phone and tell them what's going on. And then the secret service, or sorry, the state trooper would pass that onto the secret service. So it was like literally a game of phone. And now is this standard practice or was this an anomaly just for this event? It was an anomaly. I guess it's happened before, but it's irregular. And in fact, secret service has issued reforms that like this can never happen again. We all got to be in the same command center moving forward. Uh, there are cases where like EMS will be in a separate radio center because they're dealing with people like with heat strokes or other things like that. And so that can be separate. But when you're talking about security, it's all got to be in the same room. And yeah, that was one of the, uh, excuses. Although again, this, I don't know if that was a good excuse. I don't know if that was a good excuse. I don't know if that was a built-in failure or something just chalked up to incompetence. Uh, that morning, the state trooper who was assigned to the secret service command center as like a liaison to the locals, he tried to attend the briefing and he was kicked out, which again, yeah, this is like 10 AM that morning. Did they give him a reason why he was kicked out? Nope. Just like, you know, secret service only that's I, if you want to chalk it up to hubris or they're them just looking down but it's not like he was just a local cop who was dealing with traffic. Like his job was to be in that command center that day and relay information. So getting back to the timeline, uh, they see crooks again, those same local snipers see crooks, nor they're, they're looking out a window facing North and they spot crooks around six o'clock, which is at the same time Trump takes the stage. Uh, the shootings at 6, 11 PM, uh, now we're at 6 PM. They see him again. And apparently crooks knew he had been spotted because he runs off and he runs in between, um, like the two buildings and uses an air conditioning unit to kind of skip, climb up and scale up to the rooftop. But the local sniper thought he had been going all the way around the buildings. So the local sniper tells the, puts it out over the radios that he ran off. He's going around the buildings towards like the gas station up North. So all of the locals converge there. And these are, these are the guys that were in that building right next door. Yeah. Okay. And yeah, so he says, Hey, he's going around the building. He's going towards the gas station when he actually went in between two of the buildings and crawled up. So all the local cops are looking North while, uh, you know, he was already on the rooftop. He had eyes on him. And so they're looking around the gas station and the parking lot area. They can't find him. Finally, a local cop by the water tower sees crooks running from North to South on the roof. And they say, Hey, that guy, uh, he's on the roof. And keep in mind, the secret service hasn't done anything at this point, despite the fact that the local command center got him. So they're looking around the gas station and the parking lot area. They can't find him. They can't find him. They can't find him. So they call the secret service command center and say, Hey, suspicious person with the range finder, you know, the secret service just sits on their hands. Now they call the secret service again and say, Hey, that suspicious guy with the range finder, he's up on the roof. Still the secret service does not put that information over the radios. They don't do anything right now. Trump's talking, he's giving his a little stump speech. You know, you could argue that they should have pulled him down. If there's a suspicious person who had a range finder on the roof, they could have taken Trump off stage at this point, but they still don't do anything. This is crazy. There's like over a dozen people here all staring at this guy freaking out. It's absolutely nuts. And while all this is transpiring, there was a local detective, Tyler Collins. He's at the police station off site. And he's hearing all this chatter on the roof. This detective apparently is a younger, fitter guy. He's like, okay, I'm going to go get him myself. He drives all the way to that parking lot, gets out, has a partner boost him up on the roof. Oh yeah. I remember this video. Yeah. This is on body cam. Yeah. And he looks up and the body cam doesn't show this because it's just, he's facing the building and he doesn't get all the way up. But what he says is that crooks turn and pointed his rifle at him. And so drops down and puts it out over the radios. You know, the suspicious guy on the roof, he's got a gun. And at this point, what time is this? This is like probably 20 seconds before the shooting. Now it's like code red, all hands on deck. And finally the local command center. Is this the video right here? Yeah, I think this is. There was a full screen at Steve. We got audio. That's all right. You can just, you can leave the audio end, but I don't think we need to hear it. We can just. This, if you look, this is actually a 613. This is after the shooting. This is afterwards. Okay. Yeah. It's going to be tough to find because all the cops released their body cams. The locals have been pretty transparent with this to their credit. Okay. This is probably where, when the local cop is bitching, like, Hey, we told them to cover the roof and they didn't. Right. Right. Wow. But so the cop jumps up and says, he gets his buddy to boost him up on the roof. He'd see, he gets a peek up there. Crooks turns around, points the rifle at him. He jumps down immediately or drops down immediately. And then within 20, 30 seconds, he's firing those shots on top. Yeah. Yep. And the local command center leader, uh, he gets this information and you might be wondering, well, why those local snipers inside the building, why didn't they see crooks on the roof? Well, this is another issue with the man system or radio system is that all of this chatter was taking place on channel three about the guy being on the roof. So the secret service snipers on those other two buildings, this team one and team two, weren't getting any of this information. They weren't getting any of this information. Although they did hear chatter from like below that there was something going on. They see cops running around. So they have some awareness because those team one, at least is like focused in that direction. Right? Yeah. And team two repositioned itself a minute after turned around and looked at it. Yeah. Yeah. And the locals inside the building though, they were looking out. One of the local snipers had gone downstairs to help with the search, which is just stupid. Uh, Greg nickel, but the other one, Mike Merco was looking out north, uh, towards where crooks had run off. So he wasn't looking out the window South. If he looked out the window, he would have been able to see crooks. But finally he gets the message 20 seconds before the shooting, that the guy on the roof, or there is a guy on the roof, first of all, this is the first time he learns it. There's a guy with a rifle. And by the time he looks out the window, the shooting's already underway. He can't respond. So I do think that was just like legitimate mix-up and not anything nefarious. A lot of people have wondered about those locals. Also, how much skill do you think it takes for somebody to do a 180 within 20 seconds get those shots off so close? And that's why I think he missed. I think it was why Crooks missed. I think it's a case where he sees the cop climbing up the roof. Oh, crap. And the cops are on to me. High adrenaline probably spikes. Now he knows he's got to get it off now. Also, he goes for a headshot instead of a body shot. And Trump turns his head right at the right time. Luckiest guy in the world. The bullet grazes his ear. Yeah, that's what I think happened. But the biggest scandal is the shooting itself, because what happened is Crooks gets off three distinct shots. It's pop, pop, pop. And then pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Almost like he realizes he missed. So he's just. And there's a pause. And it's like. Yeah. And it's almost like he knew he missed. So now he's just spraying randomly. Yeah, he's going for a Hail Mary at the end. Yeah. But immediately after that eighth shot, you hear a ninth shot that sounds different. That's actually a local cop who's on the ground. Can you play the audio of the event so we can hear the difference, Steve? Yeah. It'll take him a minute. So how long did it take the sniper team one and Secret Service sniper team two to get their scopes on this guy? And did those guys. Have you talked to any of those guys? Did you talk to the guy who actually took out Crooks? He declined to comment. I did reach him by email, the Secret Service sniper. Okay. The local cop, who's the real hero, because as we'll see. If you put the cans on, you'll be able to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's see if we can notice that final shot, like the different sound. And you know, that's a little bit old, that chart. That chart's a couple of months old. And if you want to really see something that said, take a look at what happened. The last one did sound a little bit. It sounded like it was going the other direction. What was that? Secret Service, yeah. Oh, it was that? That was quite a delay. Wait, wait, wait. Play that again. I thought we already heard the final shot. No, the ninth shot came from the local cop on the ground. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. What shot killed him? The sniper on the roof killed him though, right? Finish the job. That's a subject of controversy. Can I take these off? I'm hearing myself. Yeah. Play me the audio one more time, Steve. All the way from the top? Not from the top, just right there. Right before the fire, the shots start. Before this. That was a cop on the ground. We're about to hear the sniper. That was the sniper at the very end. Jeez, I had no idea. Hold, hold. Are you ready? On you. Move. Move. Go. All guys here. All guys here, move to the stair. Stair, get ready. Stair, get ready. Are you ready? Are we good? Where's that photographer? Yeah, I'm looking for him too. He's going to be on the bottom left. Let me get my shoes. Let me get my shoes. I got you, sir. I got you, sir. Let me get my shoes, sir. Hold on. Your head is bloody. Sir, we got to move to the classroom. Move to the classroom. Let me get my shoes. Okay, my shoes out, sir. My shoes. Watch out. Wait, wait, wait. That's the guy right there. The buff guy. The buff guy. The buff guy. Also, the fact they let him stand up like that with his head exposed. Yeah, that's another egregious. That's one of the reasons people think it's staged, which I could, I guess, understand. So I know I had a guy on the podcast the other day who met the photographer, the jacked jujitsu photographer guy who I guess he travels around with Trump everywhere, does all their press stuff. And my buddy who's a journalist, John Ronson, he asked the photographer about it. He's like, hey, what do you think about all these theories that it was all fake? And the guy apparently got really angry at him. Yeah, I share that sentiment, although I don't get angry because Trump's silence on it have kind of allowed these things to fester. Yes. But I think it's pretty silly. I mean, people died. The person who wrote the forward to my book, Jim Copenhaver, he was shot. He still has bullet fragments in his body. Right. Yeah, it's like people that were in the towers that survived 9-11 don't like to hear the 9-11 conspiracy stuff. Right, exactly. And so, again, what we just saw is eight shots from Crooks in the first five seconds. And then the ninth shot came from a guy named Aaron Zalaponi, who's on the Butler SWAT team. He had been deployed 20 seconds before the shooting. And he was in between Trump and the building on the ground in that green, grassy area, literally just in between. He had bullets flying over his head. Wow. Total badass. Just aimed his M4 at Crooks. And we think- A long gun. Yeah. Yeah. He was on the SWAT team. And we think he probably, his shot probably grazed Crooks' ear and shattered the stock of his rifle. Because if you look at Crooks' rifle, there's like a big chunk missing out of the stock. Oh, really? Yeah. And this is all in the first five seconds. And then- Can we find that photo? Is that online? It should be on FBI's site. Okay. Yeah. If you look up like thomascrooksfbi.gov, there are pictures- Find a photo of his rifle. Yeah. Yeah. And so then there are 10 whole seconds passed before the Secret Service sniper finally puts that final bullet into Crooks, which goes into Crooks' jaw, out the other side, back into Crooks' shoulder, and then fragments, and there's two re-exit wounds making- Oh, wow. So this dude was just going handheld with this. And what kind- Is that the sight that was on it? That's Crooks' rifle. Yeah. And there's a red dot on it. It's a red dot. Okay. So it's not like a scope like you would imagine. It doesn't magnify. No. I don't know. What are you missed? Yeah. Right. That's pretty tough, right? I mean- Yeah. 150 yards away. And a lot of people, you know, you could do that at a gun range sitting with a bench on a calm Saturday afternoon. Right. With your gun maybe like resting on something. Yeah. But like quick turnaround like this. With cops chasing you. Yeah. It's not an easy shot. It's not at all. So a skilled shooter or a marksman could easily miss that shot. Yep. And by all accounts, Crooks actually was a pretty good shot. He went to the rifle range all the time. He took a pistol shooting class and somebody who was in the class with him said that he once shot a target from like 50 feet, nine millimeter, so many times that he blew a hole out of the target, like shot the same spot. So he was a pretty serious enthusiast at the very least. But again, back to Zalaponi, the hero in this- Who's Zalaponi, the photographer? No, Zalaponi's the local cop. The local cop with the M4. Who probably shattered Crooks' stock and put an end to this all. And then 10 seconds later, the Secret Service sniper, David King, finally puts that final bullet through Crooks. So if you're keeping track, that's 15 whole seconds after the shooting starts that the Secret Service sniper finally responds. And then 10 seconds later, the Secret Service sniper finally responds. And 10 seconds after the shooting had stopped, like there was just 10 seconds of dead air before you heard that final shot. And nobody has spoken with those snipers on the roof, those Secret Service guys. So Congress did interview him, which makes the scandal even worse in my mind, because maybe you could say he didn't have Crooks in his scope. It took a while to get it cited in. He panicked, something like that. But he initially told the House Investigative Committee that he didn't see Crooks until Crooks had stopped firing. That's what he said. He's like, you know, by the time I saw Crooks, the shooting had stopped. I get him in my scope, blow him away, end of the day. But then he tells that same story to the Senate Homeland Security Committee and some heroic staffer. I still don't know who did this, but this is like a Perry Mason moment where he tells the story, but the staffer pulls out the sniper's own notes that he took down immediately after the event that this committee had obtained from the Secret Service. And the staffer asked David King, well, David, according to your own notes, you say that you saw Crooks crawling into place with an AR-15. So your notes contradict what you're telling us. You actually did see him crawling into place before the shooting. And he insists that his notes are inaccurate. It's his testimony two months later is what the real truth is. But I think for being reasonable here, we should say the notes that you took. Immediately afterwards are probably the more accurate account of the event. And we do have footage. I wish I would have sent it over beforehand, but there was cell phone footage showing that South team and showing David King looking through his scope at the AGR building seven seconds before the shooting started. So really, I remember that you can kind of see he like he like looks up and he looks down. He looks up again. Well, sorry. No, that's the North team is what you saw. Oh, and so that's the they just don't know. It's. It's going on. They're freaking out because they hear shots, but they have no idea because they don't see Crooks. The trees are obstructing everything. Right. So you. So there is footage of the guy actually taking a shot. Yeah. There's somebody in the crowd at a cell phone. And you see if you zoom in, he's looking at through his scope seven seconds before the shooting started. And then when the shooting starts, the cell phone footage moves away and you don't see the sniper actually shoot back. But we know he was looking at his scope in that direction. We know that he was looking at his scope in that direction, but we don't know if he was looking at his scope, but we know that he was looking at his scope in that direction. And we have his own notes that say he saw Crooks crawling into place and it raises like any way you cut this. It's a huge scandal. If we want to be conspiratorial, we have to ask, well, was this sniper told to stand down and let Crooks get off a shot? Even if that's not the case, we have him fibbing to Congress about what happened. And he's still on Trump's security detail. Trump. Uh, after the white house correspondents dinner attack a couple months ago, uh, he's holding a press conference and he references Butler and he references the sniper. He said, Oh, I see David every day. He saved my life at Butler. He responded in four seconds from 400 yards away, like just pulling these numbers out of his ass. Uh, neither one of those things are true. As we just saw, he's right. These 200 yards away and it took him 15 seconds to respond. He's like, yeah, I tell him every day, David, I love you. And so even if we're not being conspiratorial, it's troubling that a Trump doesn't know the facts about the assassination on his own life. But B thinks David King is a hero. And this guy, instead of being reprimanded, uh, the feds all say that he's the only one that shot Crooks. The local Cobb Zalaponi didn't do anything. And David King's the real hero of the day, which as the evidence shows, um, really isn't true. Oh, this is okay. So this is the shot of the guy getting boosted. Boosted up onto the roof. Yeah. Detective Tyler Collins, who is another hero in my book because he's the one that, you know, caused Crooks' adrenaline to spike. So he gets his head up, but you can't see it with the camera. He's on the roof, sees him, jumps down. And he is in full panic mode. Football is back, baby. 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Almost as bad as the sloped roof excuse, everybody's like, that's ridiculous. Why would the Secret Service have to let somebody shoot first before they could return fire? And then similarly to the sloped roof excuse, the Secret Service walked that back and said, no, that's not true. These people had autonomy to respond to threats as they saw it. So the official story is that the snipers had the autonomy to respond to threats. Right. But that initial report from Crabtree is interesting because to me, it's almost like they were A-B testing excuses. Like they float this out there, see that the public doesn't buy it and walk it back. Again, speculative, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's what was going on there. Right. And then walk me through again, what you were briefly describing earlier with after he was killed and like the process of getting him to the medical examiner, the autopsy, the toxicology report and all that stuff. Like what was sketchy with all that? Sure. So the crooks, his body was actually left on the rooftop until the next morning around 6 a.m. Whoa. Which, yeah, I, you know, I'm not an expert on these things. But a lot of people in law enforcement have told me like, that's very bizarre. That's never really been explained. The Corey can't show that on the on our show. So, Tyler, if you're reviewing this, make sure that this does not make the cut. Corey Comparatory, one of the Vic. So from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. the next morning. Yep. Yep. Left on that rooftop. Meanwhile, Corey Comparatory, the firefighter who is tragically murdered. I think it was the fifth shot when he starts shooting wildly. One of the bullets hit a rally goer. He was taken to get autopsied, you know, a couple hours after the shooting. But crooks stayed on that rooftop until the next morning. And then instead of taking him to Butler County for 12 hours, let his body sit there. And I'm sure it went rigor mortis within that time. That's in the autopsy report. In fact, the medical examiner says rigor mortis is setting in. We learned about the wounds, entry wound, exit wound, reentry wound, and then the bullet from the Secret Service sniper, a 300 wind mag, fragments and causes two re-exit wounds. Five wounds in total. The medical examiner, as well as the FBI, say that Aaron Zalaponi, the local cop, never hit crooks at all, which just defies logic. Because after Zalaponi. Zalaponi returned fire, crooks stopped shooting. So the bullet had to. What if it like broke his rifle somehow or something? Yeah, but the medical examiner and the FBI say that's not even the case. Oh, really? Yeah, he didn't even hit the rifle. According to them, the bullet must have just winged over crooks' head. But we know it did something because crooks stopped firing. It immediately stopped crooks' shooting. And Zalaponi swears. I worked with the documentary team. They did a documentary called Butler Under Fire. They swear. Zalaponi swears that I shot him. I saw him stagger back. I definitely hit him. And I, you know, he's the local cop. I have no reason to disbelieve what he says. Right. So, but we'll never know for sure because the medical examiner, Ariel Goldschmidt, released crooks' body for cremation with fragments still inside. The x-ray shows a bunch of fragments. Fragments in the shoulder. And I think that is Zalaponi's 5-5-6 round because the.300 Win Mag fragmented twice and did re-exit wounds, but they've recovered all those fragments. I think those fragments in the shoulder would prove that Zalaponi did hit crooks, but the body was cremated with these fragments still inside, which is like egregious mishandling of evidence for a case this high profile. That was the weird thing with the autopsy. Then we have the same person, Goldschmidt, did a toxicology report, and he took seven specimens, I believe, like blood, urine, eye fluid, bile, and takes these envelope of hair, collects them for analyzing for drugs. But if you read the report, only four of the specimens are listed. There's no results listed for the hair, the eye bile, or one tube of blood. And so, again, it's hard not to be conspiratorial when they don't just list the results. It's like, what did he test positive for psychotropic drugs or something along those lines that they want to keep quiet for political reasons? We don't really know. All that they did say is that he tested negative. Negative for drugs of abuse, things like meth, heroin, fentanyl. Yeah, so he wasn't, yeah, which doesn't tell you much. Like, he wasn't a drug addict, okay. Have you talked to any medical examiners about this? Like, how far this deviates from protocol? Well, the thing is, I have talked to the, yes, and they'll tell you, well, if the cause of death is clear, which in this case it was, you know, gunshot through the head and through the neck and through the shoulder, then no further testing is necessary. No further testing is necessary, but of course. But, like, the timing of it and, like, when he was brought in, when he was cremated, the cleanup crew, like, all that stuff stinks to hell. Like, the Charlie Kirk case is like a debacle when it comes to standard protocol. And there's this guy, Joseph Scott Morgan, who, like, details this all out beautifully and, like, points out, like, you know, okay, like, immediately you cordon off the perimeter. Like, as soon as the body's moved, like, everyone is, like, keeping close track and chain of custody of the body. Okay. All the things that were associated with him, like his gun, the magazine, the shells and all that kind of stuff. So, like, I would just be curious to see, like, how far that deviated from the standard procedural practice. And, again, what was the response you got from the medical examiners you spoke to about the autopsy, or not the autopsy, but the cremation? Like, is that standard? Is the time frame 10 days? It would be standard, but this isn't a standard case. And pretty much the FBI and they had a Pennsylvania State Police trooper were in the room when the autopsy was conducted. But Congress, this is going on. Well, Congress immediately writes the letter to the FBI saying, we want to independently examine all the evidence. Do not destroy anything. And the FBI just flips them the bird. And the FBI allows the body to be released for cremation before members of Congress could examine it themselves. So, you know, they threw a fit, but then they didn't really do anything about it. And the day he was cremated somehow lines up with a Homeland Security investigation. Is that right? There was a Homeland Security counterintelligence. There was a Homeland Security counterintelligence investigation that started, I believe, the day after his cremation. I haven't heard that one, actually. No. I think I saw that in Tucker's documentary, the 30-minute documentary that he put out. I know Tucker goes into them hosing down the building like a day later and using like some special hazardous response team to do that. Right. And, yeah, I mean, I could see this is private property. They want to hose it down, get the blood off there. So I don't really know, you know, if that's necessary. I guess it is unusual that they use these guys who respond to like chemical weapons to do it. It's like, why don't they just have the grunt agents do it? So I guess that was weird. And, again, when I ask about why didn't they do a more comprehensive toxicology in terms of testing for psychotropics and other drugs like that, I'm told like, well, they know the gunshot wound killed him. So why would they test for this type of thing? But to me, that's not. You know, with a case like this, that's not acceptable. We also know he like tested for high levels of lead, which is I was told is probably his drinking water being in like the suburbs of Pittsburgh, a former industrial town. It's probably like from the pipes. Yeah, they got a lot of lead in the drinking water over there in Pittsburgh. It's tough out there. Now, when you watch the interviews of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel being asked about this, they constantly talk. They can't say anything because there's an ongoing investigation or an ongoing court case or something like this. Right. And even when when Kash Patel was asked in front of Congress about this, he just like smugly brushes it off and saying, I cannot answer anything until the trial is over. It'll impede. It'll interfere with the ongoing trial. I almost chalk that up to just Kash being an idiot and more mad at the. Member of Congress for not pressing further at that point. You know, obviously Crooks is dead, but Ryan Ruth's case, the second would-be assassin was still ongoing. And so maybe Kash used that as a proxy to stand in for Crooks. This is the one of the golf course. Yeah. And but yeah, it doesn't make any sense. They did have a grand jury investigation into Crooks for a couple months after the shooting. And initially, I thought that they might be investigating. The parents, because sometimes they'll prosecute the parents for negligently giving their kids guns. But it turns out that they were just using the grand jury to subpoena social media companies and things like that to find out a Crooks's motivations. B, if he was communicating with anybody, they say that they never got to the bottom of either one of those two questions, but they never actually called any witnesses or anything for the grand jury. I really don't know how those things work, but I thought that was odd. Like, can't the Justice Department subpoena this information itself? Why form a grand jury in the first place? Well, Joe Kent stated that he was trying to get a hold of the FBI to get it in because he wanted to know what was in his phone to see if there was any kind of like foreign connection that he can investigate further. And eventually he got back from Dan Bongino and Dan Bongino was like, oh, yeah, we were able to get into it. And he's like, don't worry about it. We got into it. Kent was like, well, what'd you find? He's like, there was nothing on there. Nothing. Yep. Yep. And yeah, Bongino has said, well, Joe Kent, he's working for ODNI. He doesn't have any criminal investigative authorities. So he doesn't have like, you know, what's he doing here in the first place? Just, you know, F off. But Kent was trying to find if there was a foreign nexus. And he does have the responsibility to do that as the head of counterterrorism specifically. Kent was interested in a possible Iranian angle because there was a guy arrested the day before Butler, which is really weird. A Pakistani guy who was allegedly working for the government of Iran to try to kill Trump. And the case is announced about a month later. Everybody assumes it's linked. The FBI says there is no link. And there really isn't. And this is one of those highly controlled sting operations where it was like him, low IQ. Guy surrounded by an informant and two undercover agents posing as hit men. But and we can get into that, too, because that's actually a significant case. But because it's been cited by Trump for his reason for going to war with Iran. But what Kent was doing was he wanted to know if any of those informants might have been in contact with crooks. And I think that's a great question. The defendant himself, who was arrested on July 12th, he didn't speak English. Didn't have any sort of capacity, it seems like. And so I don't think he was talking to crooks at all. But the Iranian angle just makes no sense. No, it does. I mean, yeah, it doesn't. I mean, Iran, their government, at least before the Ayatollah was killed, they would like call Trump before they lob a few missiles into a base like there. Please forgive us. We have to do this for PR for optics. We're not going to. They would go out of their way to make sure they do not maim. They would not maim any United States soldiers or anything like that. Like they were fair. They were not like you can say there's a lot to be said about the regime in Iran. Not great. Right. But like they certainly were not a suicidal nation. No, they're a rational actor. Yeah, sure. For sure. And Kent, though, he was trying to find out whether any of the informants involved in that FBI manufactured Iranian conspiracy, whether any of the FBI informants. I think it's a totally reasonable question to say, well, hey, did any of them have communications with crooks? And that's what Kent wanted to get to the bottom of. And he was stonewalled, stonewalled there. Let's take a quick break. There's a lot more shit I want to get to. But I got to take a leak real quick. And then we'll jump more into like the second assassination attempt. And there's tons of other shit we're going to get to. We'll be right back. Yeah, I mean, my biggest thing about the Iran part of this is if Iran was behind this assassination attempt, then why the hell would the intelligence community block Joe Kent from looking into it? Do you think, you know, we would be at war, the Biden administration would have launched a war if Iran was actually behind Butler or any other authentic assassination attempts. So it really doesn't stand the smell test. Nevertheless, you'll hear a lot of people not only linking to Butler, but citing these other cases of supposed plots against Trump in 2024. But none of those cases stand up to scrutiny. Again, let's go back to this guy arrested on July 12th, 2024. His name is Asif Mershant. If anybody wants to look up this case, his last name is spelled like merchant. He was actually allowed into the country on purpose by the U.S. in April 2024. And according to a reporter named John Solomon, they had some sort of type of almost like Operation Fast and Furious going on, where with Fast and Furious, they're allowing, ATF was allowing illegal. Gun sales to under the auspices of tracking them, see where they're going. Well, here, the Biden administration was allowing people on the terror watch list into the country with the excuse that they wanted to track them and see where they're going, try to track these networks as they do. Yeah, totally normal. So they let him in on purpose and then they immediately introduce him to an FBI informant who was Afghanistan. Man who actually volunteered for the army over there as a translator working with the with the Afghanistan army. And then he comes back here. He becomes an FBI informant, supposedly a leader of a mosque, says, hey, you should drive around this merchant guy. He's new to the country. Help him get acquainted. So the FBI informant is literally like his cab driver. Again, merchant doesn't speak English either, but they do have a meeting. Merchant supposedly proposes something illegal. And so the FBI informant introduces them to two undercover agents who were posing as hit men. Then all three of them take merchant to a strip club and they have some meeting about supposedly either assassinating U.S. politicians, staging protests or stealing documents. And merchant tells them, we'll give you specifics. Meet me in Pakistan in September, 2024. And then they arrest him as he's leaving the country the day before Butler. And so that's all this case amounts to is even if the guy had intent and he really wanted to do something, he'd had no capacity. He had no real plan. Right. No weapons, no money, didn't speak English, didn't have a specific venue or any kind of actual target determined. So it was a highly controlled sting operation. The significance, though, is that the Secret Service did receive intelligence about a week before Butler about a supposed Iranian threat. And that intelligence was this case. But even though the case was totally manufactured, you could argue that the Secret Service should have been on its toes even more if they're being briefed by the FBI about an Iranian threat. And in fact, they did send the Secret Service snipers to Butler in response. In response to this intelligence about an Iranian threat. It was the first time that the Secret Service had its snipers protecting a former president or a candidate in history. Really? Yeah. And that's a crazy coincidence. These are the same guys that waited 15 seconds to return fire. That's the only reason they were there because of that. In history. The first time in history. Usually former presidents or candidates, or maybe not candidates, like Obama might have had Secret Service sniper protection. But former presidents never have it. It's always like the locals on the roof. But they sent him Secret Service snipers specifically in response to the Iranian threat. So that is, again, just a bizarre coincidence that makes their inaction even more suspicious to me. Yeah. And the Iran thing seems to be one of the pieces of this puzzle that connects all. The crazy shit that's been happening over the last two or three years. Specifically with, you know, right after you have that Operation Midnight Hammer in, what was it, June of 2025 when that happened? Leading up to that and immediately after that, you had the loudest, most outspoken voice against any kind of war in Iran, Charlie Kirk, who was going into the Oval Office talking to Trump and being the biggest advocate to stay away from Iran. Who gets publicized. Who gets publicly assassinated in the following September. And then right before we go into this Iran war. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I'd refrain from commenting on Kirk because I don't know. He was kind of supporting it publicly, though. I don't know if he would have been able to stop it, as some people say. I think it would have been him saying, I don't support this war, but I still support the president. That seemed to have been Kirk's M.O. He said he was against war and then he did support Operation Midnight Hammer. Operation Midnight Hammer, though. He said he was against regime change, but then he clarified, oh, I'm not for top-down regime change. I don't want the military to do it, but if there's like an organic uprising in Iran, that's what I want. But I think there was reports of him actually actively going to meet Trump in the Oval Office, like trying to keep him away from doing any kind of real invasion of Iran or anything like that. Yeah. So did Tucker Carlson. Right. Right. And. Yeah, it's like. And then you have all these other times where it seems to be Netanyahu is the one that's warning Trump and using his intelligence to give Trump intelligence or pre-warnings that there's going to be an assassination attempt on his life, which just happened again recently when he had to hide into that food truck or whatever and go on a separate plane to get out of it. So it's like he's embroiled in this weird thing. Between the Israeli government and Iran, where they're constantly trying to point as Iran as the boogeyman to wanting to assassinate Trump. You know, they are the boogeyman. And it all stems from Israel, because I should have mentioned this from the outset, that they were the ones who gave intelligence to the U.S. about this merchant guy who was arrested. Oh, really? Yeah. So the guy arrested on July 12th, Israel tells the U.S. about him, and then the U.S. decides to let him into the country and set him up in this sting operation. So the facts are the facts, is that Israel passes the U.S. intelligence about Merchant. Merchant's the reason why these Secret Service snipers were sent to Butler, and then those same snipers waited 15 seconds. I don't know if there's any intentionality there, but it is what it is, so I can only report the facts. Why are they always so connected? Why are they always so connected to all of these things? Yeah, and I was hesitant to play up the significance of that until this more recent phony story about an Iranian assassination plot against Trump on July 8th, where, yeah, what you said, he was supposed to leave on Air Force One, but then he was secretly smuggled in a catering truck to a military plane, and he flies from Turkey to the U.S. to the U.K., while his staff, including Marco Rubio and reporters, were on Air Force One, and they flew as well, almost serving as decoys. That stemmed from Israeli intelligence that Iran had proxy forces in Turkey who were going to try to shoot down Trump's plane. And we've had multiple reports from the Middle East Eye, Washington Post, New York Times, that this was actually seen by the CIA and Turkish. As total phony intelligence that Israel was giving Trump to try to derail diplomacy, and it turns out that July 8th, the same day he was taken on that secretive plane, is the day he tore up the Memorandum of Understanding and restarted a full-blown war. And so I don't see any coincidence there. I think that's a causality, is that Israel told him, Iran's trying to kill you. And he kind of chimped out and restarted the war. Jesus Christ. And that does raise questions, are all these plots in 2024, did that play into his decision to start a war? Because we saw this that year as well, after the Ryan Ruth attempt. He's still a candidate. It's the final months of his campaign. He starts taking Steve Witkoff's private jet with Susie Wiles, while Trump Force One was being used as a weapon. As a decoy, because they received intelligence that Iran had supposedly smuggled surface-to-air missiles into the U.S. And was, again, going to shoot down Trump Force One. And this is even more. more dubious than the intelligence from July 8th. Because again, no arrests, no documentation. If Iran smuggled surface to air missiles into the US, there would be some documentation and we probably would have gone to war a lot sooner, but it kind of foreshadowed what would happen where they say, Mr. President, we got to put you on this plane with Witkoff because Iran's trying to kill you. There's a history there. If your team doesn't answer a customer's calls, good chances is that customer is just going to move on. I've done it myself. I needed a locksmith. I called three different companies. The third one answered. So the first two guys missed out. 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Try Quo for free, plus 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com. Danny. That's spelled Q-U-O dot com slash Danny. So going back to Butler, another very strange thing about it is that that was a turning point in the campaign leading up to the election where it was like, we thought Trump was probably, you know, there was a good chance that he was going to win this and come back because everyone was sick of Biden and all the COVID era woke crazy shit. But after that happened, it was almost certain. I remember just that feeling in my head. I was like, I'm going to win this. I'm going to win this. And I was like, oh my God, like it's over. Like he's going to win this now. Like it's sealed because you have, you know, it's just like that feeling. Like I, I specifically remember feeling like, okay, this is like maybe going to change. Cause you saw that Republican national convention where Tucker was like the headline speaker and you had a Hulk Hogan and like, he came out with a thing on his ear. He gave this very measured speech, not being a shit talker, not being his typical self being very measured and talking reasonably like, okay, maybe, you know, he had to come to Jesus. And I was like, oh my God, this is going to change. And I was like, oh my God, Jesus. Something happened to him where this is going to change the path that he goes down and he's not going to be this, you know, you know, crazy divisive type guy anymore. Maybe he's going to be like the next JFK. And, and it was crazy how that kind of like sealed the deal for his presidency. But also it's like the way that thing was on his ear and how quickly his ear healed was also just very strange. Because I don't know anything about ballistics, but you know, I know if a bullet does graze your ear, it's probably going to do quite a bit of damage and it's not going to be able to heal in a matter of a couple of weeks to where there's no visible damage to the ear. Well, you could talk to plastic surgeons who might tell you otherwise. Yeah. I mean the bullet, if it cuts, if it just grazes the skin and doesn't actually cut through the cartilage that could heal fast. And he had the bandage on, uh, for, for about two weeks. So there was some discoloration, but to your point, there wasn't any scar, but you know, if this is some sort of PSYOP or something, why wouldn't they have just scarred the ear? I think that almost the fact that there's no scar, you could argue shows that it's authentic because why wouldn't he just have somebody's scars ear. And then you have people like, oh, well, they're just shoving it in your face. They want to do it as a humiliation ritual to the public. And it's like, okay, I don't, I don't know what to say to that. Yeah. It is, it is crazy to think that that could actually be some sort of thing, real thing. Like there's people that claim that there's some biblical verse that says the blood on the ear and the right toe or whatever is some, some weird thing. Right. It doesn't look like his ear got destroyed. It's just got like, and there's also the New York times photo where you can see the bullet trail whizzing by. And that was the second shot from Crooks. Cause you see Trump's, starting to go up to his ear. Yeah. There's no blade or no squib in it. Do you think it's possible that this was planned out with the cooperation of us intelligence or somebody in the U S knew about this? And maybe, maybe Trump knew, maybe Trump didn't know, but like that this was a planned thing and not like a full blown, uh, lone nut. Uh, possible. Sure. Anything's possible. I wouldn't say. What would you say? Like the probability of this being a setup? Uh, like a setup intended for Trump to live and just this be like a PSYOP. Yes. Uh, 0.1% or so. Um, yeah. Keep in mind. You think it's most, you think it's, you think it's most likely that the intent of this operation was to actually kill him? Yeah. Yeah. I would say so. If it, if it is an operation, I mean, it could have just been crooks being manipulated online. Uh, snipers told to stand down. Yeah. That's, I don't know. It's, it's, it's really bizarre. It's really bizarre. Yeah. Uh, but we do know the bullets were real, you know, they were definitely real. Corey comparatory died. Jim Copenhaver was shot. There's still fragments inside of them. David Dutch was also, uh, egregious grievously wounded. They've actually been shot. Uh, we've got the TMZ footage showing crooks shooting. You see a little bit of gas emitting from the rifle as well as, as a casing ejecting. You have the New York times photo showing the second shot winging by, uh, his shoulder. So the New York times would have had to have been in on it. I'm sure some people don't have a hard time, um, believing that, but this is Biden's FBI, Biden's secret service. Um, and then one of my favorite pieces of evidence showing that this is an authentic event is that after the shooting, they take him to Butler, hospital and in the chaos, they actually left Trump's personal doctor behind. And he goes to the hospital and it's Butler doctors who examined him initially. And then they even take one of the Butler doctors on Trump's plane to the next stop. I think it was in New Jersey because, you know, his actual personal doctor was left behind in the chaos. And I would have thought that if this were some sort of stage event, it would have been, you know, it would have been, you know, it would have taken him to the hospital and say, nobody's allowed to see this except Trump's personal doctor for national security reasons. Uh, and then, you know, they would have handled it like that, but it was actually a Butler doctor that treated him. And that Butler doctor would have to be in on it too. I mean, I just, we spent, uh, over an hour talking about the local cops chasing crooks. All that was very authentic. These are local cops that, you know, could be your real people. Uh, you can look them up. There's news reports, like they're not stage actors. You don't have to have, everyone doesn't have to be complicit in it for it to be a setup for it to be some sort of staged event, right? You don't have to let it, the bank tellers don't know what the head of the bank, the CEO of the bank is doing, you know? But what I'm saying is there were several decisions, despite the lack of secret service support, if a few decisions had been made differently, they would have caught crooks before crooks had gone on the roof. Like if they didn't, that local sniper who saw him running said, Hey, he went in between the buildings and then they go there and see that he might've climbed up. They would have apprehended him before he even got off shots. And it would be a non, uh, a non-event. That's true. And to top it off, if this was some sort of big psyop, it got memory hold like a week later. It's like if the mainstream media is complicit, if the Biden administration is complicit, then why wouldn't they play up it as propaganda? They did with January 6th, where that's just piped into your home, uh, for years after it happened, despite, you know, that being not really big of a deal in my opinion, uh, here, it's like nobody wanted to talk about it. So Joe Kent also said on a podcast that he spoke with Trump personally, and he asked Trump if he was satisfied with the investigation and the outcome of everything. And he said, absolutely not. But then publicly, I think on Brett Baer or something, he said that he was totally satisfied with it. So if he's saying something different in public than he's saying in private, I'm going to go with what he's saying in private every single time. Sure. And the timeline's actually pretty weird there. Uh, you know, he takes office in January 2025 over the next couple of weeks, you know, there's all that action, all those executive orders, but reporters are asking him every now and then, when are you going to look into these assassination attempts? And he said, I was expecting to be briefed in a couple of weeks. Finally, he gets the briefing and in early April role, he says, well, hey, my guys tell me that Thomas Crooks, Ryan Ruth, crazy lone wolves, nothing to see there. I guess I'll accept that. But again, if you look at the timeline, Dan Bongino, the former deputy director, had just taken office on March 27th, 2025, and Trump says he's satisfied literally just a week later, which tells you when Bongino gets so mad about Joe Ken and Tucker saying that Trump shut down the investigation and Bongino says, well, Trump was satisfied. Well, Bongino didn't even investigate it himself because he couldn't have, because he took office. And then a week later, Trump says, I guess I'll accept their findings. It's almost like they relied on the previous FBI's investigation instead of actually investigating it themselves. Trump did say, too, in late April that, well, they tell me there's nothing there, but how to. Of course, his parents afford these fancy lawyers. You know, what's going on with strange. Oh, they had fancy lawyers. Yeah, because there was thoughts that they might have been investigated for giving the rifle to Crooks, which I don't know if they actually were, but they lawyered up for sure. And Trump expressed, thought that was weird. I would expect him to be tweeting about this every single fucking day. Yeah, yeah. He did it for. Like, he still talks about it. I mean, he's got a painting of him raising the fist in the White House. Like, he does talk about it every now and then. After the White House Correspondents' Dinner, he went on a tangent and talked about Butler. Oh, did he? Like, he'll bring it up. He doesn't use it cynically, which is almost to his credit, but instead, it's kind of backfired on him and led to these conspiracies, theories that, you know, he's being quiet because he's staged it. But of course, when has the truth ever stopped Trump from just running his mouth? Like, if he did stage it, you know, I would expect him to talk about it more. They're saying, oh, he's quiet about it because he doesn't want to draw attention to it because then more and more people will realize something fishy is going on there. I don't think that's the case. I think if something fishy, if it were a PSYOP, again, he'd be playing it up. Why is he so quiet? That's a good question. One can only speculate there. But I look back at history, how like Richard Nixon. That thunder? Sorry, Richard Nixon. You know, you look back at the JFK assassination, supposedly Richard Nixon asked behind closed doors, you know, what's going on with that? And he has suspicions that the CIA actually killed Kennedy, but he never went public with that. So maybe Trump's taking a page from Nixon. Where he's talking about it behind closed doors, but he's not playing it up publicly. Maybe they threatened his family. Maybe they said, Mr. President, you know, we were monitoring crooks. If this gets out, you know, it'll be the end of the FBI. It'll be a huge blow in confidence to the government. You got to be quiet about this. I really don't know, but I don't think it's because it was staged. Do you think, I mean, pure speculation, or I don't know if you've talked to anybody who would know. I don't know, but is there any reason to believe that he's being quiet about it because he fears there, he fears for his life? Like he fears that if he actually, maybe he does know the answer to this problem or the answer to who is behind this and he, if he exposes it to the public, that it will seal his fate. Yeah. And that's what people like Tucker Carlson have said publicly. I don't know. I only know the timeline of events is that he takes office and he was raising questions about like, Crooks' parents. But then by May, 2025, he says, again, he's in a press scrum. They ask him, Mr. President, have you been briefed? He says, I have, I'm going to keep it to myself. It's very personal. And ever since then, he's been relatively quiet about it. Although he does mention it every now and then. And what was the story? We kind of glossed over this though. There was also evidence that he had been close to some sort of FBI safe house or something. Before the assassination attempt, Crooks? Oh, yeah. That is a geolocation data obtained by the Heritage Foundation's oversight project. Basically, you could buy like ad data from data brokers that show where various devices were at certain times. And what the oversight project found is that there were devices traveling to and from Crooks' residence to like D.C., Plymouth, Massachusetts. And other places. And one of these phones was in a couple hundred yards of an FBI office. Again, I don't know the significance of that. If you go to D.C., you're going to be close to some sort of three-letter agency. Right. But yeah, that is a real, that is a fact. Was there, is there any conventional reasoning behind this? Like, was there any evidence that he had been going to that part of the country near D.C. or anyone visiting him from that part of the country? Oh, we haven't heard anything. And again. There's no way to explain that. We don't, it wasn't his device. It was like a device pinging. Different device. Yeah. Just a device going from Crooks' home to D.C. Could have been anybody. I wish the oversight project would release the raw data, but they haven't done that. And you should be able to figure out who that device belongs to. I'm not like a tech expert, but I've seen people say, I only need like three points to figure out. Who a device belongs to, like time, location, maybe one website, and you can figure out who it is. Yeah. Uh, so. And also, no silverware in their house, is that right? Uh, that, uh, is, I don't think that is right. Oh, really? That's fake? Yeah. Yeah. That has gotten into the zeitgeist because a member of. Bless you. A member of Congress asked about it, uh, in one of the hearings to the Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner. I think it was Eli Crane. Asked about a rumor that when cops had arrived, the kitchen was totally scrubbed. Everything was, um, totally cleaned, but I don't think there's anything to that. When you read the actual transcripts of the first responders to Crooks' home, they described it as kind of cluttered, uh, but nothing about that. Uh, the most interesting thing about the home is that, oh, actually, thanks for jogging my memory, because this is definitely worth mentioning, is that the, uh, ATF agent. The ATF agent goes inside, and he goes to Crooks' bedroom and looks down, and there's a canister of racing fuel and, uh, other bomb-making components, and they immediately evacuated the home and evacuated some of the neighbors from the vicinity. Oh, wow. And that's when, uh, according to the official story, is when they found out that Crooks had been making bombs, they radio that back to the Butler Farm Show, where Crooks' vehicle was, and then they find some little ANFO bombs. And that's when they found out that Crooks' vehicle was, uh, back to the Butler Farm Show, where Crooks' vehicle was, and then they find some little ANFO bombs. Uh, trunk. And that's significance because even though he's like a really smart kid, you usually don't learn how to make bombs by yourself. Uh, to me, that's further evidence that he had been in communication with somebody, or at the very least on federal law enforcement's radar, if you're, you know, Googling and searching how to make ANFO bombs. What evidence has the FBI already released? And what evidence do you think they plan on releasing in the future that will give us more answers to this stuff? They've only released about 300, 400 pages on Thomas Crooks in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from Judicial Watch, which is like this transparency organization. They filed a lawsuit in July 2025 when it became apparent that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino's bureau wouldn't be voluntarily just disclosing this. And we got a status report in January of this year where the FBI says that we have 75,000 pages of documents about Thomas Crooks, and they started releasing them monthly, but it's been like 50 a month for the last, uh, eight months. And so at this rate, it's, we're going to both be long dead before all 75,000 pages are produced. Uh, some of them are under seal from that grant. Some of them are under seal from that grant. Others are just entirely redacted. And so it's really, uh, they're trickling them out and it's, it's upsetting because they should be fully transparent about this. There's nothing, they have nothing to hide. So they haven't released anything that was on his phone. Like we don't know who he was in contact with. We don't have any of his contacts, nothing from his phone. Nope. Absolutely nothing. So far they've. Endless summer escapes start here. Inspired by fan favorites. Like Stranger Things and Squid Game. Beat the heat. Get your tickets today at Netflix.com slash house. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now Coach Hank saves up to 25%. and off grocery store prices. 30 pounds of pasta, 3 cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. He knows teamwork, and BJ's knows savings. This is your home, coach. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for 6 months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. Released FBI 302s, which are like interview reports from witnesses who were there, some people who knew crooks. We found a few interesting tidbits, like him being hospitalized. That came from this document dump. But other than that, no, we don't know anything about his devices. It's so crazy. It's absolutely insane. It's like it's really hard to have hope for any sort of transparency. And it feels like more and more with just Butler and everything else, that's been happening, all the shootings, that we are like living inside of some sort of production, where there's like another layer of society that's above us, pulling the strings and projecting shadows on the walls. And we just live in this lower dimension where we have no idea what's going on behind the curtain, and we never will. And it's almost like behind the curtain, they're giving us a big middle finger, like, fuck you. You're never going to find out, because it's obvious to most people with a rational brain that none of this stuff adds up. Well said. And on top of all these crazy things that are happening, we had like the Epstein stuff drop, where it gave you a little peek behind that curtain, right? Like evidence that there is some sort of another layer of wealthy people that exist, bankers and whatnot, and politicians, not politicians, but, you know, just like global wealth. Wealth. That control, not just us, but governments and intelligence services that are above the governments. And it's just like, where does this rabbit hole end? It's really hard to have any kind of optimism about where we're going in the future of this country with this kind of stuff. And we haven't even gotten into the second assassination attempt, which is just as weird and suspicious as the Butler case, in my opinion. So what was the deal with the second assassination attempt? Ryan Root? Ryan Ruth. Ruth. Yeah, two months after Butler trumps golfing on his Palm Beach course, he's on the fifth hole. His Secret Service team is doing an advance on the next hole. An agent spots somebody in the bushes. The agent initially thinks it's a homeless guy until he realizes that this guy, who turned out to be Ryan Ruth, was pointing a rifle straight at him. So the agent opens up fire. From about 10 feet away, he misses all five shots. Another stellar chapter in Secret Service history. He does cause Ryan Ruth to flee. And Ryan gets in a Nissan Xterra and bolts. And he would have been on the lam. The Secret Service had no idea where he went, if not for a citizen who heard the shots, saw this guy running away, and took down Ruth's license plate. So the citizen gives the license plate information to the local sheriff. Who put out a BOLO, a be on the lookout order. And he's caught about 45 minutes later in Martin County on the I-95. Yeah, 45 minutes later, like I said. So unlike Crooks, we know a lot about Ryan Ruth. All of it is incredibly suspicious. I mean, this is a multiple time felon. He, his first run in with, he had a bunch of misdemeanors. But he had a major run in in 2002. And this got him put on the ATS radar, where he was a construction worker. And he was, he ran a company and he was employing illegal immigrants. And he had a dispute with one of them, threatened him with a 410 shotgun, and then ran away, almost ran over another Mexican guy in his truck. The Mexicans call the police about this. And they find that Ruth had been storing dynamite illegally. At his, you know, construction site. So he gets arrested for explosives, let out on bail. He has another run in with the police about four months later, where he's got like what's described as a Tommy gun sitting in his passenger seat. When the cops pull him over, he runs away from the cops, holds himself up in his house, and they have a standoff for a couple hours before he surrenders. And the upshot of this is that after all of that, he gets probation, like these are serious, serious felonies. And he didn't spend a day in prison, he went to jail for like two days. And that's pretty much it. It's like Charles Manson type shit. That's what, yeah, I have drawn parallels to like the book Chaos, where they show Manson. You read that book? I have read that book. Yeah, it's been about five years. But yeah, I remember them, you know, Manson would always get into trouble. And they just let him out of jail. I couldn't help but think of that. Unbelievable investigative work. Over 20 years. It's a great book. For sure. And a couple of years later, Ruth is again popped for actually fencing stolen equipment from construction sites, where he was paying crackheads to steal, you know, wire, plumbing, all this from sites that he was hired to work at. They find tens of thousands of dollars worth of stolen equipment on Ruth's property. He's again charged with felonies, which triggers. A violation of his previous probation. And also it's like three fresh new charges again, though, he doesn't go to prison. He gets more probation, which it just defies any sort of explanation. I've talked to people who knew him or just, Hey, we just thought he had a good lawyer. Fast forward to 2016, I guess he starts to get politically active. He's initially a pro Trump guy. Jumps on. We'll see Gabbard bandwagon in 2019, 2020. And then I don't know why he was very radicalized, but in when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 is when he winds up his construction business and goes over there to help in the war fighting efforts. Uh, he flies to Poland, crosses the border, volunteers to be a fighter. They look at him as a 58 year old construction worker with no combat experience say, you know. I don't really need you, but maybe you could assist in recruiting volunteers. And so he starts recruiting people like, uh, radical jihadists who had fought against Assad in Syria. He's recruiting, uh, people who fought the Taliban Taliban in Afghanistan. And all this gets him reported to, I counted it one at one time, he gets reported to seven different federal or international agencies because of this recruiting activity. He got reported to the CIA, FBI, DHS, Interpol, Ukraine's federal agencies, uh, the state department even opened an investigation into him for arms trafficking, regulation violations. And that investigation was open at the time of his assassination assassination attempt. So, you know, I really don't need to tell you all this raises questions about how did this guy. He's a man of his word. with Ukrainians, people people overseas that were probably being spied on, you know, by the U.S. agencies using FISA. So that would have been information that would be kept classified is like if a Ukrainian being spied on was talking to Ryan Ruth, you know, that's like a backdoor for how they could spy on Ryan Ruth. But that doesn't have anything to do with his criminal case. That wouldn't be discovery. That would just be other intelligence gathered. I want to know why is there classified information about the assassination attempt itself, which would be his activities in the U.S. Right. Now, what was the the official conclusion about Ryan Ruth? Like what happened? Where is he now? And like, what was the government's explanation? He's in jail in Miami. He was sentenced to life in prison after a trial where, again, he fires his own attorneys and the judge allows him to represent himself, even though he's borderline. Crazy. And yeah, like his opening statement, he goes on a tangent about like Gaza in, you know, world peace and things like that. And the judge warns him like, hey, this this is improper. It has nothing to do with your case. If you do this again, you're going to forfeit your opening statement. Not 30 seconds later, he starts rambling about democracy again. And it's like, all right, you forfeit your opening statement. And the rest of the trial, uh, was pretty much like that. It's just a total clown show. And he's probably going to appeal for a new trial to try to have effective representation, which I think they should do that. But what will probably happen is they'll probably get sent to like a supermax communications management facility where they don't let him talk to any media. Uh, he'll be in solitary confinement 24 seven for the rest of his life. Is that how it is now? He's not allowed to talk to anyone. He had been going on a letter writing. Campaign, uh, like writing all the media outlets again, like signs of mental illness in his writings, uh, nothing too useful. Um, if you want to go interview him, would you be able to, if so, his lawyers want him sent, you know, again, he's what, 60 now they want him sent to like a medium security facility, uh, in North Carolina by his family. And if that's the case, then yes, I'd be able to interview him. Uh, but I suspect, because there's terrorism and like enhancements applied to this case that he'll get sent to like where, uh, Terry Nichols and Ramsey Youssef and Ted Kaczynski were sent the Florence supermax in Colorado where you're totally, uh, walled off from outside life. And how much did you look into the recent one at that dinner where that guy was running through security? Uh, not much. That was when the book was going, to the presses. So I wasn't, it didn't make the book. Uh, the most interesting thing I found about that was that what Trump was said after word at the press conference where he called David King, the secret service sniper, his hero who responded in four seconds, even though it took him actually 15 seconds to respond. Yeah. Yeah, man. It's like a never ending fucking trilogy of all these assassination attempts. There are a couple more bizarre factoids to say about Ryan Ruth. He published, uh, a book that he wrote about his time in Ukraine. And in his book, he says that his best partner was an Israeli person. And I was never able to track down who this Israeli guy was. And, um, yeah, I, it was kind of like, yeah, Ukraine's unwinnable war. So this whole book, he's mostly rambling about democracy and his thoughts about human rights. And I think that's, I think that's a really good thing. And I think that's a really good thing. And he just says in an aside that, you know, I don't believe in ethno states, although my best friend in Ukraine or my best partner helping me in the recruiting efforts was an Israeli Jew. But so he's just said that as an aside, I'm like, Whoa, that's interesting. And obviously we were never able to figure out who that guy was, which I think he never said the guy's name. Nope. He did. He was also talking to several Iranians. And I was, I was able to figure out who those guys were. Those are reporter named Ali Paxad. These are like pro Western guys. Like they're not, they wouldn't be in Ukraine working with the U S if they were, you know, with the Ayatollah, these are like the Iranians that want to overthrow the regime. So, uh, but I was able to figure out who they were. Um, the last real weird anomaly with the Ruth case is the shooting itself. And it turns out that the shooting itself is a really weird story. And it turned out that he had been camping at the golf course since 2:00 AM. So for about 10, 11 hours before the shooting, he was posted up there. And the significance of that is that if you read the final report from Congress about this, it's that Trump's golf course or golf plans were last minute. He told the secret service at 2:00 AM that he wanted to go golf later that day. Yeah. Yeah. And so the secret service is that he had been camping at a truck stop nearby shows up like minutes later. And to me, that raises questions about what's going to leak minutes after he texted his security or the secret service that he wanted to go golfing the next day. And that's verified fact. That's verified fact. If you want to look up the time that Ruth showed up at the golf course, it's the state search warrant because the federal charge of golfing, the federal charge of golfing, the federal charge of golfing, the federal charging papers say that Ruth showed up before Trump made his golf plans, which would be far less interesting. But there was another state search warrant that says that his phone first pinged at like 2:30, which would be 30 minutes after the secret service was informed about the golf plans. And yeah, that's again- Why would they be different? The federal papers came out first and I would assume, wouldn't assume, but I would speculate that maybe that they changed the date or changed the time to make it seem less significant. Yeah. That's nuts. It is nuts. It raises the possibility of a leak. Although again, I don't think anybody explicitly told Ryan Ruth that to go do this, I think it was a manipulation tactic. Again, this is my imagination, but maybe Ruth was at the Waffle House. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Some spook strikes up a conversation with him and says, hey, Trump's going to be at the golf course later today. And then that puts the idea in his brain. And then he goes to the golf course, camps out there for about 10 hours before they find him. The other thing about the look is the location where he was was used by local reporters and paparazzi to take pictures of Trump and where the Bush he was hiding in. Yeah. And so that's probably well known within that little circle of like local journalists. But this is a guy from North Carolina. He'd been living in Hawaii. He has no connections to the area. How did he know that was that was the. Perfect spot to get a line of sight on Trump. That's that's the other major question that was never answered. So bizarre. Yeah. Like I said, this one is just as bad as Butler, but people forget about it because I think it's not as visceral. It wasn't on, you know, it wasn't on video. How did you get into doing this whole thing on the Oklahoma City bombing, this documentary that you're working on? Oh, yeah. How long have you how long have you been looking into what happened in 1995? Have you been like looking at like researching this for a long time or is this like a new thing for you? Serious research about five years. Yeah. Initially, I read a book by Wendy Painting, who helped produce this Tucker Carlson documentary. Mm hmm. She wrote a Ph.D. on Ph.D. thesis on Timothy McVeigh that wound up being this massive 700 page book. Wow. And it's a hell of a book. So I read this and it captured my imagination. And I started looking up these people named in the book, like people who McVeigh knew, people who might have been involved. And, you know, a lot of these guys are still around. This was 30 years ago, but there's a few in prison looking them up in the court records. And there's some active cases still going. So when I found out that this is actually news, reporter, not a historian, but there's some news to report. So I got in touch with a lot of the people who've been researching this case as a historical matter. And it kind of just snowballed from there. And I've been writing about it for about five years. The thing, the details about the Oklahoma City bombing are really crazy when you look at them today, because I mean, it was a media was not a thing. People were, the world was not as connected as it was today. It was a lot easier to get away with shit than it is today. Right. So just based off like the witness test All the stuff that doesn't line up. And, you know, this was almost like one of the first, I mean, this, the Oklahoma City bombing was the biggest domestic terrorism event. Still is. In history. Still is. Right. And he was also, I think it was Scott Horton was the one who actually told me that he was there during the Waco thing, the Waco massacre. Yeah, McVeigh, he was kind of a drifter around that time. He was an Iraq war veteran who came home. He was on the gun show circuit. And the Waco standoff really impacted him. And after, you know, the shootout with the ATF, there was like a 50 day standoff. And he went down there at one point, he's interviewed, I think it was like a college documentary team, interviewed him on camera. Yeah. He's like passing out flyers because he's a pretty radical. He was like an explicit neo-Nazi at the time. Right. Yeah. Right. So what is like the very, very high level conventional government explanation of what happened at Oklahoma City bombing in 1995? Simply Timothy McVeigh delivered a truck bomb on April 19th that exploded at 902, I think 902 or 903. I killed 168 people, including 19 children. He had assistance in constructing the bomb by a fellow veteran named Terry Nichols, who he knew in the military. And then that there was some foreknowledge by Michael Fortier, who was another person he knew in the military and Fortier's wife, Lori, who both turned state's witnesses. But beyond that, that's as far as the conspiracy went. And there was no others involved. But that's just undercut by just so much evidence. And what is the conspiratorial, if you want to put it that way, reason behind why they would do this operation? Well, I think at the very least, it was a failed sting operation. If that's what you mean, what's the reason for them covering up the truth? No. What would be the reason for blowing up that building? Oh, as a revenge for Waco is the idea that McVeigh. McVeigh saw those Branch Davidians being slaughtered by the FBI and that they wanted to do something in revenge because they saw it as a war against the government. And there is something to that. I mean, McVeigh was profoundly impacted by Waco because they use Bradley vehicles like these military tanks to plow down the compound. And McVeigh had been a Bradley gunner. And so when he saw that, he's like, we're doing the same thing we did to the Iraqis. We're doing to our own citizens. And he was part of he slaughtered civilians like it's pretty dark. If you read Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, there's a lot of information about what McVeigh did in Iraq. Basically, they're rolling through the country. There's thousands of Iraqis trying to surrender. They're coming out of the trenches and they put these giant shovels in front of the Bradleys and they plowed dirt. Into the trenches and just rolled over the Iraqis. It's called, if you want to look it up, it's called the Bulldozer Assault or the Bulldozer Massacre. And McVeigh and his friends said that you can hear the bones crunching when we were running them over with our Bradleys. So I think. They buried them alive and then ran them over? Buried them alive. That's the U.S. Iraq War I, the Bulldozer Massacre. And McVeigh was a part of that. And I think when he saw the Bradleys involved in Waco, something really did get triggered within him. But that's only one part of a much larger story. And why. What is the explanation for the John Doe I and the John Doe II? Because there's these two guys that were with them where they went to a auto mechanic store. Yep. Not an auto mechanic store. They went to a place to rent. Rental, yeah. They went to rent that big box truck. And he told the lady he needed a box truck that could tow 5,000 pounds. He went in there. Well, they actually never saw him, right? There was two other people that went in there to get that truck. That's one of the open questions is whether even John Doe I was McVeigh. If you pull up the sketches of John Doe I and John Doe II, it's the left guy looks like McVeigh. And the right guy is someone who the FBI initially put out a manhunt for. We've got clips of Attorney General Janet Reno saying John Doe II, he's. He's on the loose. He's armed and dangerous. Don't try to apprehend him. But the story behind this is. So the truck bomb explodes. The FBI finds this axle with a serial number stamped on it. They immediately suspect that it's a truck bomb due to what had happened at the World Trade Center in, I think, 92. That was a truck bomb. There was a bunch of stuff going on with the IRA in the 70s, Lebanon, attacking U.S. embassies with the. So according to them, I think they had it on surveillance footage and knew right away. But their story is they suspected it as a truck bomb. They track the axle to the manufacturer. The manufacturer tells them that this truck was given to the rental agency. And then they talk to the people at the rental agency who had rented it out. And they give them the description that helped identify McVeigh as well as John Doe II. And there was. There was basically a giant manhunt for John Doe II until the FBI one day said, Oh, no, he actually doesn't exist. This was a case of mistaken witness identification. And they. The debunk, I guess you would say, is that the witnesses were confused with two guys who went in the next day and rented a Ryder truck. But the thing is that the guy who was there, Eldon Elliott, wasn't there the second day when these. The other guys rented the Ryder truck. The owner, right? Yeah. And he went to his grave swearing that it really was McVeigh or some John Doe I and John Doe II. It was not Todd Bunting. The mechanic who was there, who saw the two guys come in, he was like somehow flabbergasted by how much dip this guy had in his mouth. He was dip or like chewing tobacco or something in his lips. He was like staring at this guy's chin the whole time. And he came out and said, like, there's no. There's no resemblance between those guys that were here the next day and the guy that I saw. No, the person that they say rented it the next day, like one of them had a mustache. And as you see, neither John Doe I nor John Doe II have a mustache here. So, and to top that off, like the day of the actual attack, there was over 24 witnesses who saw McVeigh in a Ryder truck with somebody else. Right. We also have documents, FBI documents. FBI documents and Secret Service documents who cite surveillance footage describing two subjects getting out of the truck. And we've got a lawyer named Jesse Trenadue who's still fighting him a freedom of information lawsuit that's been running like 20 years now trying to get this surveillance footage. But the documents show that this footage clearly exists and that they clearly, it captures two people getting out of the truck. Do we have any leads as of today to who. There were a lot of rumors at the time, speculation about who it could have been. The biggest rumor that it was this guy named Michael Brescia, who was a neo-Nazi bank robber. And there's an interesting question or connection there between McVeigh and this bank robbery gang called the Aryan Republican Army. They were robbing banks around the same time with the goal of funding a right-wing revolution. And we do know that McVeigh and these robbers had the same, a nexus point. There's this white supremacist compound called Elohim City. Oh, yeah. We were talking about that with somebody, weren't we? Probably Scott Horton. No, it was, I think it was John Ronson. Oh, yeah. Ronson has investigated this too. And this is the easiest way, other than the John Doe 2 thing, which is very compelling. The nutshell conspiracy of OKC is that there. There was this white supremacist compound called Elohim City. There was an ATF informant there named Carol Howe. And Carol Howe warned her handlers in January 95 that these guys here were casing federal buildings, including the one in Oklahoma City. She gave her handlers warning. This was all confirmed in court. And then, you know, despite the foreknowledge, the attack happens. And to top it off, we know for a fact that McVeigh went to Elohim City. And so did these Aryan Republican Army guys. And to me, that's just overwhelming evidence. Like, you've got an informant who warned about it. You've got the bomber there. And you've got these bank robbers there. Right. And the neo-Nazi gangs and cults were absolutely infiltrated with informants. And they had, you know, counterintelligence guys that were infiltrating all those groups back then. Even John Ronson said that there was a moment when he was in there talking to those guys and investigating. investigating them, those neo-Nazi groups, he said, one point he was surrounded by a bunch of those nazis and one of them goes uh he goes what's your ethnicity or something like that and then he because he's jewish and he was like stunned he was like pause for a second because he didn't know what to say he i think he said uh british something like he said british something and then some other guy can't like looked at him came in and like immediately changed the subject and like diverted attention to something and he he still thinks to that day that that person was like a counterintelligence person trying to save his ass yeah that's that sounds about right with this nazi gang they did all get arrested for the bank robberies but they never connected it to okc despite a whole lot of circumstantial evidence and the reason for that is because uh this uh bank robbery gang some of them were informants the leader actually was a secret service informant named pete langan who they uh the secret service got him out of prison in 91 or 92 because some of his buddies were threatening president bush slash slash clinton and so they told him you know we'll expunge your record help us track down your buddies who are threatening uh bush and clinton and the official story is that instead of doing that he went awol and went on to form the aryan republican army and they wouldn't want to admit this um if they connected it to the bombing then the secret service again like with the assassination attempts would have blood on its hands wow so why would why would the united states government or a faction of the intelligence community inside the u.s be know about this and let it happen i i haven't gone that far i think it could be a case where it was a failed sting operation um i would like to give like they wanted to stop it before it happened yeah and because we know there were two rider trucks uh the one we discussed about jondo one and two was rented out a couple days before the blast but they there were sightings of another rider truck um at the motel mcveigh was at like a week before including like on easter sunday a lot of people saw a rider truck at gary lake in kansas uh these are credible sightings like it's easter sunday you're going to remember it's easter sunday you're going to remember something like that they tell the fbi and so the theory is that the feds put a transponder on the truck that they thought had the bomb the nazis realized about the transponder switch the trucks and then use one as a decoy on the morning of the attack to lead the feds on a wild goose chase while the real bomb happened uh was pulled up next to the murrah building and jondo too is possibly dead he could have actually tried to save the day and the reason i think that is because they found a leg that was never matched to any of the victims uh from the blast and i think it could have been if we're using our imaginations that mcveigh runs off after setting the fuse jondo too goes around back pulls up the thing he's trying to defuse the bomb and as he's climbing up it detonates and maybe uh one of his legs is protected by the lift and doesn't get totally incinerated while the rest of the body is incinerated uh but the reason i say that is because the fbi has never identified this leg despite having the capacity to do so yeah what if it was a if it was a real victim we'd have an identity if it was a criminal with no connection to the feds they could also presumably just be willing to identify it the reason i think it might have been an undercover agent or something like that is because of them refusing to provide information about this jesus christ man and what were you saying earlier that are the that there's ongoing cases that are connected to this right now that you're paying attention to yeah there's a couple uh kathy wilburn sanders who lost two of her grandchildren in the blast she's on this gut wrench yeah it it brings gets the eyes misty for sure uh she's never stopped asking questions as uh the tucker carlson documentary on this shows uh they initially you know she's having other bereaved parents to her house they talk about seeing a bomb squad around the town that leads her to be suspicious and then there's the john doe two stuff and she's been investigating the case ever since then and she actually filed a lawsuit just a couple weeks ago for records that would identify this leg and so really credit to her yeah she just she's got actual lawyers fighting this case um grandmother of okc bombing victims seeks answers about the unidentified leg this was just published literally two days two days ago more than three decades after the oklahoma city bombing the grandmother of two of the youngest victims is seeking wow she's still alive those are those interviews in that documentary are recent yeah kathy's kathy's in the doc um is seeking answers for the human remains that have never been identified kathy sanders lost her grandsons two years um the two-year-old the three-year-old uh colton smith and chase smith in the murrah building daycare uh okay when we turned around and looked at the building my daughter crumbled on her knees and said my babies my babies okay go down to where it's going to talk about i think the americans deserve to know whose leg that was said sanders she's now asking the judge to order a statement um in 1995 they didn't have dna testing and i found out years later they did indeed do some dna testing it was 2015 a company by the name of lab corp did it interesting but they also tested the dna against 168 people that died in the building there was no match to identify the unknown in june 25 a letter a june 25 letter into included with the court filing the oklahoma city attorney general said the dna was not identified and the dna was not identified and the dna was not said office said that the p71 has not been identified p71 means the leg part yeah that's a part 71 um therefore the remain it remains an open case and investigation we can use genetic genealogy and so with a simple a sample of that size i believe that we could get dna from that and be able to put it into a ged match which is a database that utilizes genetic genealogy um and put the sample in there to build a family tree wow yeah if they still have it right i mean i'm sure i don't know why they wouldn't still have it the state did say that they have it and oh really they're not producing records because it's quote an open case which is absurd endless summer escapes start here travel the worlds of netflix irl inspired by fan favorites like stranger things and squid game brave the upside down you face off with the front man play leveled up arcade games shop exclusive merch and enjoy themed food and drinks beat the heat play eat and shop on repeat at netflix house at galleria dallas bring your crew and save get your tickets today at netflix.com slash house tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college that's why she shops at bj's wholesale club saving up to 25 off grocery store prices beef jerky microwave meals laundry pods even they can't screw up have you met my kids and with bj's gas she gets there for less they call me the road warrior this is your home road warrior mom home of the save join for just 20 at bj's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save but yeah my mind because oklahoma city's an open case the bombing's an open case you're just yeah the this leg now what about his lawyer that old dude who he basically he could do anything he could break the attorney client privilege law because he was attacked physically by mcveigh and he was asking mcveigh he's like. why if you allegedly. hitchhiked from the mcdonald's to the rental place if there was a two million dollar bounty why wouldn't that guy give you up yes and he was like. and they face said something to the effect of like how is the truth going to help me and like wouldn't tell him. uh yeah i guess according this is the lawyer stephen jones stephen jones yeah uh you know it's pretty much everybody had an incentive to just pin it on mcveigh including mcveigh who a i think he was a little bit of a narcissist he might have. wanted to be the hero or the martyr for what he saw as his people uh the government obviously just wants it to be him and you know a lot of people you know other people just didn't ask the right questions i guess about what you're referencing. there um about him possibly not even being the one who rented the rider truck uh there jondo one looks like another one of these guys who was at elohim city i named pete ward who did chew tobacco and the face might look like mcveigh but the description is like five foot ten and mcveigh was like six one and really skinny so there yeah there are questions about whether he even actually rented the. the truck that. it's bonkers man yeah well i'll look forward to the rest of those episodes coming out yeah there should be i think about three seasons what other kind of other than you know your recent book on the assassination plots and this project on um the okc stuff what else do you have any other projects in the works uh the next big project is tied to oklahoma city uh pretty much the story itself is so wild but i wanted to know like who were these people who are these networks what what is the history of this overall movement and so i'm gonna write a book about the history of like the right-wing underground and the fbi's infiltration of these groups this goes back to like the 70s and it continues today and so i want to do like a big spanning history that covers ruby ridge uh the aryan republican army okc yeah that's another one john ronson was telling us about mm-hmm yeah that that ruby ridge and okc are very tied together because uh the fbi ridge was like that was like the first waco right like that was very similar to the waco thing yeah it was uh 92 a guy uh randy weaver he was part of the aryan um aryan nations group which is separate from the aryan republican army but it's the same neo-nazi milieu and the fbi had an undercover operation called patriot conspiracy or pat con for short and the fbi had an undercover operation called patriot conspiracy or pat con for short and the fbi had an undercover operation called patriot conspiracy or pat con for short where they were trying to infiltrate this right-wing underground and so they had an atf informant uh convinced randy to sell him two sawed-off shotguns right it was an entrapment yeah it was entrapment they gave him the wrong court date and then when he doesn't show up to court they put a warrant out for him and the marshals responded by sending a SWAT team like 18 months later by the time everybody had kind of forgotten about this they're going on to his property and the family dog sniffs out the marshals and they shoot the dog and uh this kid's his son right yeah sammy weaver the kid responded like they don't know it's marshals they have no reason to believe it again it's 18 months after this atf entrapment thing and so i think the son probably shot just in that general direction the marshals respond by shooting the son and then the guy who was with sammy weaver fired back at the marshals and killed one of them and then they all run back to the house and the fbi hostage rescue team is called in uh the rules of engagement at the time where you can shoot on sight so there was an fbi sniper named lon horiyuchi who shot uh one of the guy weaver's friends the bullet goes through we weaver's friend's arm hits vicky weaver randy weaver's wife while she's holding the baby and yeah kills her on on the spot and yeah just very very tragic and egregious alive he died just a couple years ago okay yeah freaking insanity man the history of this country is just bonkers twilight zone shit it is and so yeah my new uh my next book which probably won't be out for a couple years but that's going to cover that and there are some intimate links to okc that would probably take another hour to unpack yeah for real yeah well thanks for doing this man my pleasure um this is available everywhere uh amazon.com it was published by the libertarian institute assassination plots thank you sir yeah our mutual friend scott horton was generous enough to uh publish that for me that's amazing and you have the forward written by the one of the guys that was shot twice and survived at butler yep amazing well thanks um thank you for the book and we'll make sure we link that below for everyone so they can find it anything else we should tell people about like do you have a website or anything else yeah i'm the editor of a new site called headline usa and you can we just cover the news there from a conservative libertarian angle fantastic well we'll have to do a follow-up when your next book comes out absolutely my yeah thanks again happy to do that yeah all right good night folks endless summer escapes start here travel the world with us and you'll see us in the next book of netflix irl inspired by fan favorites like stranger things and squid game brave the upside down face off with the front man play leveled up arcade games shop exclusive merch and enjoy themed food and drinks beat the heat play eat and shop on repeat at netflix house at galleria dallas bring your crew and save get your tickets today at netflix.com slash house tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college that's why she shops at netflix.com slash house bj's wholesale club saving up to 25 off grocery store prices beef jerky microwave meals laundry pods even they can't screw up have you met my kids and with bj's gas she gets there for less they call me the road warrior this is your home road warrior mom home of the save join for just 20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save