“We can’t trust the FBI and the Secret Service to do an honest and open, transparent investigation,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) over the weekend.
It’s been ten days since Donald Trump and two rallygoers were shot and wounded and another was killed at a rally in Butler, PA. Over those ten days, we have learned more about the shooting from random Twitter/X users and the offices of Senators Johnson and Josh Hawley (R-MO) than we have from the law enforcement agencies that are supposedly “investigating” it. This is unacceptable.
Whenever there is a matter of important public interest that ends up being investigated by law enforcement, a daily press briefing is set up to keep the public in the loop. Examples of this include when a child goes missing in a community, or when there’s a manhunt underway for a dangerous escaped convict. Law enforcement gets so many requests for media interviews during these types of events that it’s easier to set up a briefing at the same time every day that all the news outlets can attend.
Can you think of any event more pressing than the attempted assassination of a former president?
Yet the intelligence agencies (Secret Service and FBI) that are supposedly probing the shooting have not established any daily press briefings. The media also seems oddly reluctant to pressure these agencies for daily briefings.
Instead of keeping the public informed about daily progress in the investigation, we are being subjected to selective leaks from the intel agencies.
This is what they do when they want to try to shape a public narrative. They’ll float some tidbit of information through the Washington Post (the FBI’s favorite source to leak things to) and then try to gauge whether the public will fall for it.
“We couldn’t risk putting agents on a slightly sloped roof!”
The narrative that the intel agencies seem to be trying to fabricate is one of, “Ho-hum, mistakes were made. Oopsie. We’ll get it next time.”
The goal of this is obviously to lull the public into thinking that the shooting only happened because of human error—so that we won’t suspect that the intelligence agencies had a hand in trying to assassinate another American president.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) didn’t mince words on Fox News on Monday.
“We have questions about who exactly this kid was working with,” she stated. “It’s very likely with the equipment that he came up with, the explosives and the detonator, that he was obviously working with someone.”
That’s putting it mildly, but yes. He was obviously working with someone.
We reported last week that Secret Service whistleblowers told Sen. Hawley’s office that more than half of the agents “protecting” Donald Trump were not really Secret Service agents. Most of them were DHS employees playing dress-up. Some of them had likely never touched a gun before.
Over the weekend, Sen. Johnson revealed several big things about the shooting that we hadn’t heard before. For instance, after Thomas Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service counter-sniper, a man in a gray suit climbed up on the roof. He ordered the officers there to text pictures of Crooks’ dead body to an unidentified agent who works at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). The ATF has absolutely nothing to do with this investigation.
Sen. Johnson’s office determined who the ATF agent was, but says he has “gone dark” and they can’t locate him for any questions.
Oh, and the guy in the gray suit was not with the Secret Service. Who was he? Why did he have such an intense interest in Crooks’ dead body? Why did he have pictures of the body sent to an unidentified ATF agent?
Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle testified before the House Oversight Committee on Monday. Nothing that she said inspires confidence that we’ll ever get answers to our most pressing questions on the Trump assassination attempt. This should be the most open and transparent investigation in history and she’s keeping the public in the dark.
Members of both political parties are now calling for Cheatle to resign as Secret Service Director. She and her agency are looking more like suspects in the assassination attempt with every passing day.
