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

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Ken Silva is an investigative journalist & author of The Trump Assassination Plots: What the Investigations Missed and Why It Matters, which examines the investigations into attempts and alleged plots to assassinate Donald Trump. He also publishes independently through Substack, Headline USA and the Libertarian Institute. SPONSORS https://superpower.com - Use code DANNY at checkout for $50 off your membership. https://takeultra.com - Use code DANNY for 15% off. https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/DANNY - Use code DANNY & get $150 if you win your first $5 lineup. https://quo.com/danny - Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://x.com/JD_Cashless Get Ken's book: https://amzn.to/4cAA49s Substack: https://kensilva.substack.com *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Ken's Butler assassination attempt investigation 05:26 - Thomas Crooks' personal YouTube channel 12:29 - Thomas Crooks' life before July 13, 2024 16:11 - What Thomas Crooks' father said publicly 25:09 - Security failures surrounding the Trump sh**ting 33:59 - 2nd sh**ter on the water tower theory 37:12 - False sightings of Crooks 43:06 - When Crooks was officially spotted 50:05 - The 9th shot that took out Thomas Crooks 57:51 - Secret Service sniper David King's false testimony 01:03:57 - Secret Service protocol for pulling the trigger 01:05:29 - Suspicious autopsy of Thomas Crooks 01:13:45 - FBI's public response to Thomas Crooks investigation 01:19:47 - Asif Merchant's assassination plot 01:25:21 - Israel's suspicious intelligence around threats on Trump 01:33:30 - Why Trump assassination was NOT a psyop 01:43:19 - Thomas Crooks' devices tracked to Washington, D. C. 01:46:52 - Unreleased evidence from the Butler shooting 01:50:25 - 2nd assassination attempt by Ryan Routh 02:00:47 - Correspondence dinner assassination attempt 02:02:49 - Most suspicious detail in Routh's assassination attempt 02:06:05 - The 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing 02:12:03 - John Doe #2 02:20:58 - The unidentified leg from Oklahoma City Bombing 02:27:14 - Ruby Ridge Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  It feels like the last couple of 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 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?

• 1:40Speaker 04

  July 13.

• 1:41Danny Jones?

  July 13, 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?

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. So I've been a reporter, actually, for almost 15 years, full-time. But the vast majority of...

• 2:27Danny Jones?

  A little bit closer.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  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, so...

• 2:41Danny Jones?

  Caribbean?

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, moved to the British Virgin Islands in like 2014. Thought I'd just spend, you know, a year or two there before I go back to the US and, you know, try to make my bones as a journalist. Ended up spending, you know, vast majority of my 20s down there. I didn't come back to the US until late 2021 and started working in, you know, alternative slash conservative libertarian media. So by then, you know, I had missed Russiagate, COVID, 2020 election, January 6, 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.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  So when Trump was shot in Butler, grazed 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.

• 3:48Danny Jones?

  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 FOIA's to people in the government? Like, how did the whole process start out?

• 4:04Speaker 04

  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 rallygoers. 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. So I...

• 4:36Danny Jones?

  Somebody that was on the site said that?

• 4:37Speaker 04

  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 13. And ever since then, I was hooked. Did a number of records requests. I was the one who first obtained Thomas Crooks's 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.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  When I found that out, I did FOIA's to both Allegheny County and Butler County. And they were 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 months, a legal battle. Finally won on appeal. I got the reports actually around October 5, when I went to Butler. That's when Trump returned, like the return rally where Elon Musk was there. And it was a lot of fanfare.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  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. I got the radio communications transcripts and another, a number of other documents that underpin this book.

• 6:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. Let's, I definitely want to get into that toxicology report and that autopsy. Because that's fascinating. I had not heard about that. But 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 there, not only, what, 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 violent shit.

• 6:58Danny Jones?

  But they were able to basically uncover that stuff?

• 7:03Speaker 04

  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.

• 7:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's talking about like, quote, hanging Democrats and like, executing politicians in the streets, marching on Washington, and arguing in YouTube comment sections about this stuff.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  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...

• 8:09Danny Jones?

  Like militant pro-Trump?

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, talking about like deporting Ilhan Omar, kind of like these cliche boomer talking points. But, and then COVID hits in 2020, he almost flips, where now he's supporting mail-in ballot, you know, lockdowns, he's trashing Trump for how Trump handled the pandemic. 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.

• 8:49Danny Jones?

  Or the NSA.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  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 a, an open neo-Nazi in Norway, a member of the Nordic resistance movement, which was flagged by the State Department as a terrorist organization.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:55Danny Jones?

  And also, isn't it notable that earlier that 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?

• 10:18Speaker 04

  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 Tashara, 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.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  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 kind of stuff.

• 11:25Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Do you see any patterns with this, 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, with anyone else that we've seen in history who's been involved with, you know, publicly violent events like this?

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Um, I can't think of anything off the top of my head. It's hard to tell. Uh, cause again, this is four years before the shooting. He's a teenager, teenagers tend to flip flop and get radical on certain things. So, yeah.

• 11:57Danny Jones?

  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 CIA, whoever surveils social media sites or the internet has not been seen this guy and had a flag pop up in their database? Like, that's totally insane. Not even, just completely putting aside all the events that happened on the ground that day in Pennsylvania.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  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 kind of events?

• 12:45Danny Jones?

  Were you ever, were you ever able to learn anything more? Or was anyone able to learn anything more about this, um, this Tepes, the guy who was sort of like goading him into or encouraging him to be more violent?

• 12:58Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 13:29Danny Jones?

  Now, what do we know about what was going on in Crooks' life months leading up to July 2024?

• 13:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  And one of the most bizarre things that I found was a 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 of 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

• 15:03Speaker 04

  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.

• 15:12Danny Jones?

  Two months before?

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, 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, 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.

• 15:49Danny Jones?

  Gone for two weeks. Why were the lights out? Doesn't, don't his parents live there?

• 15:53Speaker 04

  His, oh, the lights on his bedroom.

• 15:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, on his bedroom?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  I think of like the house, you know, had a vantage point of Crooks's 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 neighbor. So it's unclear.

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• 17:16Speaker 04

  Uh, no official statements. I went there, I knocked on the door, I left my car.

• 17:22Danny Jones?

  You did?

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, that's just doing my due diligence. I'm sure probably a hundred reporters did.

• 17:27Danny Jones?

  Kicking a hornet's nest, bro.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. I was with my friend, James Rogers, who's actually a documentarian, uh, working on a documentary about the Whitmer kidnapping 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, the, 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, uh, not anymore, but at the time, uh, constantly. Uh, 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's sister. There was a mask covering it up and he made a-

• 18:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, find the video of, of Crooks's 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?

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:21Danny Jones?

  Find a 24 hour or something.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  And he, he made like a flippant joke, like, do you have anything to say? And he says, well, I gotta pee, but, so it's an odd thing to say, but I can't really read too much into it.

• 18:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Were there any public statements they made to investigators or officers that were documented after, right after it happened?

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Yes. Um, do you want me to go into that now or do you want to watch this?

• 18:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, let's see this. So that's his dad right there. And then that's one of his siblings wearing the hoodie.

• 19:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. So what were the public statements?

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Yes. Um, he didn't make any public statements, but he was obviously interviewed by law enforcement.

• 19:08Danny Jones?

  On record.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, basically, you know, the shooting happens, which we'll get into all that later, but uh, he's on the rooftop. They trace his rifle, the ATF does, uh, using some emergency system. Uh, 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. Um, they traced it to a gun shop that had closed, but they found the records that Crooks's father, Matthew, had bought the rifle, I think in 2013. So, you know, they start their

• 19:53Speaker 04

  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 the license. And then they start surveilling the father's house around nine PM that night. Uh, finally, an ATF agent knocks on the father's door around, I believe, 11:50 PM 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

• 20:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  So, uh, the ATF agent talks to him for about 20 minutes about Crooks. Uh, he, he says he doesn't really know much about his son or his politics. Uh, the son would play the contrarian, just to kind of take the opposite side of an argument, whatever the father and mother would say, he would go against it. Uh, he was into history. Uh, they were firearms enthusiasts. They would go to the gun range a lot. Uh, 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? Cause like you don't have a girlfriend. And, uh, he was kind of offended by that. But that's pretty much the extent, uh, that the, what the father told the ATF agent. And then the FBI shows

• 21:30Speaker 04

  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, uh, published a transcript of that interview. But the ATF, or the FBI, excuse me, has not been interviewed by Congress. So we don't know anything that the father, uh, 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

• 22:11Speaker 04

  you guys are talking? And second of all, uh, 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, you know, why'd you just give him a rifle?

• 22:27Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah. There's so many parallels between him and the Charlie Kirk shooter. It seems like almost a car, like the, the same ingredients go into both of their backstories, right? Like they seem both, both like come from families that are like gun enthusiasts, shooters, and like both have like extreme political allegedly with the Charlie Kirk guy. Not, I don't think that's proven. Political beliefs and backgrounds and both like similar age, right? And, uh, it's just so strange.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Tyler Robinson was an engineering student too.

• 23:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, both very bright, young men who had like futures ahead of them. And it just, man, it's so strange how similar those, those guys are.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Uh, 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, there are some parallels there. Although I will say that by all accounts, Tyler Robinson was much more sociable. Like 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, uh, where Crooks was a complete loner and really nobody knows anything about Crooks.

• 23:44Danny Jones?

  So he didn't, so he didn't have any friends or anything that we know of?

• 23:47Speaker 04

  Uh, not that we know of. He was friendly with certain people, certain high school classmates, a community college classmates. Uh, he worked at this, uh, as a dietary aide at a nursing home. They said he was a good worker, but, uh, nothing that, nobody that would be considered like an actual friend friend, you know?

• 24:05Danny Jones?

  Is that BlackRock thing real? It was in a BlackRock commercial?

• 24:08Speaker 04

  It's real. I don't, I wouldn't put too much significance.

• 24:12Danny Jones?

  Just a crazy coincidence?

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah. So that, you know, BlackRock, they manage, uh, teachers pensions funds and they did a commercial about that. Uh, this again is in like around the 2020 era and they just go to Bethel Park High School. Uh, I guess the teacher asked Crooks like, are you okay with this? He said, yeah, I'll be in the commercial. Sure. Um, and yeah, that's that. I think a number of people have, um, kind of read into that because they think that the second would be Trump assassin, Ryan Ruth was also in a BlackRock commercial.

• 24:49Danny Jones?

  What?

• 24:49Speaker 04

  That would be a hell of a coincidence, but that's not true. That was one of those internet memes that has spread. Everybody thinks it's true, kind of like the Mandela effect. But, uh, actually Ryan Ruth, the second guy was in an Azov Battalion commercial when he was over volunteering in Ukraine, which we'll get into all that. Uh, but I, I find that actually more interested, interesting than the BlackRock angle with Ruth being in an Azov commercial. Uh, but yeah, the Crooks thing, that is true. Senator Josh Hawley wrote a letter in the aftermath of the shooting to BlackRock seeking more answers. I don't think he ever got a response. So.

• 25:28Danny Jones?

  What do you got here? Oh, this is the commercial. This is the video. This is the commercial? Yeah.

• 25:34Danny Jones?

  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? Uh, I haven't checked. Oh, it's only 30 seconds.

• 25:53Danny Jones?

  Look at him. Pause it on him.

• 26:01Danny Jones?

  So freaking strange, man. So strange. So to you, like, on the day of the shooting, what was it? Uh, July 13th? On the day of July 13th, to you, like, what are the biggest red flags?

• 26:22Speaker 04

  Uh, 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, uh, pretty well known and they're all highly egregious, borderline suspicious in my view. Uh, let's start, um, I guess by the actual site itself. And, uh, Steve, I sent you a diagram. Maybe we can refer to that. Uh, because the first thing to note is that this was at the Butler Farm Show,

• 27:05Speaker 04

  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. And that's technically outside of what the Secret Service would consider the site, the actual perimeter. So you can walk around, uh, 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.

• 27:35Danny Jones?

  Where's the AGR building?

• 27:37Speaker 04

  Uh, it's where it says shooter. That's where Thomas Crooks was.

• 27:41Danny Jones?

  The one that was really slanted, too dangerous to stand on.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think that's what most people remember, uh, 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. Uh, 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

• 28:24Speaker 04

  shoulder, Secret Service Sniper Team One, they did have responsibility for that AGR building that was eventually used by Crooks as a perch.

• 28:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Uh, but you see, there's a real problem here because there were trees in between that team and Thomas Crooks. So they, that team that had responsibility for the rooftop, never actually saw Crooks at all. Now, the other.

• 28:51Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. Secret Service Sniper Team Two, which is a little bit south, it would be over Trump's left shoulder. They, that was the team that eventually put the final bullet through Crooks, uh, 15 seconds after the shooting started and they had a clear view, but their responsibility, as my arrow indicates.

• 29:10Danny Jones?

  They were on, so team two was farther away than team one.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:14Danny Jones?

  And they're the ones that took him out because they weren't obstructed by trees.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  That's right. And they had the clear view, but their area of coverage was to the south. So the team leader who made this plan was actually suspended for this because it was, uh, you know, a pretty shoddy plan. What, they should have had cross coverage responsibilities where that team two had, should have been responsible for the rooftop and for north and team one should have been facing south. Uh, although Team Two did face north over a minute before the shooting and they were aware of what's going on, which, um, you know, is pretty much the biggest scandal of it all. And I'll get to that in about

• 29:59Speaker 04

  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.

• 30:14Danny Jones?

  I mean, I could hit Trump with my driver from that roof.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's what we've heard, the excuse is.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  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 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, the Secret Service agent who planned the security also said that local police told her that

• 31:04Speaker 04

  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, 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 is shown, there were like a bunch of people watching from there when the shooting went down.

• 31:48Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  Uh, let's see, the security failures-

• 31:52Danny Jones?

  Let me ask you this real quick. Sorry to interrupt. Was the water tower covered?

• 31:56Speaker 04

  The water tower was covered. Yeah, there were two local cops posted there. Yeah, the water tower in the northeast corner of this diagram.

• 32:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the top right.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  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 escaped without it being seen. I mean, there's a residential neighborhood behind. And again, like I said, the trajectory doesn't match.

• 32:47Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  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-

• 33:01Danny Jones?

  My, my overall thing with this is like, the, 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 this and setting it up, Trump would not be alive.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good point. And I've kind of waffled on whether this was-

• 33:29Danny Jones?

  Like if it was a-

• 33:30Speaker 04

  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, an intelligence agent infiltrated the FBI sting operation-

• 33:50Danny Jones?

  There could be so many layers to it.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it could be layered. Uh, yeah, I haven't gotten to the bottom of that by any means.

• 33:57Danny Jones?

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• 34:59Speaker 04

  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-

• 35:30Danny Jones?

  A limited hangout.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, some sort of misinformation, misdirection to make everybody look at the water tower.

• 35:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  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's up on the water tower. And now law enforcement has to respond to that. They flew a drone over the water tower, 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 some sort of-

• 36:10Danny Jones?

  Strategic diversion.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  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? Putting that aside, he comes back to Butler and parks north of the AGR building, uh, on a, 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,

• 36:57Speaker 04

  the Secret Service 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 1-800 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

• 37:38Speaker 04

  drone, which is the first in a series of, I guess, unfortunate security failures, if we want to call them that. So, and that, that was about 3:50 PM.

• 37:52Danny Jones?

  So this parking lot behind the building the shooter was on, anyone could just park there without going in through any kind of security?

• 37:59Speaker 04

  Yep. Yep. That's exactly right.

• 38:02Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And a lot of people were parking there, like a lot of rallygoers, 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.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  And the local sniper tells his buddies, like, hey, there's this guy down here. He's suspicious. He knows you guys are up there. Just for your situational awareness, you know, this is what's going on.

• 38:56Danny Jones?

  They were on that roof?

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Uh, they were, they were inside the building. Yeah, 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.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  So this third local sniper who's going home sees this suspicious person. It gets reported after the shooting that this is the first time they saw Crooks. But then cellphone 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 at 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 look alike. Why did they view him as suspicious in the first place?

• 39:57Speaker 04

  And that's just never been explained, other than 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.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  One of many false sightings of Crooks. Like, there's a bunch of rallygoers who swear that they saw him here, there and everywhere. And there were some like undercover state police that kind of looked like Crooks.

• 40:23Danny Jones?

  There was cellphone footage of him climbing up onto the roof, right?

• 40:27Speaker 04

  Not climbing onto the roof, but kind of crawling into position with a rifle. Yeah, that was published by TMZ and, you know, you hear a lady screaming like he's, he's got a gun.

• 40:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is like seconds before the shooting. And it actually shows a casing eject from Crooks's rifle, which is evidence that the shooting was authentic, but we'll get to that.

• 40:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, does it really?

• 40:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll get to that, too. So the first confirmed sighting of Thomas Crooks is shortly after 5 o'clock. And this time he's lingering again outside of those local sniper's AGR building. The local snipers look down and see somebody lingering around. And this time he has a rangefinder. And the local snipers found this incredibly suspicious. You know, you only have a rangefinder for a couple of reasons. You know, he wasn't there to go golfing.

• 41:22Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  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 rangefinder, let's find him. But this is 20 minutes later. Now they don't know where he is. He's kind of disappeared again.

• 41:51Danny Jones?

  Now, were the snipers on that radio channel?

• 41:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:09Danny Jones?

  What about the special forces guys? The special forces, uh, secret service guys?

• 42:14Speaker 04

  No, they had totally separate radios and a totally separate communication center, which is another egregious failure. 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 cellphone and tell them what's going on. And then the secret service, or sorry, the state trooper would pass that on to the secret service. So it was like literally a game of phone and.

• 42:51Danny Jones?

  Now, is this standard practice? Or was this an anomaly just for this event?

• 42:55Speaker 04

  It was an anomaly. I guess it's happened before, but it's a regular. 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.

• 43:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  And yeah, that was one of the excuses, although again, this, I don't know if that was a built in failure or something just chalked up to incompetence. 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 is.

• 43:44Danny Jones?

  Kicked out?

• 43:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. This is like 10 AM that morning.

• 43:48Danny Jones?

  Did they give him a reason why he was kicked out?

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Nope, just like, you know, secret service only. That's, I, if you want to chalk it up to hubris or them just looking down on the locals. 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.

• 44:06Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  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 6 o'clock, which is at the same time Trump takes the stage. Uh, the shooting's 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, uh, 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.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  So the local sniper tells, 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.

• 45:05Danny Jones?

  And these are, these are the guys that were in that building right next door?

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:09Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 45:09Speaker 04

  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.

• 45:26Danny Jones?

  He had eyes on him. And this is at 6 o'clock, 11 minutes before.

• 45:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:30Danny Jones?

  That he got, he took, got the shots off.

• 45:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, but so now they, 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 guy did call the secret service command center and say, hey, suspicious person with a rangefinder. 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 rangefinder, he's up on the roof.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Still, the secret service does not put that information over the radios. They don't do anything.

• 46:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  And now Trump's talking, he's giving his little stump speech. You know, you could argue that they should have pulled him down. If there's a suspicious person who had a rangefinder on the roof, they could have taken Trump off stage at this point, but they still don't do anything.

• 46:35Danny Jones?

  This is crazy. There's like over a dozen people here all staring at this guy freaking out.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, 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 local radios about a suspicious guy and now he's on the roof. Uh, this detective, apparently he's a younger, fitter guy. He's like, okay, I'm going to go get him myself. Uh, he drives all the way to that parking lot, gets out, has a partner boost him up on the roof.

• 47:11Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, I remember this video.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:12Danny Jones?

  This is on video, right?

• 47:13Speaker 04

  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 turned and pointed his rifle at him. And so the cop 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, it's.

• 47:36Danny Jones?

  What time is this?

• 47:37Speaker 04

  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.

• 47:48Danny Jones?

  Is this the video right here?

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think this is, there was.

• 47:52Danny Jones?

  Full screen it, Steve?

• 48:01Danny Jones?

  That's all right. You can just, you can leave the audio in, but I don't think we need to hear it. We can just.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  Uh, this, uh, if you look, this is actually a six thirteen. This is after the shooting.

• 48:08Danny Jones?

  Afterwards.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's gonna be tough to find because all the cops released their body cams. Uh, the locals have been pretty transparent with this to their credit.

• 48:17Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  This is probably where, when the local cop is bitching like, hey, we told them to cover the roof and they didn't.

• 48:24Danny Jones?

  Right. Wow.

• 48:26Speaker 04

  But.

• 48:26Danny Jones?

  So the cop jumps up there, he gets his buddy to boost him up on the roof. He sees, gets a peek up there. Crooks turns around, points the rifle at him. He jumps down immediately. Or drops down immediately and then within twenty, thirty seconds, he's firing those shots on Trump.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  Yep. And the local command center leader, uh, he gets this information. And you, 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 local command system or radio system. Is that all this chatter was taking place on channel three about the guy being on the roof.

• 49:06Danny Jones?

  So the secret service snipers on those other two buildings, uh, team one and team two weren't getting any of this information.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 49:21Danny Jones?

  Because those, team one at least is like focused in that direction, right?

• 49:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And team two repositioned itself a minute after.

• 49:30Danny Jones?

  Turned around and looked at it. Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  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 Murco was looking out north. 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 twenty 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.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  Uh, so I do think that was just like legitimate mix up and not anything nefarious. A lot of people have wondered about those locals. I.

• 50:21Danny Jones?

  Also, the, how much skill do you think it takes for somebody to do a one eighty and within twenty seconds? You know, get those shots off so close.

• 50:33Speaker 04

  And that's why I think he missed. I think it was why Crooks missed. I think it's a case where, you know. He sees the cop climbing up the roof. Oh crap. And the cops are on to me. Hide adrenaline probably spikes. Now he knows he's got to get it off now. Uh, 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.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what I think happened. But the biggest scandal is the shooting itself because, um. What happened is Crooks gets off three distinct shots. It's pop, pop, pop.

• 51:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  And then pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Uh, it almost like he realizes he missed, so he's just. Yep.

• 51:23Danny Jones?

  And there's a pause and it's like.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's almost like he knew he missed, so now he's just spraying randomly.

• 51:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's going for a hail Mary at the end.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  But immediately after that eighth shot, you hear a ninth shot that sounds different. That's actually a local cop who was on the ground.

• 51:41Danny Jones?

  Can you play the audio of, of the, um, the event so we can hear the difference, Steve? It'll take him a minute. So.

• 51:52Danny Jones?

  How long did it take the snipers, sniper team one and secret service sniper team? Two to get their scopes on this guy and, and.

• 52:05Danny Jones?

  Did those guys, have you talked to any of those guys? Like, did you talk to the guy who actually took out Crooks?

• 52:10Speaker 04

  He declined to comment. Uh, I did reach him by email, the secret service sniper.

• 52:16Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  Uh, the local cop who's the real hero. Cause as we'll see.

• 52:22Danny Jones?

  You can, if you put the cans on, you'll be able to hear the.

• 52:26Danny Jones?

  So let's see if we can, 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 wanna really see something that's said, take a look at what happened.

• 52:50Danny Jones?

  The last one did sound a little bit, it sounded like it was going the other direction.

• 52:55Danny Jones?

  What was that?

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Secret Service, yeah.

• 52:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, it was that? That was quite a delay. Wait, wait, wait. Play that again. I thought we already heard the final shot.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  No, the ninth shot came from the local cop on the ground.

• 53:09Danny Jones?

  Wait, wait, wait, hold on. What shot killed him? The sniper on the roof killed him though, right?

• 53:14Speaker 04

  Finished the job. Um, that's a subject of controversy. Uh, can I take these off? I'm like hearing myself.

• 53:22Danny Jones?

  Let me, yeah, play, play me the audio one more time, Steve. All the way from the top? Not from the top, just when the, like right there, right, right before the, the, the fire, the shots start before this.

• 53:42Danny Jones?

  That was the cop on the ground. I were about to hear the sniper.

• 53:55Danny Jones?

  That was the sniper at the very end.

• 54:00Danny Jones?

  Jeez, I had no idea.

• 54:20Danny Jones?

  Where's that photographer? Yeah, I'm looking for him too. He's gonna be on the bottom left.

• 54:43Danny Jones?

  Let me get my shoes.

• 54:51Danny Jones?

  That's the guy right there. The buff guy.

• 55:16Danny Jones?

  Also the fact they let him stand up like that with his head exposed.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's another egregious, like that's one of the reasons people think it's staged, which I could, I guess, understand.

• 55:27Danny Jones?

  So I know, I had a guy on, on the podcast, um, the other day who met the photographer. The, the jacked jujitsu photographer guy who I guess he travels around with Trump everywhere, takes, does all, does all their press stuff. And, um, my buddy who's a journalist, John Ronson, he asked the photographer about it. Be like, hey, what do you think about all these theories that it was all fake? And the guy apparently got really angry at him.

• 55:51Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I, I share that sentiment, although I don't get angry because, uh, Trump's silence on it have kind of allowed these things to fester.

• 55:59Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  But, um, I think it's pretty silly. I mean, people died.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  The person who wore, wrote the foreword to my book, Jim Copenhagen, uh, he was shot. He still has bullet fragments in his body.

• 56:13Danny Jones?

  Right. Uh, yeah, it's like people that were in the towers that survived nine eleven don't like to hear the nine eleven conspiracy stuff.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  Right. Exactly. Exactly. And, 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 Zalapony, who's on the Butler SWAT team. He had been deployed twenty 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.

• 56:47Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  Total badass, just aimed his M four at Crooks and we think.

• 56:52Danny Jones?

  A long gun.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. He was on the SWAT team. Uh, and we think he probably, his shot probably grazed Crooks's ear and shattered. The stock of his rifle. Cause if you look at Crooks's rifle, there's like a big chunk missing out of the, uh, stock.

• 57:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 57:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. And this is all in the first five seconds and then.

• 57:11Danny Jones?

  Can we find that photo? Is that online?

• 57:13Speaker 04

  It should be on FBI's site. Yeah. If you look, look up like Thomas Crooks, FBI.gov, there are pictures. And so then there are ten whole seconds passed before the secret service sniper finally puts that final bullet into Crooks. Which goes into Crooks's, uh, jaw, out the other side, back into Crooks's shoulder and then fragments. And there's two re-exit wounds making.

• 57:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 57:44Danny Jones?

  So this dude was just going handheld with this and what kind is that the site that was on it?

• 57:51Speaker 04

  Uh, that's Crooks's rifle. Yeah. And there's a red dot on it.

• 57:55Danny Jones?

  It's a red dot. Okay. So it's not like a scope like you would imagine.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  It doesn't magnify. No.

• 58:01Danny Jones?

  Oh, no wonder he missed. Yeah, that's pretty tough, right?

• 58:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 58:12Danny Jones?

  Right. With your gun, maybe like resting on something, but like quick turnaround like this.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  With cops chasing you. Yeah. It's not an easy shot at all.

• 58:21Danny Jones?

  And so a skilled shooter or a marksman could easily miss that shot.

• 58:26Speaker 04

  Yep. And by all accounts, Crooks actually was a pretty good shot. Uh, he went to the rifle range all the time. Uh, he took a pistol, uh, shooting class and somebody who was with 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. Uh, so he was a pretty serious enthusiast at the very least.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  But again, back to Zala Pony, uh, the hero in this whole.

• 58:56Danny Jones?

  Who's Zala Pony, the photographer?

• 58:57Speaker 04

  Uh, no, Zala Pony is the local cop.

• 58:59Danny Jones?

  The local cop with the M4.

• 59:00Speaker 04

  Probably shattered Crooks's stock and put an end to this all. And then 10 seconds later, the Secret Service sniper, David King finally puts that final bullet, uh, through Crooks. So if you're keeping track, that's 15 whole seconds before the shoot, after the shooting starts, that the Secret Service sniper finally responds and 10 seconds after the crook, uh, the shooting had stopped. Like there was just 10 seconds of dead air before you heard that final shot.

• 59:28Danny Jones?

  And nobody has spoken with those snipers on the roof, those Secret Service guys.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  So Congress did interview him, uh, which is, uh, it 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 sighted 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.

• 59:59Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  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. Um, 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.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Uh, 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, um, 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.

• 1:01:17Danny Jones?

  I remember that. You can kind of see he like, he like looks up and he looks down and he looks up again.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  Well, so sorry. No, that's the North team is what you saw.

• 1:01:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. They just don't know what'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.

• 1:01:34Danny Jones?

  Right. So you, so there is footage of the guy actually taking a shot to kill him.

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  There's somebody in the crowd had 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 before Crooks even, uh, started shooting and we have his own notes that say he saw Crooks crawling into place. Uh, 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?

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  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 correspondent's dinner attack a couple of 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 them every day, David, I love you.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  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 cops, Zala Pony didn't do anything and David King's the real hero of the day, which as the evidence shows, um, really isn't true.

• 1:03:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, this is, okay. So this is the shot of the guy getting boosted up onto the roof.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Detector, Detective Tyler Collins, who is another hero in my book because he's the one that, you know, caused Crooks's adrenaline to spike.

• 1:03:40Danny Jones?

  So he gets his head up, but you can't see it with the camera.

• 1:03:44Danny Jones?

  He's on the roof, sees him, jumps down.

• 1:03:48Danny Jones?

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• 1:04:32Danny Jones?

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• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  According to the Secret Service, the answer is no, but that's a great question because the following morning, July 14th, a great reporter named Susan Crabtree publishes a story based off of anonymous sources in the Secret Service who told her that the snipers were under protocol, that they had to let the sniper or let Crooks or let a threat shoot first before they could return fire. Those were the rules of engagement. Almost as bad as the slope 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 slope roof excuse, the Secret Service walked that back and said, no, that's not true.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:06:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  But that initial report from Crabtree is interesting because to me, it's almost like they're A B testing excuses. Like they float this out there, see that the public doesn't buy it and walk it back. Uh, again, speculative, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's what was going on there.

• 1:06:27Danny Jones?

  Right. And then walk me through again, what you were briefly describing earlier.

• 1:06:35Danny Jones?

  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?

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  Sure. So the Crooks's body was actually left on the rooftop until the next morning around 6:00 AM.

• 1:06:53Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:06:54Speaker 04

  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. Uh, the Corey

• 1:07:05Danny Jones?

  You can't show that on the, on our show. So, uh, Tyler, if you're reviewing this, make sure that this does not make the cut.

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  Corey Comparatori, one of the vic, the

• 1:07:16Danny Jones?

  So from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM the next morning?

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Yep. Yep. Left on that rooftop. Meanwhile, Corey Comparatori, the firefighter who was tragically murdered by Crooks. I think it was the fifth shot when he starts shooting wildly. One of the bullets hit a rally goer. Uh, he was taken to, uh, get autopsied, you know, a couple of hours after the shooting, but Crooks stayed on that rooftop until the next morning. And then instead of taking him to Butler County,

• 1:07:45Danny Jones?

  For 12 hours, let his body sit there and I'm sure it went rigor mortis within that timeframe.

• 1:07:51Speaker 04

  That's in the autopsy report. In fact, the medical examiner says rigor mortis is setting in.

• 1:07:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  Uh, we learned about the wounds, uh, entry wound, exit wound, re-entry wound. And then the bullet from the secret service sniper, a 300 wind mag, fragments and causes two re-exit wounds. Uh, five wounds in total. The medical examiner, as well as the FBI say that Aaron Zalapony, the local cop, never hit Crooks at all, which just defies, uh, logic. Because after Zalapony returned fire, Crooks stopped shooting. So the bullet had to

• 1:08:31Danny Jones?

  What if it like broke his rifle somehow or something?

• 1:08:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they, uh, the medical examiner and the FBI say that's not even the case.

• 1:08:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. He didn't even hit the rifle. According to them, the bullet must've just winged over Crooks's head. But we know it did something because Crooks stopped firing and

• 1:08:49Danny Jones?

  Is immediately stopped Crooks's shooting?

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  And Zalapony swears, I worked with the documentary team that did a documentary called Butler Under Fire. They swear, uh, Zalapony 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.

• 1:09:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  Uh, so, but we'll never know for sure because the medical examiner, Ariel Goldschmidt, released Crooks's body for cremation with fragments still inside. Uh, the X-ray shows a bunch of fragments in the shoulder. And I think that is Zalapony's 556 round because the 300 wind 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 Zalapony did hit Crooks, but the body was cremated with these fragments still inside, which is like egregious mishandling of evidence

• 1:09:55Speaker 04

  for a case this high profile. Um, 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. Uh, like blood, urine, uh, eye fluid, bile and tests, uh, you know, takes these envelope of hair, uh, collects them for analyzing for drugs. But if you read the, uh, report, only four of the specimens are listed. Uh, 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.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  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. Uh, we don't really know. All they, all that they did say is that he tested negative for drugs of abuse. Things like meth, heroin, fentanyl. Yeah. So he wasn't, I got, yeah, which isn't, doesn't tell you much. Like he, he wasn't a drug addict. Okay.

• 1:11:03Danny Jones?

  Have you talked to any medical examiners about this? Like how far this deviates from protocol?

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  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. There's no further testing is necessary, but of course.

• 1:11:24Danny Jones?

  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 ha, like the Charlie Kirk case is like a debacle when it comes to standard protocol. And, uh, 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 bodies move, like everyone is like keeping close track and chain of custody of the body, 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.

• 1:12:07Danny Jones?

  And, and again, what was the, what was the response you got from the medical examiners you spoke to about, uh, the autopsy? Or not the autopsy, but the, um, the cremation, like is that standard timeframe? 10 days?

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  It would be standard, but this isn't a standard case. And they, 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 while Congress immediately puts, 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, uh, allows the body to be released for cremation before, uh, members of Congress could examine the, examine it themselves. So, you know, they threw a fit, but then they didn't really do anything about it.

• 1:13:08Danny Jones?

  And the day he was cremated somehow lines up with, uh, a homeland security investigation. Is that right? There was a, uh, a homeland security, uh, counterintelligence investigation that started, I believe, the day after his cremation?

• 1:13:26Speaker 04

  Uh, I haven't heard that one actually. No.

• 1:13:28Danny Jones?

  I think I saw that in Tucker's documentary, the 30 minute documentary that he put out.

• 1:13:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:13:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  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, uh, you know, if that's necessarily scandalous. I guess it is unusual that they use these guys who respond to like chemical weapons to do it. It's like, why, why don't they just have the grunt agents do it? Uh, so I guess that was weird. Um, and again, when I ask about why then 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.

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  Uh, we also know he like tested for high levels of lead, which is, I was told is probably, uh, is drinking water being in like the suburbs of Pittsburgh, a former industrial town. It's probably like from the pipes.

• 1:14:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah. They got a lot of lead in drinking water over there in Pittsburgh. It's tough out there. Um, now, when you watch the interviews of Dan Bongino and Cash Patel being asked about this, they constantly talk about, 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 Cash 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, it'll impede, it'll interfere with the ongoing trial.

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  I almost chalked that up to just Cash being an idiot and more, uh, mad at the member of Congress for not pressing further. At that point, you know, obviously Crooks is dead, but, uh, Ryan Ruth's case, the second would be assassin was still ongoing. And so maybe Cash, uh, used that as a proxy to stand in for Crooks.

• 1:15:38Danny Jones?

  This is the one of the golf course?

• 1:15:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, but yeah, it doesn't make any sense. They did have a grand jury investigation into Crooks, uh, for a couple of 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, uh, using the grand jury to, uh, subpoena, uh, social media companies and things like that to find out, A, Crooks's motivations, B, if he was communicating with anybody. Uh, 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, I really don't know how those things work.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  But I, I thought that was odd. Like can't the justice department subpoena this information itself? Why form a grand jury in the first place?

• 1:16:30Danny Jones?

  Well, Joe Kent stated that he was trying to get ahold 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. And Kent was like, well, what'd you find? He's like, there was nothing on there.

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  Yep. Yep. And yeah, Bongino has said, well, Joe Kent, he's working for

• 1:17:00Speaker 04

  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. 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

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  there is no link, and there really isn't. 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 hitmen. 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...

• 1:18:28Danny Jones?

  The Iranian angle just makes no sense.

• 1:18:30Speaker 04

  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 they're...

• 1:18:43Danny Jones?

  Please forgive us, but we have to do this for PR, for optics. We're not gonna... They would go out of their way to make sure they do not maim any United States, you know, soldiers or anything like that. Like, they were very, they were not, like, you could say, you could, there's a lot to be said about the regime in Iran, not great, right? But like, they certainly were not a suicidal nation.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  No, they're a rational actor, for 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 had been in touch with Thomas Crooks. And I think that's a great question. I mean, it's a plot, literally, they're entrapping this Pakistani guy into trying to kill Trump, and there's informants posing as hitmen. 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.

• 1:19:44Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Um, let's take a quick break. There's a lot more shit I want to get to, but I gotta take a leak real quick. And then we'll, we'll jump more into like the second assassination attempt. And there's tons of other shit we're gonna get to. We'll be right back. Yeah. I mean, my biggest thing about the Iran, 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?

• 1:20:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right. 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 Mershat, if anybody wants to look up this case. His last name is spelled like Merchant. He was

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  actually allowed into the country on purpose by the US in April 2024. And according to a reporter named John Solomon, they had some sort of type of a, 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.

• 1:21:35Danny Jones?

  As they do.

• 1:21:35Speaker 04

  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

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  something illegal. And so the FBI informant introduces him to two undercover agents who were posing as hitmen. Then all three of them take Merchant to a strip club, and they have some meeting about supposedly either assassinating US politicians, staging protests, or stealing documents. And Merchant tells them, well, 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

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  had intent, and he really wanted to do something, he'd had no capacity. He had no real plan, 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

• 1:23:37Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 1:23:59Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's a crazy coincidence. These are the same guys that waited 15 seconds to return fire.

• 1:24:06Danny Jones?

  That's the only reason they were there, because of that?

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:24:38Danny Jones?

  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? Up, 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 publicly assassinated in the following September. And then, right

• 1:25:23Danny Jones?

  before we go into this Iran war.

• 1:25:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. And again, I'd refrain from commenting on Kirk, because I don't, he was kind of supporting it publicly, though. I, 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 MO. He said he was against war, and then he did support Operation Midnight Hammer, though. He said he was against regime change, but he's, 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 a organic uprising in Iran, that's what I want.

• 1:26:01Danny Jones?

  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.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. So did Tucker Carlson, and so...

• 1:26:15Danny Jones?

  Right. Right. And, yeah, it's like...

• 1:26:22Danny Jones?

  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.

• 1:26:58Speaker 04

  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 US about this merchant guy who was arrested.

• 1:27:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the guy arrested on July 12th, Israel tells the US about him, and then the US decides to let him into the country and set him up in this sting operation. So I would, the facts are the facts is that Israel passes the US intelligence about Mershant. Mershant's the reason why the Secret Service snipers were sent to Butler, and then those same snipers waited 15 seconds.

• 1:27:34Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:27:35Speaker 04

  I don't know if there's any intentionality there, but it's, you know, it is what it is. So I can only report the facts.

• 1:27:43Danny Jones?

  Why are they always so connected to all of these things?

• 1:27:50Speaker 04

  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 again, 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 UK while, you know, 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

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  that Iran had proxy forces in Turkey who are 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 officials 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.

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  I think that's a causality is that they, Israel told him, Iran's trying to kill you, and he kind of chimped out and restarted the war.

• 1:29:21Danny Jones?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  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 year, months of his campaign, he starts taking Steve Witkoff's private jet with Susie Wiles, while Trump Force One was being used as a decoy, because they received intelligence that Iran had supposedly smuggled surface-to-air missiles into the US and was again, going to shoot down Trump Force One. And this is even more dubious than the intelligence from July 8th, because again, no arrests,

• 1:30:05Speaker 04

  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, there's a, there's a history there.

• 1:30:24Danny Jones?

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• 1:31:06Danny Jones?

  with tools like HubSpot, Zapier, Claude, and more. So you spend less time chasing information between systems. QUO's the number one rated business phone system on G2 and is trusted by over 90,000 businesses. Money's on the line, so always say hello with QUO. 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

• 1:31:48Danny Jones?

  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 gut, 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 specifically remember feeling like, okay, this is like, maybe going to change. Because you saw that Republican National Convention where Tucker was like the headline speaker, and you had 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 a come to Jesus, uh, something happened to him where this

• 1:32:30Danny Jones?

  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, uh, 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.

• 1:33:10Speaker 04

  Uh, well, you could talk to plastic surgeons who might tell you otherwise.

• 1:33:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:33:15Speaker 04

  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 relatively fast. And he had the bandage on 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 so many scars here? 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.

• 1:33:59Danny Jones?

  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? Doesn't look like his ear got destroyed. It's just got like a And then there's also the New York Times photo, where you can see, like, the bullet trail whizzing by.

• 1:34:23Speaker 04

  And that was the second shot from Crooks, because you see Trump's hand starting to go up to his ear.

• 1:34:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  There's no blade or no squib in it.

• 1:34:31Danny Jones?

  Do you think it's possible that this was planned out with the cooperation of US intelligence, or somebody in the US 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?

• 1:34:56Speaker 04

  Uh, possible, sure. Anything's possible. I wouldn't say

• 1:35:00Danny Jones?

  What would you say, like, the probability of this being a setup?

• 1:35:04Speaker 04

  Uh, like a setup intended for Trump to live and just this be like a psyop?

• 1:35:09Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:35:10Speaker 04

  Uh, 0.1% or so. Um, yeah, keep in mind

• 1:35:17Danny Jones?

  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?

• 1:35:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I would say so. If it is an operation, I mean, it could have just been crooks.

• 1:35:29Danny Jones?

  It could have just been.

• 1:35:30Speaker 04

  Being manipulated online, snipers told to stand down. Yeah, that's, I don't know. It's, it's, it's really bizarre. It's really bizarre.

• 1:35:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 04

  Uh, but we do know the bullets were real, you know.

• 1:35:43Danny Jones?

  They were definitely real.

• 1:35:44Speaker 04

  Corey Comparatore died.

• 1:35:46Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  Jim Copenhaver was shot. There's still fragments inside of him. David Dutch was also

• 1:35:53Speaker 04

  grievously wounded. They've actually sued the Justice Department over the security failures. 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, Trump is surrounded by informants, you know, he's got four criminal cases against him. They're tracking every move. You know, we

• 1:36:35Speaker 04

  would have seen, probably heard some sort of whistleblowing or something like that if this was some sort of staged op. Certainly he couldn't have done it without the complicity of, uh, of Biden's FBI. 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.

• 1:37:15Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  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 staged event, it would have been, take 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 neighbors if you live in Butler. These are real people. Uh,

• 1:37:58Speaker 04

  you can look them up. There's news report, like they're not stage actors.

• 1:38:01Danny Jones?

  Well, that, you don't have to have, everyone doesn't have to be complicit in it for it to be a set, 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?

• 1:38:12Speaker 04

  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, if 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, a non-event.

• 1:38:39Danny Jones?

  That's true.

• 1:38:40Speaker 04

  And to top it off, if this was some sort of big psy-op, it got memory holed like a week later. It's like if the mainstream, if the mainstream media is complicit, if the Biden administration is complicit, then why wouldn't they play up it as propaganda like 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.

• 1:39:11Danny Jones?

  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 Bret 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.

• 1:39:35Speaker 04

  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, uh, in early April, he says, well, hey, the, my guys tell me that Thomas Crooks, Ryan Ruth, crazy lone wolves, nothing to see there. I guess I'll accept that. Uh, but again, if you look at the timeline, Dan Bongino, the former deputy director, had just taken office on March

• 1:40:18Speaker 04

  27th, 2025, and Trump says he's satisfied, like literally just a week later, which tells you, when Bongino gets so mad about Joe Kent 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, you know, 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. Uh, Trump did say too, in late April, that, well, they tell me there's nothing there,

• 1:40:58Speaker 04

  but how do Crooks's parents afford these fancy lawyers? You know, what, what's going on with strange?

• 1:41:06Danny Jones?

  Well, they had fancy lawyers.

• 1:41:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, because there was, uh, thoughts that they might've been investigated, uh, for giving the rifle to Crooks, which I don't know if they actually were, but they, they lawyered up for sure. And Trump expressed, um, thought that was weird.

• 1:41:22Danny Jones?

  I would expect him to be tweeting about this every single fucking day.

• 1:41:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, and 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 Correspondence Dinner, he went on a tangent and talked about Butler.

• 1:41:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, did he?

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  He'll bring it up. He doesn't use it cynically, which, um, is almost to his credit, but, um, instead it's kind of backfired on him and led to these, uh, conspiracies, theories that, you know, he, he's, he's being quiet because he staged it. But of course, when has the truth ever stopped Trump from just running his mouth?

• 1:42:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:42:08Speaker 04

  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. Uh, I don't think that's the case. I think if something fishy, if it were a psy-op, again, he'd be playing it up. Why is he so quiet? That's, that's a good question. Uh, one can only speculate there, but maybe, uh, I, I look back at history, how like Richard Nixon.

• 1:42:39Danny Jones?

  That thunder?

• 1:42:42Danny Jones?

  Sorry, Richard Nixon.

• 1:42:43Speaker 04

  You know, you, you look back at the, uh, 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. Uh, 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. Uh, 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 gotta be quiet about this. Uh, I really don't know, but I don't think it's because it was staged.

• 1:43:23Danny Jones?

  Do you think, I mean, pure speculation, or I don't know if you've talked to anybody who would 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 if he exposes it to the public, that it will seal his fate?

• 1:43:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's what people like Tucker Carlson have said publicly. Uh, I don't know. I only know the timeline of events is that he takes office and he was raising questions about like Crooks's parents, but then by May 2025, uh, 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.

• 1:44:19Danny Jones?

  And what was the story? We kind of glossed over this though. There was also, um, evidence that he had been close to some sort of FBI safe house or something before the assassination attempt, Crooks?

• 1:44:32Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, that is a geolocation data obtained by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project. Uh, basically you could buy like ad data from data brokers that show where various devices were at certain times. And what, what the Oversight Project found is that there were devices traveling, uh, to and from Crooks's residence to like DC, Plymouth, Massachusetts and other places. And one of these phones was in a couple hundred yards of an FBI office. Uh, again, I don't know the significance of that. If you go to DC, you're gonna be close to some sort of three-letter agency.

• 1:45:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:45:13Speaker 04

  Uh, but yeah, that is a real, that is a fact.

• 1:45:17Danny Jones?

  Was, is there any conventional reasoning behind this? Like, was there any evidence that he had been going to that part of the, of the country, the near DC or anyone visiting him from that part of the country?

• 1:45:30Speaker 04

  Uh, we haven't heard anything. And again.

• 1:45:32Danny Jones?

  There's no way to explain that away.

• 1:45:33Speaker 04

  It wasn't his device. It was like a device pinging.

• 1:45:36Danny Jones?

  Different device.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Just a device going from Crooks's home to DC. 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. Uh, so.

• 1:46:07Danny Jones?

  And also no silverware in their house. Is that right?

• 1:46:10Speaker 04

  Uh, that, uh, is, I don't think that is right.

• 1:46:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? That's fake?

• 1:46:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, that is gotten into the zeitgeist because a member of.

• 1:46:19Danny Jones?

  Bless you.

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:46:39Speaker 04

  I don't think there's anything to that. When you read the actual transcripts of the first responders to Crooks's home, they described it as kind of cluttered, but nothing about that. The most interesting thing about the home is that, well, actually, thanks for jogging my memory, because this is definitely worth mentioning, is that the ATF agent goes inside and he goes to Crooks's bedroom and looks down and there's a canister of racing fuel and other bomb-making components. And they immediately evacuated the home and evacuated some of the neighbors from the vicinity.

• 1:47:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

  And that's when, 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's vehicle was, and then they find some little ANFO bombs in Crooks's 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. To me, that's further evidence that he had been in communication with somebody, or the very least on federal law enforcement's radar, if you're Googling and searching how to make ANFO bombs.

• 1:47:52Danny Jones?

  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?

• 1:48:04Speaker 04

  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 Cash 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

• 1:48:47Speaker 04

  eight months. And so at this rate, it's, we're gonna both be long dead before all 75,000 pages are produced. Some of them are under seal from that grand jury that was conducted. Others are just entirely redacted. And so it's really, they're trickling them out. And it's upsetting because they should be fully transparent about this. There's nothing, they have nothing to hide.

• 1:49:12Danny Jones?

  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?

• 1:49:17Speaker 04

  Nope, absolutely nothing. So far, they've...

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• 1:50:08Danny Jones?

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• 1:50:37Speaker 04

  Released FBI 302s, which are like interview reports from witnesses who were there, some people who knew Crooks. We found some, 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.

• 1:50:59Danny Jones?

  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, and everything else that's been happening, all the shootings, that we are like living inside of, 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

• 1:51:44Danny Jones?

  you, you're never gonna find out, because it's obvious to most people with a rational brain that none of this stuff adds up.

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  Well said.

• 1:51:53Danny Jones?

  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 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.

• 1:52:34Speaker 04

  And we haven't even gotten into the second assassination attempt, which is just as, just as weird and suspicious as the Butler case, in my opinion.

• 1:52:42Danny Jones?

  So what was the deal with the second assassination?

• 1:52:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was about...

• 1:52:44Danny Jones?

  Ryan Ruth?

• 1:52:45Speaker 04

  Ryan Ruth.

• 1:52:46Danny Jones?

  Ruth.

• 1:52:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, two months after Butler, Trump's golfing on his Palm Beach course. He's on the fifth hole. His Secret Service team is doing an advance on the next hole, and 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. But 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

• 1:53:30Speaker 04

  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 sheriffs who put out a BOLO, 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

• 1:54:13Speaker 04

  a bunch of misdemeanors, but he had a major run-in in 2002, and this got him put on the ATF's 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 called 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

• 1:54:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:55:25Danny Jones?

  It's like Charles Manson type shit.

• 1:55:26Speaker 04

  That's, yeah. I have drawn parallels to like the, yeah, the book Chaos, where they just show Manson.

• 1:55:34Danny Jones?

  You read that book?

• 1:55:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:55:43Danny Jones?

  Unbelievable investigative work, over 20 years.

• 1:55:45Speaker 04

  It's a great book, for sure.

• 1:55:47Danny Jones?

  Tomlinson worked on that.

• 1:55:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. 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,

• 1:56:31Speaker 04

  hey, we just thought he had a good lawyer.

• 1:56:35Speaker 04

  Fast forward to 2016, I guess he starts to get politically active. He's initially a pro-Trump guy, jumps on the Tulsi 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 warfighting efforts. 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, "We don't really need you, but maybe you could assist in recruiting volunteers."

• 1:57:19Speaker 04

  And so, he starts recruiting people like radical jihadists who fought against Assad in Syria. He's recruiting people who fought the 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.

• 1:57:43Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 1:57:45Speaker 04

  He got reported to the CIA, FBI, DHS, Interpol, Ukraine's federal agencies. 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, multiple-time felon, operate with impunity and almost get a shot off at Trump when he's on the radar of at least seven different agencies? And he's even being actively investigated by the State Department. And then we have the-

• 1:58:30Danny Jones?

  It's so, the parallels, man. It's just like, I don't even need to say it, but it's like Lee Harvey Oswald, who was on the radar of the FBI and the CIA, had a flash job, was a defector, like, on that route in Dallas, he was, that was the equivalent of a flea being at a Lysol convention, you know? Because him being anywhere around the president would have raised so many red flags in these agencies. And it's just like, just like this guy.

• 1:58:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I don't think it was something explicit as the intelligence agencies telling him to try to kill Trump. I think it was him probably being manipulated, because he did have a trial, he represented himself, which is a total shitshow. And at any point, he could have blurted out like, "Hey, this agent or whatever told me to do it." But there is classified information in his case, which was sealed by Judge Cannon, Eileen Cannon, the same judge who handled the Mar-a-Lago classified information case against Trump. She presided over the trial of Ruth. And the DOJ exercised something called the Classified Information Procedures Act,

• 1:59:41Speaker 04

  which means that if there's classified information in a criminal case, they don't have to give that to the defendant as part of the discovery process, even if it could help the defendant's case. They're allowed to hide it, even if they affect your right to a fair trial. So, they exercised this law. Judge Cannon signed off on it. And she even said that if this information were published, it would damage national security, which makes you wonder what that information is. I mean, you know, we know he was in touch with Ukrainians, people overseas that were probably being spied on, you know, by the US agencies using FISA. So, that would have been information that would be kept classified.

• 2:00:26Speaker 04

  It's 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 US?

• 2:00:50Danny Jones?

  Right. Now, what was the, the official conclusion about Ryan Ruth? Like, what hap, where is he now? And like, what was the government's explanation?

• 2:01:00Speaker 04

  He's in jail in Miami. He is 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 and, 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."

• 2:01:42Speaker 04

  And the rest of the trial 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 he'll probably get sent to like a supermax communications management facility where they don't let him talk to any media. He'll be in solitary confinement 24/7 for the rest of his life.

• 2:02:09Danny Jones?

  Is that how it is now? He's not allowed to talk to anyone?

• 2:02:11Speaker 04

  He had been going on a letter-writing campaign, like, writing all the media outlets. Again, like, signs of mental illness in his writings, nothing too useful.

• 2:02:24Danny Jones?

  If you wanted to go interview him, would you be able to?

• 2:02:26Speaker 04

  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 in North Carolina by his family. And if that's the case, then yes, I'd be able to interview him. But I suspect because there's terrorism and, like, enhancements applied to this case, that he'll get sent to like where Terry Nichols and Ramsey Youssef and Ted Gudzinski were sent, the Florence supermax in Colorado, where you're totally walled off from outside life.

• 2:03:04Danny Jones?

  And how much did you look into the recent one at that dinner where that guy was running through security?

• 2:03:11Speaker 04

  Not much. That was when the book was going to the presses. So, I wasn't, it didn't make the book. The most interesting thing I found about that was that what Trump was said afterward 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.

• 2:03:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, man. It's like a never-ending fucking trilogy of all these assassination attempts.

• 2:03:43Speaker 04

  There are a couple more bizarre factoids to say about Ryan Ruth. He published 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, yeah, I, it's 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 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."

• 2:04:25Speaker 04

  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-

• 2:04:35Danny Jones?

  He never said the guy's name?

• 2:04:37Speaker 04

  Nope. He did. He was also talking to several Iranians. And I was able to figure out who those guys were. There was a reporter named Ali Pakzad. These are like pro-Western guys. Like, they're not, they wouldn't be in Ukraine working with the US if they were, you know, with the Ayatollah. These are like, the Iranians that want to overthrow the regime. So, but I was able to figure out who they were. The last real weird anomaly with the Ruth case is the shooting itself. And it turned out that he had been camping at the golf course since 2:00 AM.

• 2:05:17Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:05:39Danny Jones?

  What?

• 2:05:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, the Secret Service is informed about Trump's golf plans. And then Ruth, who had been camping at a truck stop nearby, shows up like minutes later. And to me, that raises questions about, was there a leak?

• 2:05:57Danny Jones?

  Minutes after he texted his security-

• 2:05:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:06:00Danny Jones?

  Or the Secret Service that he wanted to go golfing the next day.

• 2:06:02Speaker 04

  That's, that's exactly right.

• 2:06:03Danny Jones?

  Verified fact.

• 2:06:04Speaker 04

  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 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-

• 2:06:35Danny Jones?

  Why would they be different?

• 2:06:38Speaker 04

  I, the federal papers came out first and I would assume, I 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.

• 2:06:53Danny Jones?

  That's nuts.

• 2:06:55Speaker 04

  It is, it is nuts. I, 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. I imagine, again, this is my imagination, but maybe Ruth was at the Waffle House, some spook strikes up a conversation with him and says, hey, you know, Trump's gonna 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.

• 2:07:32Speaker 04

  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

• 2:07:44Danny Jones?

  Where in the bush he was hiding in?

• 2:07:46Speaker 04

  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 that to get a line of sight on Trump? That's, that's the other major question that was never answered.

• 2:08:08Danny Jones?

  So bizarre.

• 2:08:11Speaker 04

  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, um, you know, it wasn't on video.

• 2:08:21Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. How did you get into doing this whole thing on the Oklahoma City bombing? This documentary that you're working on?

• 2:08:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Um,

• 2:08:30Danny Jones?

  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?

• 2:08:40Speaker 04

  Serious research, about five years. Yeah. Initially, I read a book by Wendy Painting, who helped produce this Tucker Carlson documentary. Uh, she wrote a PhD on, PhD thesis on Timothy McVeigh that wound up being this massive 700 page book.

• 2:09:03Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:09:04Speaker 04

  And it's a hell of a book. So I, 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've 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, uh, looking them up in the court records. And there's some active cases still going. So when I, uh, found out that this is actually news, I'm a 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 an historical matter. And it, um, it kinda just snowballed from there. And I've been writing about it for about, uh, five years.

• 2:09:49Danny Jones?

  The thing, the, the details about the Oklahoma City bombing are really crazy when you look at them today. Because I mean, it was a different world back then, right? Like social 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 testimony, all the stuff that doesn't line up. And, you know, this was almost like one of the first, I mean, this, the, okay, Oklahoma City bombing was the biggest domestic terrorism event.

• 2:10:29Speaker 04

  Still is.

• 2:10:29Danny Jones?

  In history.

• 2:10:30Speaker 04

  Still is. Yeah.

• 2:10:32Danny Jones?

  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.

• 2:10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. McVeigh, uh, he was kind of of a drifter around that time. He was an Iraq war veteran who came home. Uh, he was on the gun show circuit and, uh, 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. He's like passing out flyers because he's a pretty radical. Uh, he was like an explicit neo-Nazi at the time.

• 2:11:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:11:17Danny Jones?

  Right. So what, what is like the very, very high level conventional government explanation of what happened at, uh, Oklahoma City bombing in 1995?

• 2:11:28Speaker 04

  Uh, the, simply Timothy McVeigh delivered a truck bomb on April 19th that exploded at 9:02, I think 9:02 or 9:03, uh, killed 168 people, including 19 children. Uh, he had assistance in constructing the bomb by a fellow, um, 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 states witnesses.

• 2:12:06Speaker 04

  And, but beyond that, that's, that's as far as the conspiracy went. And there was no others, no others involved. But that's just undercut by just so much evidence.

• 2:12:17Danny Jones?

  And what is the conspiratorial, if you want to put it that way, reason behind why they would do this operation?

• 2:12:25Speaker 04

  Well, I think at the very least it was a failed sting operation. If, if that's what you mean, what's the reason for them covering up the truth?

• 2:12:34Danny Jones?

  No, what would be the reason for blowing up that building?

• 2:12:37Speaker 04

  Oh, is, uh, revenge for Waco is, is the idea that McVeigh saw those Branch Davidians being slaughtered by the FBI.

• 2:12:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:12:48Speaker 04

  And that they wanted to, uh, 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, uh, vehicles, like these military

• 2:13:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:13:06Speaker 04

  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. Uh, 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

• 2:13:49Speaker 04

  or the bulldozer massacre. And McVeigh and his friends said that you can hear the bones crunching when they're, we're running them over with, uh, our Bradleys. So I think

• 2:14:01Danny Jones?

  They buried them alive and then ran them out?

• 2:14:02Speaker 04

  Buried them alive. That's, that's the US Iraq war one, 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.

• 2:14:19Danny Jones?

  And why, what is the explanation for the, the John Doe one and the John Doe two? Cause there's these two guys that were with them where they went to a auto mechanic store.

• 2:14:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:14:31Danny Jones?

  Not an auto mechanic store. They went to a place to rent.

• 2:14:33Speaker 04

  Rental. Yeah.

• 2:14:34Danny Jones?

  They went to rent that big box truck and told, he told the lady he needed a box truck that could pull tow 5,000 pounds. And then, uh, he went in there. Well, they actually never saw him, right? They, there was two other people that went in there to, to get that truck.

• 2:14:49Speaker 04

  That's one of the open questions is whether even John Doe one was McVeigh. Uh, if you pull up the sketches of John Doe one and John Doe two,

• 2:14:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:58Speaker 04

  it's the left guy looks like McVeigh, McVeigh and the right guy is someone who the FBI initially put out a manhunt for. We've got clips of like Attorney General Janet Reno saying, John Doe two, he's on the loose. He's armed and dangerous. Don't try to apprehend him.

• 2:15:17Speaker 04

  But the story behind this is, um, so the truck bomb explodes, the FBI finds this axle with a serial number stamped on it. Uh, they immediately suspected that it's a truck bomb due to what had happened at the World Trade Center. And I think 92, that was a truck bomb. There was a bunch of stuff going on with the IRA in the seventies, Lebanon, you know, attacking US embassies with the truck bomb. So according to them, I think they had it on surveillance footage in New 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 talked to the people at the rental agency

• 2:16:02Speaker 04

  who had rented it out. And they give them the description that helped identify McVeigh as well as John Doe two. And there was initially a giant manhunt for John Doe two until the FBI one day said, oh, no, he actually doesn't exist. Uh, 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 rider truck. But the thing is that the guy who was there, Eldon Elliott, wasn't there the second day when these other

• 2:16:42Speaker 04

  guys rented the rider truck. Yeah. And he's, he went to his grave swearing that it really was McVeigh or some John Doe one and John Doe two. It was not Todd Bunting.

• 2:16:53Danny Jones?

  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, uh, he came out and said, like, there's no resemblance between those guys that were here the next day and the guy that I saw.

• 2:17:18Speaker 04

  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 one nor John Doe two 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 rider truck with somebody else. We also have 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 Trennado, who's still fighting a freedom of information lawsuit that's been running like 20 years now, trying to get this surveillance

• 2:17:59Speaker 04

  footage. But the documents show that this footage clearly exists and that they clearly, uh, it captures two people getting out of the truck.

• 2:18:08Danny Jones?

  Do we have any leads as of today to who the John Doe could be?

• 2:18:13Speaker 04

  Uh, there were a lot of rumors at the time, speculation about who it could have been. Uh, the biggest rumor that it was this guy named Michael Bresch, who was a neo-Nazi bank robber. And there's an interesting question or connection there between McVeigh and this bank robbery gang called, uh, the Aryan Republican Army. Uh, they were robbing banks around the same time, uh, with the goal of funding a right wing revolution. And we do know that McVeigh and these robbers had the same, uh, a nexus point. There's this white supremacist compound called Eliheem City.

• 2:18:53Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah. We were talking about that with somebody, weren't we?

• 2:18:55Speaker 04

  Probably Scott Horton.

• 2:18:56Danny Jones?

  No, it was, uh, I think it was John Ronson.

• 2:18:58Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. Ronson has investigated this too. And yeah, this is the easiest way out, other than the John Doe two thing, which is very compelling. Uh, the nutshell conspiracy of OKC is that there was this white supremacist compound called Eliheem 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, the attack happens. And to top it off, we know

• 2:19:39Speaker 04

  for a fact that McVeigh went to Eliheem 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.

• 2:19:54Danny Jones?

  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 them, uh, those neo-Nazi groups. He said at 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, cause he's Jewish and he was like stunned. He was like paused 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

• 2:20:37Danny Jones?

  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.

• 2:20:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that sounds about right. And 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 Langen, 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

• 2:21:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:21:49Danny Jones?

  Wow. So why would, why would the United States government or a faction of the intelligence community inside the US be, know about this and let it happen?

• 2:22:04Speaker 04

  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 the government.

• 2:22:13Danny Jones?

  They wanted to stop it before it happened.

• 2:22:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. And cause we know there were two rider trucks. Uh, the one we discussed about John Doe one and two was rented out a couple of 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 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,

• 2:22:58Speaker 04

  switched the trucks and then used 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, uh, Murrah building. And John Doe two 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, John Doe two goes around back, pulls up the things to try to defuse the bomb. And as he's climbing

• 2:23:40Speaker 04

  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. If it was a, if it was a, 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've been an undercover agent or something like that is because of them refusing to provide information about this.

• 2:24:20Danny Jones?

  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?

• 2:24:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a couple. Uh, Kathy Wilburn Sanders, who lost two of her grandchildren in the blast. She's on this.

• 2:24:39Danny Jones?

  Gut wrenching.

• 2:24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. It, it brings, gets the eyes misty for sure. Uh, she's never stopped asking questions. As 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 of weeks ago for records that would identify this leg. And so credit to her. Yeah. She just, she's got actual lawyers fighting this case.

• 2:25:21Danny Jones?

  Grandmother of OKC bombing victims seeks answers about the unidentified leg. This was just published literally

• 2:25:29Speaker 04

  Two days ago.

• 2:25:32Danny Jones?

  More than three decades after the Oklahoma City bombing, the grandmother of two of the youngest victims is seeking, wow, she's still alive? Was those are those interviews in that documentary are recent?

• 2:25:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25:42Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:25:42Speaker 04

  Kathy's in the doc.

• 2:25:45Danny Jones?

  Is seeking answers for the human remains that have never been identified. Kathy Sanders lost her grandsons, two year, um, the two year old and 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 state medical examiner to tune over records and biological matter connected to the leg."

• 2:26:20Danny Jones?

  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 LabCorp 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. Oklahoma City Attorney General said, office said that the P71 has not been identified. P71 means the leg.

• 2:26:51Speaker 04

  Part, yeah, that's a part 71.

• 2:26:52Danny Jones?

  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. And put the sample in there to build a family tree. Wow.

• 2:27:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah. If they still have it, right? I mean, I'm sure, I don't know why they wouldn't still have it.

• 2:27:25Speaker 04

  The state did say that they have it and

• 2:27:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:27:28Speaker 04

  But they're not producing records because it's quote, "an open case," which is absurd.

• 2:27:36Danny Jones?

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• 2:28:32Speaker 04

  But yeah, my mind.

• 2:28:34Danny Jones?

  Because Oklahoma City is an open, uh, the bombing is an open case.

• 2:28:37Speaker 04

  You're just, yeah, the, this leg.

• 2:28:39Danny Jones?

  Now, what about his lawyer? That old dude who he basically, he could break the attorney client privilege law because he was attacked physically by McVeigh. And he was asking McVeigh, he's like, uh, why, if you allegedly hitchhiked from the McDonald's to the rental place? If there was a $2 million bounty, why wouldn't that guy give you up?

• 2:29:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:29:06Danny Jones?

  And he was like, and McVeigh said something to the effect of like, how is the truth going to help me? And like, wouldn't tell him.

• 2:29:14Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I guess according, this is the lawyer, Stephen Jones.

• 2:29:17Danny Jones?

  Stephen Jones, yeah.

• 2:29:20Speaker 04

  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've 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. But what you're referencing there, um, about him possibly not even being the one who rented the Ryder truck.

• 2:29:53Speaker 04

  Uh, John Doe one looks like another one of these guys who was at Elihim City, uh, named Pete Ward, who did chew tobacco and uh, the face might look like McVeigh, but the description is like five foot 10 and McVeigh was like six, one and really skinny. So there, yeah, there are questions about whether he even actually rented the truck that day.

• 2:30:17Danny Jones?

  It's bonkers, man.

• 2:30:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:30:19Danny Jones?

  Well, I'm looking forward to the rest of those episodes coming out.

• 2:30:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, there should be, I think about three seasons.

• 2:30:25Danny Jones?

  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?

• 2:30:33Speaker 04

  Uh, the next big project is tied to Oklahoma City. 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 going to 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 seventies 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.

• 2:31:10Danny Jones?

  That's another one John Ronson was telling us about.

• 2:31:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, that Ruby Ridge and OKC are very tied together because, uh,

• 2:31:20Danny Jones?

  Ruby Ridge was like, that was like the first Waco, right? Like that was very similar to the Waco thing.

• 2:31:24Speaker 04

  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 gets the same neo-Nazi milieu. And the FBI had an undercover operation called Patriot Conspiracy or PATCON for short, where they were trying to infiltrate this right wing underground. And so they had an ATF informant, uh, convince Randy to sell him two sawed off shotguns.

• 2:31:56Danny Jones?

  Right. It was an entrapment.

• 2:31:58Speaker 04

  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, uh, they're going onto his property and the family dog sniffs out the marshals and they shoot the dog and

• 2:32:25Danny Jones?

  Shot his kids, his son, right?

• 2:32:26Speaker 04

  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 Horiuchi who shot, uh, one of the guy Weaver's friends.

• 2:33:10Speaker 04

  The bullet goes through Weaver's friend's arm, hits Vicki 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. He died just a couple of years ago.

• 2:33:31Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:33:36Danny Jones?

  Frickin' insanity, man. The history of this country is just bonkers. Twilight Zone shit.

• 2:33:41Speaker 04

  It is. And so, yeah, my new, uh, my next book, which probably won't be out for a couple of years, but that's going to cover that. And there are some intimate links to OKC that would probably take another hour to unpack.

• 2:33:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, for real. Yeah. Well, thanks for doing this, man.

• 2:33:56Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 2:33:57Danny Jones?

  This is available everywhere.

• 2:33:58Speaker 04

  Uh, amazon.com. It was published by the Libertarian Institute.

• 2:34:02Danny Jones?

  Assassination plots?

• 2:34:03Speaker 04

  Thank you, sir. Yeah. Our mutual friend Scott Horton was generous enough to, uh, publish that for me.

• 2:34:08Danny Jones?

  That's amazing. And you have the foreword written by the, one of the guys that was shot twice and survived at Butler.

• 2:34:13Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:34:16Danny Jones?

  Amazing. Well, thanks. Um, thank you for the book and we'll make sure we link that below for everyone.

• 2:34:20Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 2:34:21Danny Jones?

  So they can find it. Anything else we should tell people about? Like, do you have a website or anything else?

• 2:34:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm the editor of a news site called Headline USA. And you can, we just cover the news there from a conservative libertarian angle.

• 2:34:31Danny Jones?

  Fantastic. Well, we'll have to do a follow-up when your next book comes out.

• 2:34:34Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 2:34:35Danny Jones?

  Thanks again.

• 2:34:36Speaker 04

  Happy to do that. Yeah.

• 2:34:37Danny Jones?

  All right. Good night, folks.

• 2:34:39Speaker 02

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