Plausibility, Denied: Chris Martenson on DarkHorse
Bret and Chris discuss the Trump shooting and many of the questions that must be asked in the weeks following the event.Find Chris Martenson at Peak Prosperity: https://peakprosperity.com/Find Chris Martenson on X: https://x.com/chrismartenson*****Sponsors:Pique’s Nandaka: delicious mushroom, tea, and chocolate drink that provides all day energy. Up to 20% off + free frother+beaker at www.Piquelife.com/darkhorse.Seed: Start a new healthy habit today with Seed probiotics. Use code 25DarkHorse ...
I have the pleasure of sitting today with return guest Chris Martinson, I should say Dr. Chris Martinson, who is a good friend and has been on the podcast before.
Many will remember the joint podcast, the Dark Peak Horse Prosperity Podcast we did from Panama when we visited the Darien Gap.
We are on a very different topic today, although they all seem to be related in some odd fashion.
Chris, welcome back to Dark Horse.
Brett, so good to be back with you.
It's been a little, been too long.
I know we're both very busy people, but what a target rich environment for people who want to talk about what's actually happening in the world.
It's hard to keep up.
Yes, I would say I am increasingly focused on the various characteristics of what I have been calling the Cartesian crisis.
And what I've been noticing this week is that people's level of confidence in their understanding of the world is more or less a constant as the quality of their information and evidence plummets.
So it should be that people's confidence goes down, but it doesn't seem to.
And that is resulting in chaos out in the lands where we try to make public sense of things.
So anyway, go ahead.
This has been troubling me a lot.
Nick, who you just met before we started recording, and I almost, you know, we catch up on orders of business because we work remotely from each other for a half hour, but almost an hour every morning is just WTF and trying to make sense of this because we turn it, we're both very logical, rational, deductive people, so we keep rotating this situation to try and make sense of it.
And it's, it's so difficult.
And here's my here's, here's where I'm stuck.
This is the horns of my dilemma.
On the one hand, I'm a very skeptical contrarian sort of person, Missouri, show me state kind of guy, I like the data, I'll chase it down, I'll bird dog it, form hypotheses, reject them, that's my path.
On the other hand, I'm now aware that one of the things that I think Goliath, as you say, that the Cartesian crisis, I believe it's not organic, I think it's manufactured, and one of the goals they want is exactly what you would read in any fifth generation manual.
They want me to not be able to believe my own self or anything.
And all of a sudden, I'm in this rabbit hole.
I'm just falling all the way down, Brett, and as red-pilled as I thought I was.
Like, I don't trust anything anymore.
I'm looking at these campaign photos from Kamala that are clearly AI doctored, and there's no need to.
They could just have a non-doctored photo.
It would still show people, but they feel the need to Distort that lens of reality to the point that I found Getty images that are fully doctored, provably so, and there's no need for that.
But Getty is supposed to be the official keeper of record when it's a Getty image.
This is a snapshot of history.
And so they're doing this even though there's no clear need to do it, so I have to fall one level down.
Wow.
Since there's no need for it, it's got another purpose, which I think we're going to talk about.
Yeah, well I would say, you know, I don't know where you come out on it, but two things.
One, the environment in which you can't trust anything causes a very predictable response, which is either you become just totally credulous and you'll accept anything because it's too painful to use skepticism, or you become a cynic.
And both of these, these are both failure modes, right?
We cannot become cynical and just reflexively disbelieve everything.
That's a totally paralytic mode.
So I agree with you, this is not organic.
And the purpose is to drive us into these reflexive responses that are ineffectual.
And it makes us vulnerable to being controlled.
With respect to the images that you're talking about, I've seen them too.
And what I would It's not only that they are provably doctored.
We are not, that is not being hidden.
We are supposed to detect that they are provably doctored, and that will cause us to divide into these two camps.
There will be those who say, what the hell are you talking about?
You really think people are doctoring photos of campaign rallies?
Have you lost your mind?
And the other people will say, it's right in front of you.
Look at it.
Right?
And the point is we become Completely un-understandable to each other, and that's the point.
Permanently divided.
And I see this all as an outgrowth of COVID.
Meaning something got weaponized during COVID that's now stalking the land.
And I see this as a continuation pattern of something that first got dropped in our laps.
I don't recognize it having happened before COVID.
I was aware of rabbit holes and misinformation and conspiracy theories and, you know, things like that.
That's fine.
But they were so quaint compared to this weaponization that I've seen now.
And just, I'll tell you the one thing that freaked me out.
This is like, number one, scared me, was watching people go from, who the heck is Kamala Harris, this bimbo, to, wow, I really have a lot of hopes and I love this woman and I have so much pinned on her, right?
She went from moron to saint in about 24 hours for a lot of people out there, and I thought, that frightened me.
Not that they did it, They may you know trying to affect this PR transformation but that so many people just seamlessly bought it.
I agree and I think it is well a obviously nothing about the what you're saying is a new force stalking the land is completely new but it is a new level that first emerged during COVID and That could be that the COVID story was special, as you and I both know that it was, and it could be that our susceptibility has leapt.
That if you imagine the fraction of what people understand to be something that they have observed that comes across a screen, as that fraction goes across some threshold,
than their manipulability based on altering what's on their screen or having what's on my screen be different than what's on your screen goes it becomes possible to control people's reality it's you know it's I keep struggling to figure out how to update Plato's cave so that we understand it for the modern era it's like a personal cave for each person and that
Because we have no experience with personal reality at that level, We don't have an immunity to it, right?
We're not even cynical about it.
I think earlier in the conversation I said skeptical but I meant cynical.
You're going to become cynical and you're not going to be able to process anything because you're so used to being revealed to be a fool by what you thought you had observed with your own eyes.
So there's that.
And then there's also the other factor, which is the end game.
That there's something about this that feels like there are tools that Goliath would once have worked to preserve, that Goliath no longer seems interested in preserving.
Which could be desperation, or it could be that Goliath does not anticipate needing them again.
Um, because we're moving in, we're going through a phase transition where the illusion of democracy is no longer going to be necessary.
And therefore, uh, it doesn't matter that you're burning people's faith in it.
You had something you wanted to say, I saw it.
Yeah, I want to back up because I'm stuck on Plato's Cave for a minute because I realized there was an assumption baked into it.
I'm very familiar with the allegory, but I hadn't thought about it enough.
So, at a minimum, all the people in the cave, even though they have this manufactured reality, it's a shared manufactured reality.
What you're saying is, we're all staring at our own shadows.
They are hand-tailored for you.
Brett has his set of shadows that AI shows him.
Chris has his set of AI shadows that it shows me.
And so...
The first thing we have to do now as humans is either give up or spend enormous amounts of time trying to get our shadows to line up.
Right?
It's exhausting.
It's beyond our capability, I'm pretty sure.
And we've gone, I would say that there was an intermediate phase.
And in fact, COVID showed it to us pretty well.
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You're sitting next to somebody.
Looking at a different cave wall, but there are roughly two of them.
And what we now have is a fractal where there are two general themes.
You're either watching a red cave wall or a blue cave wall, but within that there is tailoring.
There is, you know, you know what anamorphic art is.
Mm-hmm.
Anamorphic art is these amazing three-dimensional renderings that look like, you know, a giant chasm is opened in the sidewalk, but they only work if you're standing in one spot.
They were drawn to be looked at from one spot.
And so we have just this um proliferation of anamorphic cave walls and we know this actually we saw a an interview i've now forgotten where i saw it but it was a leak from democratic operatives on a zoom call with each other discussing what they do and the thing that really got my attention was they were describing a technique in which
Your search history, if you, the example they used was that if you were searching for information on Biden's failing cognition, that then YouTube would serve you videos in which Biden was speaking cogently.
And you would think that your suspicion, which had been detected by your search history, had been falsified by your observation, which you don't understand is connected.
That it is the very fact that you are suspicious that is causing you to see falsifying evidence.
So, if the world is constantly falsifying your hypotheses because it doesn't want you to go down that road, You know, cynicism is almost the only functional response, but you can't have a civilization of cynics.
You just can't.
It won't work.
So this is a, it's a bad moment.
It is, but you know, my hope, such as it is, is that it's like with Pfizer and Moderna and their magic holy juice.
They overdid it.
And they pushed.
And I am now proudly anti-vax, as long as the completion of the sentence is anti-vaccines that have not been adequately tested with proper controls and over the long term.
Right?
And so you start digging and you're like, well, not that one, not that one, not that one.
And I'm still looking for one that has the appropriate science behind it to make the claims that they've made.
So there's that.
Well, and this is the heartbreaking thing about this election is, to my way of thinking, and I said this out loud at the beginning of as COVID began to unravel around the lab leak, As their narrative fell apart.
I said, you know, this story, some stories diagnose a system.
This story is going to diagnose our entire system.
Between the lab leak, repurposed drugs which were claimed not to work, and so-called vaccines that were claimed to be safe and effective and were neither.
If you chase all of those threads, you will see the cancer across every vital organ in our system.
And so my own rationale to myself, the reason that I was pursuing these things, was not because I necessarily wanted to be focused on COVID or on lies about treatment.
It was because this was the best opportunity I thought we would ever get to understand what had gone wrong with the West.
And now during this election I'm watching a tacit agreement between the red team and the blue team not to talk about it because they both have blood on their hands.
And then you've got Bobby Kennedy who would certainly like to talk about it but because the red and the blue team are trying to you know fence him out of the election We're going to lose our ability to chase that thread properly.
And I think it's, it's going to be one of the greatest losses.
Most people won't detect it.
They'll think COVID's over.
We've moved on.
And the answer is no, no, no.
You needed to know what happened there.
If you were to have any hope of fixing the system.
Well, I don't know what's all the way at the base of this.
If it's just money, I'm going to be very disappointed in my fellow humans, and so maybe it's that grubby and stupid.
But it feels darker than that, and I feel like we're entering a particularly dangerous period of history, which is why I'm doing what I'm doing.
I'm putting out still nearly daily videos on the Trump shooting, although The narrative has moved on, right?
We had a palace coup.
Did Biden actually resign?
Are they using body doubles?
We're unclear about that.
What's going to happen in Lebanon?
Did you see what's happened?
It's such an accelerating, I call this the quickening, right?
We're in that fourth turning moment where so many things are happening at once.
You can't process them adequately, but I'm being stubborn about this because if we can't properly manage even something as simple as the shooting there's not a chance in the world we're going to navigate the complexities of what's coming up.
I totally agree with you and that is in fact why I thought it was vitally important that we have this conversation now.
I know I've lost track of the assassination.
I was paying close attention and so many things are happening at once that I I've mentally moved on but I'm violating a rule that I personally hold dear, and I know that I'm doing it.
It's just a matter of bandwidth.
And the rule, I call it the theory of close calls.
And the way it works personally is that when you have a close call, let's say that you were nearly struck by a vehicle that was traveling fast enough, it would likely have killed you, but it didn't hit you.
Well, a lot of people will process that as, Oh, that was lucky.
Um, and they'll move on because there's not a scratch on them.
To my way of thinking, if the difference between what did happen and what might have happened was pure luck, if you might have died if you had been a second earlier in crossing the street, then you should process it as essentially as significant as a fatal accident, even though it has no physical implication, right?
Because you never want the difference between life and death to be luck.
It means you made an error somewhere.
So I always process close calls with tremendous dedication because I know that I'm saving my future self or I'm saving my kids or my wife or something I hold dear by trying to figure out where the error was that left something important to luck.
Now in the Trump shooting case, we have exactly this.
We have a likely winner, and I just mean one of a tiny number of people who might win the office, who appears to have turned his head, denying an assassin a successful fatal shot.
I know because you and I have both lived our entire lives in the shadow of the Kennedy assassinations.
I know How I know that history pivots around these events.
When somebody is killed by an assassin it inherently shapes the future in a radical way which is why one should always be concerned that an assassin is just not a lone crazy person but might represent something more because the amount that is at stake in an American election is so great even just monetarily.
It goes well beyond money, but even just monetarily, you know, the trillions of dollars that are at stake in a modern American election provide plenty of incentive for people to want to eliminate a candidate from the ballot effectively.
And if they can't do it with slander, they can do it with bullets.
And we know that the toolkit that the Deep State has for manipulating people is very deep.
We know that they have explored the creation of assassins using mind control, involving drugs and other techniques.
We know that we know very little about what currently exists in their toolkit.
And so, in any case, it is an obligation.
If what saved this election and left all of the candidates viable was luck, then we should be fully dedicated to figuring out what the hell happened.
We should be agreed on this.
Both parties need a reasonable guarantee that nobody gets an easy shot at them, right?
You can't perfectly immunize any public figure but this was such a high degree of failure.
It was frankly rather like October 7th, right, in Israel where the border was mysteriously left unguarded.
It was that same implausible level of failure that You know, do I know what it means?
No, I really have no idea.
But I do know that if an assassin got unlucky, and that's why one of the major party candidates is alive today, that every single honest broker ought to be fully dedicated to figuring out what actually happened to make sure that that can never happen again.
And we obviously aren't.
Mm hmm.
It's the level of negligence is on this was so high, it's difficult to think of it as something other than malfeasance.
So maybe we back up a tiny bit and let's have the landscape for this, right?
Because my hypothesis, my null hypothesis on this would be Biden would have gotten better protection.
I have said the same thing that if you reran the same event in the same place that the assassination attempt would not have happened.
No, because just to put it in context, where Trump was speaking and where the shooter was alleged to have shot from on the top of building six was a nine iron away.
right?
It's pretty close, right?
We're not talking a three wood.
We're talking a nine iron, right?
This is like very, very close.
So we have that.
And then there's all these mysterious circumstances on the day of, right?
Such as they do have two secret service sniper teams, but they put one of them where they can't even see the spot the shooting happened from.
And they put the other right behind them where they could sort of see, but they're still blocked from a whole line of roofs.
And I talked with all these professional snipers who just said, first off, not that facility.
There's no way there were too many roofs, 400 yards, 500 yards.
When you actually look at it from line of sight, they said this was undefendable or difficult.
I would have needed 10 sniper teams to do it right.
Um, second, snipers operate at the outer edges.
You have your close quarter combat people, you have your inner defense team.
Those are the people who are supposed to swarm them or not let them get on the stage in the first place.
So you have this ring structure.
Well, they had their outer ring sitting right on top of both of the inner rings.
So it was, they, and then they said, Well, the roof was too slopey.
No, it was too hot.
Well, we were short-staffed, right?
Well, if you're short-staffed, that'd be like, Brett, we're running a car lot where we have a valet service and we only have two valets.
And somehow, You find that I've made the decision to put both valets in every car and there's a big line of angry customers.
You're just like, this is no, you know, Chris, that no, right?
Just unthinkably bad, right?
Uh, and so everything from just from the whole setup is like, this was an unconscionable placement and use of assets while leaving known lines of sight completely undefended.
So you and I remember, I think the phrase emerges from Watergate.
And you and I, I've forgotten exactly how old you are, but you and I were both children during Watergate.
I think the phrase plausible deniability became a thing.
It emerged somewhere that somebody was discussing the question of, you know, somebody's alibi and the term was coined.
And I've noticed that in recent history, deniability is no longer expected to be plausible.
Right?
Yeah, we see that in many historical events.
You could not possibly fail by accident as badly as the CDC failed with respect to COVID.
They literally got everything wrong.
You could literally figure out what you should do by looking at the CDC website and doing the opposite of whatever it said.
That is not a plausible level of failure.
It's failure.
But It's just so improbable that you have to suspend your disbelief to accept it.
And the Trump would-be assassination has this exact flavor to it.
I am not...
An expert in protecting presidential candidates from snipers.
I've, I've fired some weapons.
That's about it.
I don't have any other expertise that would be relevant.
And that obviously isn't much.
I would not have made this mistake.
I would have looked at it and I would have said, I am not sure what we are supposed to do about that.
I'm not sure whether the solution to that problem is a sniper that has a view of that roof, or it's somebody stationed on that roof, or it's something that obscures the line of sight.
I wouldn't know what to do, but I know that until you tell me what you've done about that roof, this is a no-go.
And yet, and then, you know, as you have found and as you are going to show us, as you dig, you find just error after error that even I, as somebody who knows nothing about this, wouldn't have made, right?
The local cops and the Secret Service are coordinating and yet they don't have a common communication channel.
Could I possibly have that right?
Is that correct?
To a point with an asterisk, which is at least all the locals are on a set of channels, right?
And there's a whole group of them in what's called a quick reaction force.
They're all kitted up.
They look like they just came out of Afghanistan, right?
These are the local SWAT guys and ESU and quick reaction force guys.
They're all under the barns over there where the Secret Service snipers are.
So at a minimum, they can hear it in their ear.
And they do one of these things and they yell up to the roof.
I mean, it's just implausible, to use the word, that there wasn't a means of this happening.
Right.
Unless the idea was to break the communication chain so it couldn't happen for some reason.
And you know, again, we're now looking back weeks since I've been paying careful attention.
But the number of these things is amazing, right?
There was awareness that something uncontrolled, unanticipated was taking place that involved credible reports of a guy on a roof with a weapon.
You do not chase down the guy Before you alert the target that he must not be visible.
Trump's team should not have allowed him onto the stage if this was already unfolding and if he was on the stage they should have pulled him off and it doesn't matter that it would have been embarrassing and weird if the guy had turned out just to be some dude.
Right?
I would not have made this mistake.
And if I would not have made this mistake, it is absolutely implausible that professionals who are charged with doing this as their mission would have made this mistake.
Even if one person had a brain tumor that caused them not to remember all of the training and thinking and experiences and exercises they had been through.
Even if somebody had a whole team missed it.
What am I being asked to believe?
This is like the dumbest movie I've ever seen.
Exactly.
It's an implausible B movie plotline.
C movies.
Yeah.
It's not even, it's straight to video.
Straight to video.
Um, so, so there's all these things where the timeline, there's a lot, there's a lot to unpack in this whole story.
Um, and, and of course, there's, there's something going on with the locals around what's called the American Glass Research Building.
I call that AGR.
It's that big complex, bunch of, a bunch of different buildings.
And then you got your Secret Service people, and then there's different layers of them.
And, and it turns out there were actually I'm going to guess close to 100 law enforcement in and around that whole thing, right?
Some of them are in plain clothes are out in the audience and they're roaming out there.
There's some at the edges, but here's the most implausible part of this timeline.
So somehow they've alerted themselves that there's this kid, right?
And they take a picture at 615, another one at about 635, and then, you know, he's forwarding, Greg Nickel is forwarding these on Greg as one of the Beaver County ESU snipers, right?
He's forwarding this along by phone, and it goes off and somebody says, well, send it up to command.
So he sends it to command, which is a place which has state police who receive it, and then a Secret Service person.
It's relayed, there's a suspicious guy.
So they know they're looking for a guy, right?
But I gotta set this, like, let's just You can watch the videos.
There are 15,000 people on that side of the fence to the south.
But there's this fence that separates this AGR complex and this is their land.
And there's a bunch of locals who wandered over after work or whatever and they just walked in.
There's maybe 70 people there.
So somehow they lose this kid.
In a sea of 70 people.
None of whom were his age, wearing glasses with his gray t-shirt and white shorts.
Yeah.
Just like, just like, how do you, they, so they lost him.
So, so they were, he was last seen at 6.05 on a picnic table, they said.
They, they noted this in their after action report.
Headed towards the direction of this gas station called Sheetz.
S-H-E-E-T-Z is a gas station chain out, out in that region.
So, last headed towards Sheetz.
And that wasn't true.
He was actually headed towards Sheetz, but in between him and Sheetz was this building he climbed up and on.
So they see him at 6.05.
Somewhere in the next minute, he's on the roof.
He spends at least two minutes doing God knows what, and then he runs across, and we've seen the Copenhaver video where he runs across the roof, right?
And there he is at 6.08 in 38 seconds on the roof, like right there you can see him, clear as day.
And he doesn't take a shot until 6 11 33.
So for three minutes, right?
Meanwhile, there's all these people, all these citizens who are this building he's on is actually a fairly low building.
It's one story and it's set down in a little depression and people were on a grassy knoll.
This is just like Dealey Plaza, but with 200 cell phones this time.
So our odds are better this time.
And they're all like, just like, there he is.
There he is.
And there's all these police.
Some uniform, but we know there's plainclothes.
And they all miss him.
They all miss him.
So this is where I love the timeline.
So we have this other body camera from this guy.
He's on patrol.
He's like five minutes from the facility.
You see him.
It's all blanked out auditorily, but you can see at one point he pulls over, checks his cell phone.
And zips it, and pulls up under the water tower, talks to somebody else, wheels his car up, gets out, spends 60 seconds orienting, and finds Crooks in under two minutes.
Some random guy, wheeling in from the exurbs, dials in and finds him right away, right?
How did all these other people, when even when there's people pointing to him, and he's like, it's like right there, it's not like a mysterious little blob on a 10-story building, it's like, Right there.
But I mean, part of the problem is, with respect to implausible elements, there are too many to even track.
The sniper is texting What are you telling me?
Texting is not an efficient way of communicating an emergency message.
Again, I don't know anything about how to protect presidential candidates, but I would argue if you've got a system in which all of the experts who are present do not have an ability to trigger an immediate withdrawal of the vulnerable person, you've got a problem.
We have been told That somehow the protocol was to chase down this loose end, rather than protect the person, which is something that you have there, easy to control.
So, on its face, it is preposterous that the solution that failed was to Chase down the mysterious guy.
I mean, what if there had been four of them?
Right?
Like, what if you can't chase down all the loose ends?
At the moment that you know that your protocol has failed and you have somebody who's a potential threat loose, you pull the target off the stage.
Or you don't let him go on the stage.
Or you surround him with something.
That's the easy part.
I mean, I don't even understand what the narrative is so badly written.
I don't even know what it is I'm supposed to think might have happened.
Nevermind that I don't believe it.
I don't know.
I couldn't tell a coherent story that sounded like this because there's no coherence.
It, I think I have trouble forming words sometimes because it's one of those moments where you're like, you know, you can't like, how do you, how do you even begin to talk about it?
It's so preposterous, right?
And, and so, um, there, you know, I'm still chasing down a bunch of different things, right?
We've done audio analysis and, and by the way, just so your listeners know, the way I operate is I only work with hard data.
Um, and there are other forms of data.
Eyewitness data, I classify green, yellow, red, right?
And they can be various shades.
It's a spectrum, but green data is hard data.
And we might not like it or it might be difficult to wrestle with, but it's hard data, right?
So good chain of custody video and sound is good for me, right?
Somebody's camera was in the FBI's hands for a week.
It was kind of yellow for me, right?
But a good green thing is somebody just uploaded and put their thing right up there and we have it.
And now it starts to Triangulate and coordinate with, it doesn't disagree with the other video and sound evidence that we have.
So you start to build this library of what I call green data.
Yellow, hmm, gonna have to chase this down.
We don't exactly know what to make of this, right?
And so we've got a whole pile of yellow data.
It's not bad, but it's not solid yet.
And then there's red stuff, right?
And by the way, eyewitness testimony is red.
that people hear things and see like I had people throwing stuff at me for weeks there was somebody on the water tower I have three witnesses all said that and like look if you've ever been hunting you go out in the woods and somebody shoots from more than 100 yards away all you can say is it came from over there you know it's like a whole quarter of a of a compass There's not a chance in the world somebody heard it from the water tower.
They might have heard something and looked over and seen a water tower, I believe that.
But that was red data for me.
But oh my goodness, I had so many people, and by the way, I'm gonna use air quotes, people!
This has been, there's been some professional water muddying going on, but that's a different story for maybe later.
So I just want people to know, that's what I do.
I start, all I'm trying to do is just Let's just organize around the green data because I think that's where you start and then when time permits and later you can get into the fussier parts in the yellow and maybe there's stuff in the red you can drag out later and really buff it up but for now there's only two functions I think I've been fulfilling in this one official recorder of events as they happen because somebody has to because I learned from COVID this stuff goes away very quickly Yep.
And it's hard to remember and Google memory holes it and things change and I know I read something but it doesn't seem like the same article when I go back so I just capture everything now and that's a whole full-time job.
And the second thing is to get the data out there in an organized form so that they have to fit their narrative to this because first mover advantage.
Right well I worry and I worried publicly that one of the things that they were doing the reason they weren't releasing even the basics you know how many how many shell casings did they find on the roof for example was they were trying to figure out what we had and what would emerge And because they knew they were telling a garbage story, they wanted to figure out what it, you know, you can construct a narrative to explain any evidence if you know what the evidence is.
What you can't do is construct that narrative ahead of time and then have the evidence keep telling people that your story is bullshit.
So they held the story back, in my opinion, very likely because they wanted to know what was going to emerge.
And, you know, That, that was in and of itself a, uh, an indication that they were guilty of obscuring things.
For what reason, we don't know, but that they were obscuring things that didn't need to be hidden because they weren't, they shouldn't have been secret.
Um, I did want to go back one quibble and it really is a quibble, but I think you know me and you know that I would quibble for a reason.
I wouldn't call these things, uh, red, yellow, and green data.
They become data when you have cataloged them and understood them.
They are evidence.
In other words, I think that a lot of times people say data when they mean evidence.
And there are lots of things that count as evidence that don't count as data because they weren't collected in an intentional fashion.
And anyway, I think policing that subtle distinction is important if we're trying to figure out, you know, because for one thing, if you say it's red data, You've already granted it a kind of validity.
It's data.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
So anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
I mean, anything without like a solid chain of custody bothers me, right?
So, so for instance, first helmet cam person counts five casings and then later counts eight, right?
And I have no video record of, of what happened in between those moments.
And I still don't have video record of the first people on the scene.
We only have later cameras that come up and they go, Oh, well, they counted eight.
There must be eight.
And I'm like, doesn't work that way.
I need to see the first helmet cam of the first person.
And I need to see them everything in there and it has to be high enough resolution to support what you're claiming.
Because what I've learned is.
There's sloppy work and then there's intentionally sloppy work like the like I was horrified to see how little crime scene control there was.
There must have been eight people up there all stomping around and they're walking in places or should have been a cone of ejected brain material and stomping everywhere and they've got lug soul boots and those pick up little shell casings and off they go and It was unbelievable and then they were power washing the roof the next day or the next day two days later yeah and then and then it was just I was thinking of actually going because there was one thing I wanted so bad one thing
Uh, we know that that first shot seems to have grazed his ear because of the reaction, and it times up with the sound, and then there was a ping off the railing.
So that shot clanged off of the top railing, and we can isolate it because of a video somebody shot to within about maybe an inch of where it hit on that railing.
I wanted to go up.
I wanted to put my ear on that rail- eye on that railing.
I wanted to have somebody who was 6'3 stand on that stage.
I wanted to go, oh yeah, that's where it came from.
They dismantled the whole thing!
I couldn't believe this actually!
They dismantled the whole thing!
So I'm having flashbacks because of course like every other skeptic I've been through the Kennedy assassinations and I'm aware you know it wasn't shell casings it was the bullet itself but the magic bullet that shows up on the stretcher right that bothered me a lot and so the point is the magic bullet
In the John F. Kennedy assassination feels a lot like the, we're not going to tell you how many shell casings were on the roof, right?
It's a question of integers that can falsify a story very quickly and they don't want to, you know, they don't want to tell you.
And then the railing.
Okay, you've got a railing that's been hit in an assassination attempt on a major party candidate for president.
Every inch of that fairground or event ground should have been very thoroughly documented.
Every inch of it.
And certainly anything with evidentiary value like You know, do we know where the bullets in the turf went?
We must.
We should.
We, the public, don't know.
But that railing reminds me of the goddamn doorframe from the Ambassador Hotel in the Bobby Kennedy assassination.
Did they lose that?
They lost that, didn't they, right away?
They sure did.
The LAPD.
So there was no Secret Service protection.
I think actually Secret Service protection for presidential candidates emerged out of the Bobby Kennedy assassination.
But the doorframe was apparently lost by the LAPD, which of course matters because the number of bullets falsifies the Sirhan Sirhan lone gunman story.
Right?
As do many other things call it into question, but that is one unfalsifiable piece of evidence.
If you've got more bullets than Sirhan had chambers in his gun, it's game over for that story.
And so anyway, there's a kind of You know, what kind of evidence is it when the very thing you need in order to know whether the story you're being told is true just happens to be unavailable?
That's convenient.
Right?
You know, Epstein's cameras that were supposed to cover his cell the day he apparently killed himself.
You just, it just so happens that the thing that would have left us very little room for doubt that it was a suicide failed.
Now, You know, stuff failed.
You're telling me video cameras never fail?
Well, no, that's not what I'm telling you.
But I'm telling you this was a high-profile criminal suspect and that you had multiple cameras fail?
I mean, like, okay, so I don't have the video.
Now what do I know?
And in fact, The logic of the perjury trap ought to be echoing in our ear, right?
The logic of the perjury trap is if you're lying under oath, you're doing it for a reason.
And we may not be able to prove the thing that you're lying about because we don't have all of the evidence, but we can infer That you're not doing it for laughs, right?
If you're going to lie under oath, we've made it a crime.
You're doing it to obscure something even worse.
And, you know, I don't know why Epstein's video cameras failed and why the LAPD lost a doorframe and, you know, why the helmet cam video that you would want from the Trump would-be assassination scene isn't available, but these things suggest that there's a story
That we aren't being told and that the thing that would tell you that that story exists just so happens to conveniently be absent.
It is a quick blast to the past.
Senator Josh Hawley showed up at the crime scene a couple three days later and the FBI and everybody they wouldn't let him on.
U.S.
Senate Senator kicked off just summarily get out of here and then you turn around and it was so important to keep people off the crime scene and just a couple days later the whole thing's dismantled and off it goes, right?
Incredible!
Incredible!
I mean, especially if there's nothing to hide, then allowing us to satisfy ourselves that actually the story is the one that we are being told makes so much sense, right?
If there's nothing, you know, I'm surely going to get into trouble for even mentioning this, but the recycling of the metal from the Twin Towers after 9-11 If there's nothing to hide, recycling that metal is a terrible mistake because what you should do is you should leave it to the chemists and the historians and the physicists to satisfy themselves that the incredible thing we saw is what we're being told, right?
By doing away with the evidence, you of course, you foster theorizing about Possible conspiracies.
So if your point is really, hey, you guys are out of control, conspiracies, yeah, maybe they happen occasionally, but it's not nearly as common as you think, then a thorough, transparent exploration of the evidence will allow us to come to that conclusion.
And when you keep burying the evidence, recycling it, losing it, not collecting it, right?
What is it going to result in?
Something's going to fill that vacuum.
Well, and I think enough people have been woken up by this.
This was a real shock.
It woke up a lot of people, I thought, who maybe were on the fence before, hadn't really thought about things too much.
I've talked to a few former Biden supporters with all of this.
So they had a number of shocks they had to deal with all at once, right?
Which was June 17th, I think, if I have the date, or was it 27th?
Anyway, they had the debate.
Right.
Right.
Which suddenly revealed that Biden was in advanced stages of dementia.
Right.
Not up to not fit for purpose, which had the implication that, of course, this had been hidden from everybody who wasn't willing to see what they could see with their own eyes.
Right.
But that was a shock.
And then it was just a it was just two or three days before the convention when this attempt happens against Trump, which is inconceivable in its lapses.
And they called it the Pac-Man security zone that the Secret Service had set up with a big pie wedge, the mouth missing, you know. - Yeah.
So, somehow that failed, and the theory I've heard is that the power structure was deeply afraid of Donald Trump going off the reservation and not picking the right VP.
They presented him with some sort of a list, and the guy he picked, J.D.
Vance, wasn't on the list.
And so, that's a problem for the deep state, because if he goes to the convention, picks his VP nominee, and then you off him, Well, you still have this VP you don't like in the way.
So it was just it was the timing of it all.
You can feel if it was a sloppy job.
And I think the way I interpret it is somebody kind of threw that together kind of quick.
It didn't have a really well thought out sort of an aspect to it.
And they they dropped a few balls.
And so now we're asking the most obvious.
So this is how deep down this hole I go.
If you want to have some fun, Try and use Google to find out anything about special agent in charge for the Secret Service field office out of Pittsburgh.
His name is Tim, or Timothy, but he goes by Tim Burke, B-U-R-K-E.
Impossible.
He literally doesn't exist.
I've taken whole things where I know articles have been written about him, put the quotes around it, dropped that exact fragment in, and returned zero results.
You can't find it.
Yeah.
You can't find it, and he's the guy everybody ought to be asking questions of, like, hey Tim, why'd you put both people here on this occluded roofline?
Have you never done this before?
You know, you ever play paintball once, you know?
So your Tim Burke anecdote reminds me of something, and I've now forgotten the name of the Secret Service head, Kimberly Cheadle.
Kimberly Cheadle.
As Kimberly Cheadle was facing her congressional grilling before her resignation, I was thinking, this is kind of a pressure release.
that people are focused on this assassination and they this is a person saying incredibly foolish things and you know stonewalling on the most basic of facts and that her purpose this looked like an apparatchik to me this looked like somebody whose purpose was to take the heat And it can't have been fun.
I'm sure she didn't enjoy it.
But the idea was if you're going to cause people to move on, you have to feed them something.
And so a woman in charge of this agency I mean, her story about the sloped roof was just maddening, you know, in two ways.
One, like you, I've been on many roofs.
The slope there, you know, it's like the best case scenario from the point of view of how sloped a roof might be.
This was This was a roof you can be casual about going on, right?
This was not a very... It was a 1.15 to 12, not a 10-12, not a 6-12, a 1.15-12, which somebody pointed out is well within ADA guidelines for a wheelchair ramp.
Right.
This is an ideal roof if you have to go on it.
Yeah.
What's more, her I didn't remember what nonsense she said about it being peaked or sloped at the peak?
It got steeper towards the peak or something?
Yeah, I mean, I've seen... It's an Asian pergola.
What the hell was she talking about?
But okay, so somehow the political structure has put a person who
has well below the average person's understanding of roofs uh in a position where roofs are central to her job and she says really dumb things and then she's fired and you know people move on from the assassination attempt to other topics in some sense because this is kind of like in my mind an artificially Complete narrative, right?
There was massive incompetence and, you know, the head incompetent lost her job over it and now we can move on to the next thing.
And, you know, it reminds me a little bit of the Warren Commission and the CIA Arguably coining the term conspiracy theorist in order to dismiss people who doubted the lone gunman theory.
So anyway, I think there's kind of a human dimension that people follow these stories They don't follow them analytically.
They don't, in general, have the tools to understand what the nature of the evidence is and whether or not it tells a consistent story and whether that story is the same story that they're being told.
You know, in general, there would be...
Press conferences in which we were given information as it emerged and that would begin to paint a picture of what had taken place.
The embarrassing elements would be embarrassing.
The stuff that would dispel other hypotheses would do its job.
But in this case, everything's held back, and so we're in this sort of human dimension of, oh, there was massive incompetence.
Can you believe that they, you know, did this, that, and the other?
And then the person most associated with that incompetence, a person who has associated herself with the incompetence by saying preposterous things about Rooves, right, is sacrificed and that You know, that sounds to me like a psychological game is being played in which most people aren't tracking the evidence, they're tracking the people.
And they saw, you know, Jim Jordan take Kimberly Cheadle to task and they felt good because they were angry and it relieved that emotion and caused them to look for something else to pay attention to.
I agree with all that, and of course, she deserved to be fired, of course, for just being completely incompetent at the job.
But she's not the person we should be asking questions of.
She didn't make decisions over where those snipers were or were not going to be placed, or whether they should have even used that particular fairground, right?
Those are the people, and not one question has been asked publicly of those folks yet.
Right?
And so Jim Jordan can bark and all that, you know, and it does feel good.
But one thing I've learned from this, Brett, is I'm never going to fear a Congressional or a Senate hearing.
I'll just show up, give them any sort of stupid answer I want, and they'll yell at me and that'll be the end of it.
Because apparently they have no power.
Nothing ever happens.
Yeah, nothing ever happens.
I guess that's right.
I also have to say, You know, the whole time I'm watching Kimberly Cheadle stonewall the house, I'm thinking, I'm thinking shit rolls downhill and that the person who is not testifying is Secretary Mayorkas.
Right?
Is that Kimberly Cheadle's purpose?
Is that she's like, you know, The bottom paint on a boat that, you know, sloughs off and keeps the hull intact.
I mean, this, you know, and I don't raise Secretary Mayorkas haphazardly just because he was her superior, but Secretary Mayorkas specifically denied Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Secret Service protection, right?
His signature on the document that said no to the request for Secret Service protection.
And apparently was involved in determining whether or not, now this I don't know for sure, maybe you'll tell me that you have the evidence, but was he not involved in rejecting requests for increased Secret Service protection by the Trump campaign?
I don't have his name on a document, but somebody high up that chain, it was either the new guy, Ronald Rowe, he swears he wasn't in the meetings, but it did happen, so that would have been between Cheadle and Mayorkas.
I don't have anything beyond that.
So then, at the very least, There ought to be a question to Secretary Mayorkas about why requests for increased security for the Trump campaign were rejected and his answer might well be those didn't get to me and then we could find out who they did get to and then we could look at that person and you would think that every single person any patriot would be interested in getting to the bottom of this because all of us
If we believe in democracy, all of us are depending on somebody not being able to veto a democratic choice with a bullet.
We're all depending on the Secret Service.
So if there's a problem, whether it's incompetence or a mole that's been, you know, a foreign power, isn't it?
You know, a foreign power would love to vote in our elections.
They don't get to, right?
We should constantly be concerned that they might find their way into our system in one way or another.
They might compromise our communications.
They might, you know, have a mole.
Who knows what's possible?
To the extent that this revealed a problem, it should have become a focus for the entire political structure.
And the only way that it doesn't is if some part of that political structure actually knows that it doesn't have to worry about what happened to Trump happening to them.
Which is unsettling.
Well we're not, we're not, so this whole thing is, first I'm bothered by the negative space in this story, right?
So there's things, for whatever reason, there were whole groups of people behind Trump, some of whom had cell phones out and we've not seen a single video from his side from the shot, where the shot came through, right?
Don't know why, right?
Wow.
Not one.
Nobody's ever shown that image, right?
So it must exist, right?
There's a whole bunch.
I can show you camera after camera after camera of people.
I'm like, we need those shots right there.
Cause I can show you they're filming right on the critical side where Crooks was on the roof and all of that.
And I can point them out.
They have names.
I don't know what, so there's all this missing stuff.
I'm reasonably certain this facility probably had cell phone.
I mean, sorry, security cameras.
And I, I think, like you, that what the FBI has done is they're going to wait for all the citizen investigations, we're going to come out, we're going to have our second shooter theories, and this and that, and then some months later they'll go, oh, oh, did we forget to mention we actually have all of this on film and you're all wrong, or something?
Like, they're just, I feel like there's that gotcha coming, so I'm being extra diligent with stuff, like, you know, zero trust in this whole thing.
But there's only one person we have to ask a question of.
One person.
This is very simple.
Who made the decision not to place snipers on that roof?
The most obvious roof.
Who made that decision?
Because they keep saying like the decision was made, this little passive voice thing.
No, who made the decision?
And I can't believe it's odd to me that even the locals didn't say, you know what, we weren't told to stand on that roof, but we're doing it anyway.
They were in this two-story building off to the side, and there's a very improbable timeline.
Can I go through that timeline real quick?
Yeah, in fact, I think a lot of what we've talked about is really important, but I do want to have you Lead us into this story and tell us what it is after you've spent weeks sorting through it.
How should we understand the evidence that we do have available to us?
Alright well the things we so just to dispel the stuff that remember it on the first couple days there was this horrible collection of people saying it was all staged or geez I'm sorry that he missed you know so that was sort of like the toxic environment we were in for a while so let's just be very clear real bullets were shot real people were either killed or wounded And that happened, okay?
And my null hypothesis is Crooks somehow got on the roof undetected and fired all eight shots, okay?
There were 10 shots fired but two of them were back at him, right?
So that's null.
Hypothesis one, H1, is They let it happen.
Right.
And there's a couple of ways you let it happen.
Right.
Either you just open up a security gap that you know he's going to step into.
Right.
Or you're a little bit more encouraging than that.
Right.
So under that scenario, they've they've let it happen.
But maybe with encouragement, he's classic patsy groomed by somebody given some training.
Maybe he's even told his bullshit story like you're part of an important exercise where we're going to use you as a live test to make sure our guys are on point.
He doesn't even know what's going on.
That's who knows.
And then there's another hypothesis, which there's an active shooter besides him.
So, there's three shots, and then there's five.
And both of these, when you talk to professionals, you find out they're a little, they're not impossible, but they're starting to strain credulity a little.
Okay?
What are?
So, the first, those first, how the patterns of those shots.
So, let's take the first three.
The first one happens at 6.11 and 33 seconds.
Crack.
That's the one.
Snick right by his ear.
Clangs off the railing.
And then it's about 0.8 seconds, and you get the second crack.
And then it's 0.75 seconds, you get the third one.
So very measured.
Nice and measured.
Now, the story though is, this is a kid, he's 20 years old, who knows whether he's downed a whole bottle of Benzos to keep it all calm, but he's on the roof, he's just running across, he's just assembled his rifle apparently out of his backpack, and then a cop hauls himself up, and apparently he has the presence of mind to point his rifle at him.
Now he has to settle on back down, get into position, dial it in, and that first shot was the most accurate.
There but for the grace of God, right?
Because of the head turn.
Yeah.
We don't have a dead Trump or scrambled brain Trump.
So for professionals they say listen, I've done a lot of shooting To get your gun on target and settled so that you can take that shot even without the stresses of being Running across a roof and assembling it and this being this isn't just like a day at the range We're on we're in the Serengeti.
This is big game hunting, you know and There's a, there's a male lion over there.
No, no, no, no.
It's not even a big game hunting.
Because, I mean, you, you do raise a scenario in which maybe he thinks this is a test.
I find that hard to imagine, but absent that, he knows that his life is on the line.
If you're shooting big game, that's not your mindset.
So the idea that you could settle yourself, you talk to professional shooters, they say it's, it's not impossible, but it's kind of implausible.
You're going to be like, you know, he's, he had a red dot, not a scope with crosshairs, all stable.
Like you see in the movies, if you've ever shot a red dot at about a hundred yards, that thing is dancing, even if it's braced and settled.
Right.
So we know that he had a red dot.
We did not know that last time I checked in with the story.
Do we know what the weapon was?
Yes, it was a DPMS AR-15 style platform, probably with an 18-inch barrel, but this is another negative space.
Like, this gun should have been on a table with a white tablecloth with the eight shell casings, and we should know that the firing pin strike matches the firing pin, and it was fired recently, and his handprints are on it, and etc.
We know none of that at this point in time.
I can't even guarantee you that that gun that they pulled off Fired anything at all.
We're lacking the most basic of data at this point in time.
Yeah, I worry about that.
What we don't know about that gun and about...
The shell casings and about that initial discovery of them leaves open the possibility that he was fully a Patsy.
Which I'm not saying I think he was, but I'm just saying as you say the negative space is too much.
That possibility exists.
Yep.
Okay, so you were telling me... Alright, so he takes those first three shots.
Wait, wait, wait.
I want one other piece of information first.
What is the period of time... Do we know the period of time?
We must, because there was audio of Trump speaking, so we should be able to calibrate all these things.
We should be able to get them on the same timeline.
What is the period of time between the officer peering up over the roof, Crooks pointing his weapon at the officer, and then Crooks taking his first shot?
So the officer hauls up at about 45 seconds before the hour and then sees something and drops down.
So let's say that's about a three second period of time.
So that takes us up to about 48.
The first shots happened at 33 seconds past.
So we have 33 plus about 10 to 12, depending on how you count.
So about 40 seconds.
40 to 43.
So again, again this raises all kinds of questions.
An officer has had a weapon pointed at him by the guy on the roof that he was suspicious of and an immediate call has not resulted in Trump being pulled off the stage.
There's 40 seconds.
That's plenty of time for there should be effectively A button that you push when something is sufficiently off that it is time to lock down the environment so that the target cannot be hit.
I mean, I'm no pro, but if I was them, I'd have a code phrase, you know?
Pineapple.
That's an emergency, or whatever your code phrase is.
You know, condition black.
You just yell it out, and that's that.
It means everybody, you know, get down.
Everybody do the thing.
There's a reflexive action.
Everybody do the reflexive action that we do when something is way off.
Yep.
Yep.
So, but this cop who drops down, he drops down into a well.
There's a state cop there.
There's another municipal cop there.
He drops into this well.
We don't know what's happening yet.
The Washington Post reported that they had somehow managed to get access to the things.
And he said, He's got a gun into his radio that communicates out at 6, 10, and 55 seconds.
So we still have 38 seconds to go here.
So he keyed in and said, he's got a gun and he's lying on the roof.
That's what's communicated.
Now, what's not communicated, because we have a dash cam right there, we don't hear what I would have expected.
But hey, everybody can panic differently or whatever's going on.
What I wanted to hear was that officer yelling in officer voice, you know, it's their one of their most important tools.
He's got a gun or something.
He says nothing.
You can barely hear him say he's lying down through the dash cam and then dead silence and this cop runs all the way around his car to the front of the building.
pulls his sidearm out he's got a a rifle in the car and he's peering but he's now in the direct line of fire which is so anti-cop like i ran this past a bunch of my cop friends and they're like okay this is really hard to explain like you can't even from a basic human survival instinct yeah you don't run to the front of the building where you've just seen somebody with a long weapon which by the way he identified as an ar before he'd been on the roof
so he already knows he's looking at a semi-automatic long-barreled weapon capable of shooting multiple rounds And he runs to the front.
And the only command he gives, he runs right by a state cop, leaves him alone, doesn't say a thing to him, says something to his mic, I don't know what that is, but he runs up and there's a group of people standing on that fence line with Trump's stand over here, and the shooter.
And he says to them, get out of the way!
Of what?
Is there an elephant coming?
Should I... Is there a bowling ball for my... Like, it's just such a vague command.
You know, it's just... We're struggling with it.
But I can't account for that behavior set very easily, because it's just so against everything I know about how police operate.
They don't take to having weapons pointed at them lightly.
They tend to get a little frosty about that, right?
He doesn't use his big cop voice to yell anything communicative to anybody nearby, right?
He doesn't run to his car to get his rifle.
He doesn't... He doesn't... I don't understand what happened there at all.
It's a bizarre thing.
Yeah, I don't know what to make of it because, I mean, he's obviously a human being.
A lot of the things you would expect him to do are just human things, and... So something's off, but I mean, maybe it's just panic.
So, we have those first three shots.
There's a 2.7 second gap, and then we hear 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Now, what's amazing is those five shots come out in just 0.77 seconds.
The split in shooting is the time between two trigger pulls.
And professionals are looking to get their splits down in the 0.2 range, right?
Really, really high quality people can get down into the 0.1-ish range.
But those are world class.
So five of these shots come out and the first one has a gap of a quarter second, but the next four, I'll have splits of 0.17.
I mean, this is fast.
Somebody's you're just like it, that I've shot a lot, even braced.
You tell me I'm going to like, have to pull that fast.
And I'm all keyed up.
Cause I just went big game hunting and missed.
Right.
I got buck fever.
I'm just, I'm gonna spray this cone.
Unfortunately, it was the middle of that group of five, shot six overall, that middle one, is the one that hit Corey Comptor in the head.
So these shots were actually exceedingly well aimed.
They were all right down there.
They couldn't hit the Secret Service pile and Trump because there's a stand in the way, the north stands that Bleachers that people were on.
That pig pile is now below that level.
Corey Comptore was standing up against the railing on that north stand, and he got hit.
So the idea, again, not impossible, but the implausibility factor when you talk to professional shooters, of some kid, who I don't care how much he trained, he's all hopped up, he's just missed, he's gotta know that there's counter-sniper fire because he's done his best to avoid them and sneak over to the side.
He knows what kind of danger he's in, so he riffs off five.
What did he do for five?
And that one that hit Corey Comptor is actually dead nuts on right where you would want to be because from that spot through his head to the stadium to the podium there is a nice straight line.
And all the rest of them we can account for because we can hear them on the microphone.
Now they're making their supersonic snicks.
So I don't know how far away they can be and still hear it.
I think it's reasonably far.
But it's pretty good shooting, right?
Again, not impossible, but you got questions you know so then we have to raise hypothesis which again is a an echo of the John F Kennedy assassination right yes there's a question about the shooter the weapon and the shots that are claimed yeah that is not impossible but Seems very unlikely.
Well, let me take you, the timeline for me is the thing I have the hardest trouble with.
So, to set the stage, you know, we've got that complex with the AGR buildings, and there's the building he was on that Crooks allegedly shot from, which is building six in their terminology, and it's this little one-story thing.
Attached to it is a two-story building with windows along the side where we know there were supposed to be two countersnipers mysteriously not on the roof but but at least they're in that overwatch building which we know because Eli Crane went there the week after and he filmed out of it congressional congressman Eli Crane and you can see the shooting spot like it's like right there you know you could throw a screwdriver and disrupt the shoot I mean it's like right it's so easy
And more mysteriously, we know that right before the shots rang out, all those windows were open except for one, but there's four windows on that side.
Three are open.
So again, you talk to anybody in the biz, they're like, you never have open windows facing a president or presidential candidate.
Never.
It's just like, it's like the biggest no-no.
It's like, no.
But they were all open.
Just to make it clear, it's a no-no because Well, I guess I want to know why.
Somebody could potentially set up... I mean, I... My first thought is, if you have those open windows, somebody could be withdrawn into the shadows.
You wouldn't be able to see them, and they could shoot from there.
But of course, a closed window doesn't preclude that.
It just means that you would have an open window.
A closed window is going to mess your shot up badly.
Okay.
Because it's going to distort things?
Yeah, it's going to flatten your bullet out for sure.
It's going to deflect it and that thing's going to just... that's not going to be accurate anymore.
Your first shot out of a window is going to be a mess.
A hot mess for the first shot.
Okay.
Yep.
And if you were trying to conceal something, it would make it unambiguous where the shot had come from because you'd have a broken window.
You would.
And even if, you know, you drilled it, you know, old school single paned windows don't exist anymore.
So these are usually double paned.
So you're going to make this shattered mess.
Now your field of vision is screwed up and you might not even have a hole because if your gun recoiled at all, you know, you have to, anyway, you might have to blast for a while to get a, get a clear opening.
I get it.
So, so there's that, but even if you imagine, well, I have a professional cypher team there.
It's cool.
Well, now imagine that you've got a professional sniper weapon and you got a team up there and somebody walks in, shoots them with a silenced or suppressed weapon and now they have all the time in the world.
So you just open windows are a no-no.
They put the snipers on the roof because they don't want to have to deal with the open window problem.
So it's just how it breaks out.
Okay but still mysteriously there's all these open windows which at a minimum the snipers on the secret service should have been dialing those in and complaining like crazy like what what what are we doing here like this is like such a breach of protocol it's like well again this speaks to the absence of a shared channel to a point but i mean this is so gross it's it's no but i mean this is one of a dozen reasons that you wouldn't
If somebody suggested, well we're going to have different channels and somebody will communicate between them, that's the kind of idea that might come up in a spitballing session, but anybody who knew what they were they were doing would shoot it down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the snipers.
Yeah.
All right.
So, so here's where it gets, so here's where again, I'm just, uh, it's going to be hard to form the word.
So imagine this.
Okay.
So the secret service has done a terrible job.
They haven't communicated, but these guys, you know, I can show you their YouTube channel where they train, they train hard.
I know people at my personal range, the people who do this, take it seriously, right?
They're just not like weekend Joes and they forgot and we left windows open and all that.
So here's a couple of things.
Um, Again, my friend Tom, who was a Philly Sergeant for a long time, he said, We have to account for how these two overwatch snipers from the locals both left their post, apparently.
They left.
And he said, that doesn't happen.
And he gave a story.
He said there was this time he was on shift.
It's night.
He's driving around and he finds a uniformed officer just standing in the road.
So he pulls up and rolls the window down and says, Hey, what's going on?
The guy said, I think my unit left.
We were on parade duty.
And this was my job, but I think my Sarge forgot to come by and relieve me.
So I'm just here.
What do I do?
And he's like, you're relieved.
He's like, people, when you have a post, it's rule one.
You don't just like, I had guard duty, but you know what?
I felt like I just didn't want to do it that night, so I didn't.
It's like, not a thing.
Okay?
It's not a thing.
So here's the second question we have to ask.
I'm going to switch now over to this view.
So this is the timeline we're supposed to accept.
Okay?
So first up, the local sniper teams, they've been planning for weeks.
We have all their documents.
Charles Grassley released them all, and it's a very complete planning document.
They're supposed to take their positions at 11 o'clock, day of.
That's July 13th.
So they do.
And they are tracking weirdness about this Crooks kid for at least 105 minutes before any shots ring out.
Okay?
It's an hour and 45 minutes.
We know that from their sending texts and all that.
Okay, it's 6.03.
It's showtime.
Trump was supposed to come on at 5.55.
It's a little later, so he comes on at 6.03.
Trump takes the stage.
So this is it.
We've been planning for weeks.
We're ready.
I'm in position.
I have this vital overwatch position.
I have a post in this vital overwatch position building, and there's two of us, two snipers.
Well, at 6.05, one Of the two snipers in that overwatch position decided that they were going to leave to go look for Crooks.
This is in their official planning.
This is their after action report documents.
This is in Senator Ron Johnson's timeline.
Like, it's 6.05.
We're two minutes into showtime and one of these guys is like, you know what?
I think I should go look for this guy.
Doesn't radio it down, doesn't, you know, telegraph his concern, doesn't talk to any one of the dozen law enforcement who are around there.
And by the way, again, there's like 70 people down there.
It's like, hey, buddy, can you, like, go look?
So we're supposed to believe one of them, a bandit's post leaves, okay?
All right.
And then at 6:05, a muni cop on patrol apparently received a text and beelines it for the AGR complex This is the guy who ended up finding him.
So he's already, he's already found out there's something wrong.
He just, you know, drives his car and beelines it.
It's 6.06.
The next, the last sniper in that overwatch position leaves.
And they left with windows open.
We saw from the grassy materials that they had sniper weapons up on tripods.
So apparently we're supposed to leave, believe that both of them abandoned post.
And took off because of concerns, leaving windows open and all of their sniper gear just there.
Okay.
So yeah, I just see multiple problems with that.
For one thing, if one person has left their post, that ought to reduce the chances of the second person leaving their post dramatically.
Correct.
Right.
And it's impossible for both of them to leave their post without somebody authorizing that.
So again, this is a very simple place to focus the investigation on.
It's like, we need to know when did you leave, why did you leave, and who gave you authorization to do that.
And what's more, because these guys are in the overwatch position looking at the roof that is otherwise uncovered,
At the point that they've got somebody running around that they're worried about, continuing to watch, I mean for many reasons, continuing to watch that vulnerable spot makes more sense not less sense, right?
Going to look for somebody that you don't know where they are Where you will therefore be leaving a place from which this person whose location you don't know could take a shot at President Trump.
That doesn't make any logical sense.
And as you say, if there's some story that explains that, then the person who left their post, both of them, would have that explanation.
But of course, We don't have access to whatever their explanation for that weird behavior is.
No, it's dead.
It's a big silent spot.
It's just missing.
It's just absolutely missing.
We don't even know the name of the second sniper.
We know one of them was Greg Nickel, but who's the other guy?
It's just absolutely unknown, all right?
And then at 6.08.38, it's the first time in this overall timeline we see Crooks appears on a video shot by, very, very ironically, by James Copenhaver, who was one of the two victims shot on that back upper south bleacher stand.
And then at 6.09.04, this muni cop wheels in, you know, jumps out of his vehicle, and in less than two minutes, only a minute and 49 seconds, he finds, he finds him, he finds him.
And then we have that mysterious gap of 38 seconds or 40 seconds, whatever that is, you know, before the shots come out.
So that's the I just... Brett, I just struggle with this.
You have a job.
Your job is to be a sniper.
Your job is to not leave your post.
And both of you... And the story's been changing.
One of them went to go look for him.
He got locked out.
He didn't have a key card.
The other guy went to go let him in.
But even if you allow for that sloppiness, like, okay.
How many seconds does it take to go down a single flight of stairs and back up again?
This guy's missing from his post for six minutes.
There's nobody apparently up there.
For six minutes.
Right.
And again, just even just running through this as a human being, if you really thought it was higher priority for you to leave the post and go look for crooks, you might not need to say to the other person, you have this, you are in sole Uh, responsibility over our, over this roof that we're looking out on because I have to go do this other thing.
Right?
So it's like the number of things that you, you know, there's a scary guy that's enough of a concern that I'm leaving my post.
You know what that is?
That's like a thousand times more concern than you need to get Trump to a secure spot.
Right?
At the point you're leaving your post, you're deviating from the security plan, right?
The first thing you would do is you would take Trump out of the line of fire.
And then you probably wouldn't leave your post, but there would be communication about what you had seen.
The grounds would be What's the term?
I mean, I'm trying to avoid the term lockdown because it has such terrible connotations post-COVID.
You would lock down the environment so that wherever Crooks was, you could find him.
And if the story ended up being there was concern about an individual, we found him, it was just a kid, you know, he didn't have a weapon though somebody had thought he did, That's not wildly embarrassing.
That's what caution, we all understand that that's what caution looks like when people are charged with protecting life and limb.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Hindsight's 20-20 all the snap, but again, returning to my law enforcement friends who've worked details like this, they say, well, the idea that they first took a snap of this kid and he raised enough, they saw him with a rangefinder, right?
It wasn't like, hey, here's a kid, he's kicking the ground with his toe too many times, or there's something vibey about him, I don't like.
A rangefinder, right?
You want to explain?
That alone, a range finder is a device that shoots a laser beam out and it bounces back and it measures the interference and tells you exactly how far something away is.
I mean, these things are super accurate.
Like they'll tell you to within an inch, over hundreds of yards, how far away something is.
And they're very typically used by snipers and hunters and people who need to know how far something is before they take a shot.
So it's a mobile device, you hold it up to your eye, you press a button on and it tells you how many yards it is usually.
And they're using that to correct for what?
Is it to set the red dot or is it to correct for?
Yeah, because, you know, people often mistakenly think a gun shoots a bullet and it goes straight.
Right.
Yeah.
Sort of does.
It doesn't.
It's following a parabola from the moment it leaves the barrel.
Right.
And so you have to set that parabola by something called sighting your weapon in and you sight it in for a given range.
You might sight it in at 25 yards.
That would be very typical for an AR-15 because of the way that bullet travels.
Yeah.
If you sight it in at 25 yards, it'll be dead flat at 25 yards, but it's still rising.
And at 300 yards, it'll be dead flat again.
So you have to know if you're at 100 yards, you're going to be 11 inches too high if you're sighted at 25.
Yeah so so it is it would be to reset the red dot so that it would cause the drop in the bullet as it traveled to be accounted for in where the Red dots don't have that easy tuning.
You would just know if you were zeroed at 25 yards.
Yeah, you'd have to aim 11 inches lower than you thought at 130 yards.
So, but he has a rangefinder.
So my law enforcement friends say, oh, this is simple.
We do this all the time.
You pull up to the kid.
You're all nice.
You say, Hey, hi.
Yeah, just, Hey, I've got a couple of questions.
You know what?
I'm going to want to look in your backpack, but I'm going to, I'm just going to handcuff you.
This is merely a formality.
I do this all the time, you know, you're very pleasant, and if they don't go with pleasant, you tackle them and tase them, right?
But, you know, you do the whole thing, you go through the backpack, nothing's in there, you zip it up, you know, say no hard feelings, just this is me doing my job safely, and you send them on their way.
So, to them, it was improbable that you had this many law enforcement assets, which again, are numerous, and there's only like 70 people on that site.
Can I show you another one more?
Like, this is how improbable this is.
Like, it's just...
So this is taken from a video that was shot.
This is just a still.
It was taken on the west side of the building where everybody could see Crooks.
This is taken maybe 16 seconds before the first shot rings out.
And in red, here we have this gentleman.
This is Greg Smith, who is very famously the guy who was wearing that red Trump hat with the fake red hair sticking up, who gave the BBC interview and said, I was looking at This the shooter and there were Secret Service.
I mean there were snipers right in that building.
So right over on this side is the building we're talking about and but of note.
Circled in yellow is a uniformed police officer.
Circled in yellow is a second uniformed police officer.
And circled in green are two plainclothes officers.
I think they're state police.
And by the way, those guys circled in green, we have them all over the place earlier.
They are over here.
And again, this is how many people were on this side.
You know, can you find a kid with glasses with a gray shirt?
And there are, you know, there's two plainclothes officers here.
And so, so it's just, again, we have to believe that somehow they lost this kid.
They, none of the assets on the ground, which include two uniforms and two plainclothes at a minimum, that's who I found so far, are on the exact same side that they lost crooks in the minutes up before this happened.
And somehow the both snipers decided who had responsibility that the best way to deal with this would be to duck out and go take a look for them themselves.
Yeah, and it's insane.
You know, the point about the sniper is that they are very well positioned to protect the situation from a piece of equipment that is not easily moved.
There, there, They are the opposite of your mobile eyes that's going around looking for threats.
Their purpose is to neutralize a threat.
you know and they've got a weapon a heavy weapon on a tripod dialed in you know I mean so I can tell you what the critics will say yeah and you well know because you will have heard from them already a lot the critics will say
Okay, I hear what you're telling me, but you cannot possibly imagine that the number of people that you are implying would have had to be in on failing to protect the president would have been, and if they were, that they would all be silent.
That's a lot of people who are failing to do their job in shocking ways.
Well, it's a good criticism, but let's, let's skinny it down.
What's the, what's the minimum?
What's our Liebvig's minimum here?
How, what, what's the fewest moving parts we can imagine?
So, um, I don't know.
I'm just going to make this up.
I'm not pointing any particular fingers at this point, but let's imagine that those two plainclothes guys are, are states, staties, right?
And I see them interacting very, very freely with state cops.
So I'm guessing, right?
And their badges are all blurred for some reason in every video, but they kind of look like the shape of a state.
So let's imagine they're state.
So they have, they have power over, they're a whole food chain layer up from beat cops.
Okay.
Local beat cops.
Um, you know, more powerful, more important, all that.
So what if those two guys said, Hey, you know what you guys, I need you to go over here and look at this side.
All you need is you just need to create a hole so that nobody's watching when this kid gets on the roof.
That's the one thing you need to assure, right?
And then you need to make sure that somebody gives an order that causes those two snipers not to abandon their posts, but to be called away.
Again, you need somebody who has that authority to be able to do that.
Um, okay.
But again, look, I'm not arguing that I don't... that there's no way for this to be true.
But I am arguing that there is a layer of insulation that comes from... Okay.
What seems to have happened looks, based on where the evidence has led you, like a... like collusion between
State-level law enforcement and the Secret Service and one would imagine that if one were trying to get enough people on board with such a project that not everybody who you tried to bring on board
would be okay with the objective.
So, it's hard to imagine how... I mean, mind you, I think the idea that there's no solution to this problem is up against another idea, which is, yes, but the story you're telling me about these failures is implausible.
So, you know, you can tell me it's implausible that this number of people would collude and that you would be able to find that number of people to collude without somebody blowing the whistle.
But I can equally say that the story you're telling me about what you say did happen doesn't add up either.
So we are forced to choose between difficult to accept scenarios.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
To me, so it's not implausible to me that that that cop who rolls up and finds him in under two minutes is confused.
Because imagine how confusing this would be.
You know that you're like you have basically the entire county's law enforcement happens to be right there.
And apparently they're looking for this kid and you roll up and you find him right away.
Think how confusing that is.
Yeah.
What just happened?
Like, what am I missing?
Is this a training exercise?
What is this?
Right?
Right.
Which, you know, if a transparent investigation would unearth, if there's nothing to hide but in, let's put it this way, if incompetence is the cover story, Then there's nothing to obscure by failing to be transparent.
Because what's going to emerge in that transparency is incompetence that we already know was there.
That's baked in from the beginning.
That's the cover story.
So if there really isn't anything to find, then you would imagine that there would be some sort of Let us discuss the comedy of errors that resulted in this.
And each of these things would have a natural explanation that would itself stand up to scrutiny.
So, again, I feel like the logic of the perjury trap is where we return.
That we are being... that the not being forthcoming about the evidence is indicative that there is something to hide because the usual thing that would cause people not to be forthcoming, which is that they were hiding incompetence, there's nothing to hide.
We've seen it, right?
They don't know a sloped roof from an unsloped roof.
They don't understand that roofs are consistently sloped from the peak to the gutter, right?
So, okay, incompetence, you know, that's going to be a relief if that's what we really find.
So why are you hiding anything?
Right?
You want us to find the incompetence because you already told us that's the explanation.
So anyway, there's something weird about the amount of stuff we don't know.
It's just off.
Yeah, I mean, look, there is no possible outcome of the story where you go, Oh, that's understandable.
And people did the best they could.
And it was reasonable.
The bare minimum in this story is, wow, that was a complete f-up.
You guys really dropped the ball in monumentally bad ways.
Locals, Secret Service, statees, enough blame to go around and make everybody have a really poor career from thereafter, right?
Yeah, the number of heads that should roll is large, in the best case.
Yep.
And that thin blue line turned out to be non-existent when the, when Secret Service tried throwing the locals under the bus right away.
And then we had the state police spokesman, Paris, come out to Congress and throw the other locals under the bus.
He used the word abandoned their post for reasons we don't understand for those two snipers in the Overwatch building.
Right?
And then they came out and said they didn't abandon their post.
It was these guys.
So all the finger pointing, which actually is a good sign because sometimes you get to the truth faster.
When you get to the finger pointing.
Yeah.
So this is, you can feel it.
There's a lot of CYA going on right now for reasons that could be as innocent as, wow, you guys really screwed the pooch on this one really bad.
You know, somebody is going to have to take the fall, right?
Or there's something worse brewing under here.
Yeah.
Right?
All right, so what else do we need to know?
You've shown us the timeline, which I must say leaves my jaw on the floor, you know, and the timeline.
The entire time that anomalies are showing up and not getting better and getting worse and getting weirder and getting scarier, there is no general call to, hey, let's pause this entire thing until this is resolved.
It's a crazy timeline in and of itself.
It becomes especially crazy in light of that.
You've got an anomalously high firing rate for the second flurry of shots given a 20-year-old shooter under what has to be the most incredible pressure he's experienced in his entire life.
You've got a cop who has had a weapon pointed at him who then behaves utterly anomalously, does not, you know, give the sign that this event has to immediately be locked down in order to protect uh the the would-be target because things are absolutely out of control.
What else do we need to know?
I want to just just one I mean these are just little little things that are confusing to us researching this at this point in time so um As I mentioned, we don't know who the second sniper is for the locals up in that Overwatch building.
That was the person who allegedly abandoned post, or left it, or was called away first.
And then there's this guy, Greg Nickel, who is gonna come down, and he's out- and the story is he left it 6-0-6, right when Crooks first got on the roof.
really bad timing just missed it and he's somewhere and we don't know where he is for the next six minutes or more so we have here a cop cam the cop pulls up this is the from the police officer who found him in under two minutes right he leaves his car is there and the the dash cam is running unfortunately the sun's against the windshield so it's a little washed out but what we're going to see here is the shots have gone off And we are now approaching almost two minutes after the shots have gone off.
And we're going to watch this, which is Greg Nickel come out.
And I want you to just, just you on your own, tell me about the behavior.
Like this is a guy who apparently abandoned his post and then, oh no, shots happened right from the place I was supposed to be covering.
Tell me his demeanor as, as you receive it, um, here.
So this is just a short clip and it starts with the first sniper to leave his post.
Yes.
So this is the building.
This is called Building 6.
The roof of this has this kid on it who's now dead.
And here he comes.
That's Greg Nickel.
So all the shooting has happened.
It's all happened.
And there he goes.
That's it, right?
So he comes out of the building and walks off, right?
And if we did that again, He comes out and he doesn't seem particularly concerned.
Kind of looks like a guy coming out of a 7-Eleven.
Looks around.
Kind of ambles off.
Now, that's incredible.
So, he's abandoned his post.
There has been an assassination attempt that it is his job to prevent.
And he's not incredibly agitated that the fact that he's not where he was implicates him.
He's not.
I mean, I got to say, both those guys look incredibly nonchalant.
Well this is a problem with the story for a lot of people.
So let me tell you why I have sympathy for the it was staged people.
I actually watched this happen in real time.
I happened to be on it.
And for no good reason.
Well you know what?
Trump's rallies usually aren't covered.
This one happened to be on.
So I happened to be watching it.
Right?
This all stuff happens and I have enough presence of mind that You know, they're on this pig pile on top of him for about a minute and then they stand him up and of course he walks off and gives that iconic, you know, bloody ear, fist raised, fight, fight, fight thing.
I'm yelling at my monitor.
I'm saying, put him down!
Like, how did they know there wasn't a second shooter?
Right?
Right?
There's 15,000 people he's exposed to in rooflines, and I'm a doof.
Like, this is not my job.
And I was just screaming.
I'm like, you roll his ample frame off the back of the stage, and you drag him by his arms below cover.
Yep.
And they stood him up.
And I'm like, how did they know there was only one?
Both these guys are acting like, oh, threat's over.
I mean, I just can't account.
Like, how do they not know?
How do they know there's not a second shooter?
Yeah, it's a low quality.
It's a low quality narrative, right?
Because it's like written by somebody who does not properly understand the mindset of somebody who has just put themselves in harm's way to protect the person under their care.
Right?
Right.
It just doesn't make any sense.
I don't get that.
But back to this as an idea set.
So let's imagine, um, so Greg has abandoned his post.
We don't know where he is in this building complex.
If he's in the second story Overwatch building and has not alerted anybody or shot this kid who's about to take a shot, boy, we got questions.
But let's best case imagine Greg's a screw-up and he's just down in the donut station and he's hanging out in the bottom of this building and he hears shots go off right over his head, right?
I'm thinking your first thing you do is you race back up to your command post and then immediately radio chatter.
You know, suspect down, suspect down.
Like, you were informing people.
Yep.
He just like, nah, he just hangs out for another couple minutes, I guess, and just ambles out of the building to go find out with everybody else what's going on.
There's no radio chatter from him on any channel that I can find.
Or his compatriot, who we still don't know who that is.
Totally missing from this story.
So if I'm Inspector Clouseau, like I got, I'm just like, so it was just last week.
Who was it that was grilling Ronald Rowe, the newest acting director of the Secret Service?
I forget, was it Biggs?
I forget for the moment, but he's being grilled officially in front of one of these barking dog committees.
And they said, so, what have you learned from local law enforcement?
He's like, well, we haven't talked to them yet.
This was last week.
This is almost a month in.
He's like, we haven't talked to them yet.
That's a plausible word.
Yeah.
See, as a biologist, I would tell you that really you need to instantaneously talk to them because as flawed as eyewitness accounts are, they're going to get worse the longer you wait.
And, um, what's more.
There's time for collusion, people who may have, you know, let's say that it was incompetence, people who realize they have something to cover, get their story straight.
There's all kinds of reasons that you would actually want to get right on that.
And a month is a long time, right?
Like, I mean, what's the term when, when the challenger exploded?
There's a term for what happens in mission control where every single thing is shut down in a careful way so that no information is lost.
I've forgotten what the term is, but there's some term.
They go into some mode that is not normal And the point is, our job now is not to lose a single bit of information because we need as much as we have all just gone through a trauma.
Our job has failed.
We didn't do it.
We have another job, which is to find out exactly how that happened so that it never happens again.
Right?
That mode should exist here.
And it absolutely did not exist here.
And it still doesn't exist here.
Right?
Yeah.
So that's, I mean, I got tons of data and we got audio analysis and that, but I'm just down to these timeline oddities that just don't, they just are implausible.
you They're implausible.
Implausible.
You know what?
I can take one implausibility, you know, .05 is the standard, right?
That means one in 20.
It happens.
One in 20 happens.
That's why people play Dungeons and Dragons with a 20 sided dice.
It happens.
But when you roll that 20th side six times in a row, you start to think maybe this something's not quite right with this die I'm rolling here.
Right.
And it's, yeah, and it's as likely as any other sequence of rolls and yet Utterly implausible.
Now, there's also another missing, there's a dog that didn't bark here, which is... Okay, so you've got this level of incompetence.
And you've got a guy who a know-nothing 20-something
Unhinged enough to take a shot at a presidential candidate who somehow passes through all of these holes as the holes align and finds himself on the roof with a loaded weapon having used his rangefinder and takes a shot that the only difference between what happened and
A successful assassination was the turn of a hat.
Where are all of the cases in which somebody got 30% as far?
Or 50% as far?
Right?
So you're telling me that this massive failure based on just incompetence stacked on top of incompetence Lines up with the one person who tried it?
Right?
Or are there constant, you know, you would you would expect in order for that level of incompetence to result in a would-be assassination that got this close, you would expect that the incompetence That there would be lots of efforts that exploited several layers of incompetence but didn't get to the last four because there was competence.
Right?
And we don't see that pattern.
We have the anomalous attempt lining up with the shocking multiple layers of incompetence.
Something about that is weird and I grant you I don't know how to calculate the likelihood of those two things finding each other.
Um, you know, is it always the Keystone Cops with the Secret Service?
Well, I'll tell you, there's whole chunks of the video I have, if we set it to Benny Hill music, it would just play perfectly.
You know, Yackety Sax is clearly in play for part of this.
Let me take you to this one piece of bad luck, okay?
If you have plainclothes officers out there, they're typically armed and they usually, they also have some sort of a comm, right?
They either have an earpiece or they have some other hidden thing, right?
Where they're in communication.
Now, in an event like this, as part of the pre-planning, you show up at 11 and people are looking through the books and they're like, look, these are the guys we have in the audience, right?
We got a guy wearing this, we got a guy wearing that.
Now, the problem is, is that, you know, Crooks had kind of long hair.
He's wearing eyeglasses and he's got a gray shirt and he's got white pants.
Now, remember I showed you this?
I said, Hey, there were these circled in green over there.
They're these two undercover or plainclothes guys.
Here they are.
Well, this is one of them here.
Get my laser pointer out here.
This is one of them, right?
And in fact, if we go a little closer, this is a close-up of this guy.
Darn the bad luck!
He's wearing a very matching set of things to what Crooks would have been wearing.
I'm not totally clear what this badge is because, like I said, they blurred it up enough that I can't quite tell.
Don't know exactly, but again, I'm going to guess he's statey, but darn the luck.
Those poor guys who are back here on the sniper roofs, they do have to go through something called a de-conflict because they know they're supposed to be guys on that roof who are friendlies, and they know if they went to the briefings, at least one of them is dressed in a darkish t-shirt, has long hair, is going to be wearing sunglasses, and has whitish pants.
So just really bad luck that that happened.
So yeah, I want to understand what you're telling me.
It would make sense, this is news to me, but it would make sense if what the plainclothes people were going to be wearing was already understood so that there's not an error where somebody who's in plainclothes is mistaken for a baddie and shot.
Are you telling me that Crooks's outfit Just so happens to match somebody who would have been on the minds of snipers so that they wouldn't shoot him?
We have a very bizarre, so we saw the two sniper teams, they're called Hercules 2 and Hercules 1, that's their code names.
Very strong.
The guys on the north barn who are all, they're like the guys that everybody saw and they're trying to see stuff, they had a tree in their way.
So I have total, like, A, they didn't have a shot, B, they probably didn't have a view, but if they did, if the trees and the, they look through, they're like, Huh, this guy looks a lot like, is that, is that the guy we're not supposed to shoot?
Because he's a friendly?
Because we, I know I got a plainclothes over there wearing a dark shirt and white shorts.
You know, I could see that confusion, right?
Yep.
And then we have the Hercules One, which is the guys to the south, who I believe were the ones who took the final kill shot, because we have audio that supports that and other data.
They were, their whole duty mission was to the South.
They were facing the wrong way.
In about 30 seconds before the shooting starts, you see them, they suddenly, somebody, something's communicated.
They pick their guns up, they swivel totally the other direction.
They've abandoned everything to the South.
So if there's a shooter to the South now, they don't abandon that lightly.
So both of them swivel.
It's not like one of them decided, I got the North, you keep on the South.
Both of them swivel, mount their guns, dial in.
They're looking, but they still don't take a shot.
Not we have one, two, three, they still don't take a shot.
One, two, three, four, five.
Next.
They still don't take a shot.
10 seconds after that, they finally take that shot.
So 15.8 seconds from first shot, but you can see the guys they're dialed in and I know what's going on.
If this theory is right, if they're struggling, they're like, wait a minute.
Who is this over there?
Because the last thing you ever want to do is shoot a friendly, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I can see that holding people off.
What I can't see is that we don't know.
I mean, it's weird that we don't know where the kill shot came from.
And it's weird if there's a story like this guy just so happened to be wearing something that confused the snipers.
That's exculpatory, right?
So you would imagine that we would know that unless there's something about that coincidence that can never be known.
Well, last night with Elon Musk, Trump said, you know, that kill shot he mentioned it twice.
He said 400 yards.
I don't have anything 400 yards away.
So even Trump doesn't seem to have access to that information at present, right?
Or I have it wrong, but I've got I got, I have data.
It's in my green column for that shot.
Um, and I, you know, maybe something different happened, but, uh, but still like that we don't have basic information.
Remember, so Kim Cheadles is like testifying a week later and she has, she's lacking all the basic information.
She doesn't know how many shots have been fired.
She seems to be unaware that shot nine in this series was actually not taken by anybody on her team, but on the other team.
She's unaware of where those shots were taken from, she's unaware of all the basics, right?
Which, a week into it, right?
And then a week after that, we have Chris Wray, and he's like, oh, um, I don't know what kind of gun that was.
You know, he's just like, confused.
He didn't know, he's like, somebody asked him straight up, I think it was Biggs, said, did it have a scope on it?
He's like, I'm not.
Was it a scope?
I think it was a scope.
Like, dude, you're FBI.
He should have said that was a DPMS model 398.
It was manufactured in 1993.
Serial number had a red dot dialed in at 75 yards or whatever.
Like he should have, he was totally clue bagged about even the most basic details about the weapon.
So let me ask you some, some stuff that I wondered about early on.
Um, Do we know what ammunition was fired?
Nope, we do not.
We don't know.
We know that 50 rounds were purchased at a gun store, but that again, we don't know if those were the same ones that were used.
Do we know what they were?
Nope.
We are told it's a 223, but I actually am lacking the most basic of information.
I don't know.
So do we know 223 was a full metal jacket?
Don't know.
We would want to know, were they 55 grain?
Were they the 77 grains?
It matters.
You know, because one of the things that bothered me most right up front was there's an audio recording from a cell phone that got uploaded very early on.
So I have, it's green, right?
Good chain of custody.
Somebody just uploaded it.
And it's from the side of the building, and the first three shots sound completely different from the next five.
Just qualitatively.
They're like, tuk, tuk, tuk, and then crack, crack, crack, crack, crack.
Totally, they just sound different.
So we started analyzing it, and they have different resonant frequencies, and their fingerprints don't look the same, and even worse, they're not echoing off of the same surfaces, because we have clear echoes.
So it says, well, since we know that all eight bullets went down range, it can't be because the gun was pointed in a vastly different direction for those echoes.
Um, and that's a real problem.
So the only way I could possibly account for that is he stacked his mag with very special ammo for the first three and the next five were just something totally different.
And that's why we don't know though, right?
This would be basic information that could clear up a lot.
Do we know about the magazine on the gun?
Nope.
Do we know how many rounds were left?
Nope.
Nope.
But just to get that sharp stick in your eye that makes you squint, Chris Wray was asked twice, twice by two separate people, one Senate, one Congressional, about the empty cases that were found on the roof.
And twice he said, we recovered eight cartridges.
Now a cartridge is the fully assembled, unfired bullet.
It has all four components.
It has a primer, it has powder, it has a case, it has a bullet.
Once it's fired, it's not a cartridge anymore.
And again, your top lawman knows this.
And so you have to question, why be imprecise twice?
Not once.
I was operating on low sleep.
Twice.
Makes no sense.
No, it makes no sense.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm going to keep coming back to it again and again.
The logic of the perjury trap is what we have here, right?
We don't know what you're lying about, but we're going to make it a crime that you're going to lie under oath.
And the reason that we do that is because, you know, we can't allow you to obscure your actual crime with lies.
In this case, I don't want to speak about crime.
I have no idea what the laws are surrounding what we're being told and not being told.
Lying to Congress is obviously a crime, but the implication of not sharing information that in no way should be sensitive.
I mean, if Crooks is the only shooter and he shot all of those shots, There's no reason that we can't know what bullets, what cartridges were being used.
I mean, you know, .223 leaves a huge range of possible ammunition.
It's relevant to your sonic analysis whether they were all identical rounds or variable.
Wouldn't make sense to load variable stuff in there if the guy was, you know, trying to assassinate President Trump.
Then he doesn't want variation, right?
So anyway, there's... why...
Do you wonder how basic this is?
I don't, I can't, I don't even know how many times Copenhaver and David Dutch were shot.
I've read twice.
They each had two wounds, which changes everything in my analysis.
I've read they had one wound each.
And where's the New York Times hunting the family down and him showing his wounds and seeing his medical charts and his... Right.
And you know, two wounds could mean multiple things.
Could be an entry and an exit wound, or it could be hit twice.
Could be fragments from some other bullet.
It could have been a through and through that went through this guy into that guy.
I mean, we don't know, but we're lacking basic stuff.
Where did all those bullets land?
We have no idea.
There's no map.
There's no trajectories.
There's no... Every single location where a bullet landed should have been marked, and there should be an aerial photograph in which we can see them, and all of the trajectories should tell the same story that we get from body on the roof The video that we have that isolates his position.
Why can't we have the basic information if really there's nothing to hide but incompetence which you've already confessed to?
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Yep.
So, you know, in the spirit of things, I've gone back and forth.
I was really convinced there were two shooters, and then I was really convinced there was one, and I'm just, I'm yellow on it right now.
I have data both ways in its data, and that's a problem for me, and I don't know how to resolve it at this point, and I'm starting to get a little feisty about the fact that I know they could resolve this by just releasing some data, and they're purposely not doing that.
They're purposely confusing the most basic of things.
Cases versus cartridges versus timelines versus just simple stuff.
So I have a question that I've had since this event.
It seems to me that in 2024 it is inconceivable that you would not have High quality 3D cameras, or their equivalent, mounted in regular known positions at a height throughout an area like this.
It's like the black box of an airplane, right?
You don't know when you're going to have an event, but it's not expensive.
The Secret Service could, in the process of doing its job, it could deploy full coverage high quality cameras with known audio characteristics in which the sensors either do no processing and they shoot raw or they have known processing that we can you know that's not destructive so that as soon as there's been an event we can go back and we can say okay here is the library of footage
It is available and we can see every camera is telling the same story and that story agrees with the shooter on the roof, the number of cartridges, excuse me now, I've done it, the number of casings.
Yep.
Sorry about that.
I know the difference.
But why is there not A library of footage that allows you to establish exactly what happened in any event where the Secret Service is spending who knows how much to deploy living people and put them on roofs and you know to go out there in advance and survey the place and there's a this is a lot of expense the cheapest part of it
Would be deploying a full set of cameras and, you know, and microphones that would allow you to reconstruct any event completely.
Why is that not a thing?
I don't know.
It's a great question because if I was running this, not only I would be doing that, but we know that we have facial recognition software now operates in airports and China uses it so you can buy a Slurpee at 7-Eleven, right?
It's just if they have 7-Elevens there, right?
It's a thing.
So we're supposed to pretend like these guys just roll in guys and gals they just roll in it's just like oh there's random people everywhere right no not in this day and age right you should have known lists of people you would have their cell phones pinged you would have facial recognition technology you'd want all those cameras up so that if somebody starts to appear over and over again and they're setting off some things so you have eyes on so you're not trying to watch 15,000 people you're watching these 10 right that's that's just obvious right but we're supposed to believe Brett
That they didn't record any of the audio from the Secret Service that day.
So we're missing an entire library of material.
We have no idea who said what to who.
Because you mentioned Watergate.
We learned there were two operative phrases from Watergate.
Plausible deniability was one, but I think what was it John Dean said?
What did they know and when did they know it?
Yeah, it's an obvious thing.
And again, there's echoes of...
the John Kennedy assassination here because if I recall correctly somebody accidentally had their microphone keyed so that there was audio evidence.
So that ought to have taught us the lesson that in any place where you might have an event that you're going to need to reconstruct you want to collect the basic data.
Now I will say I hear us having this conversation And you and I are going to take a bunch of crap because people are rightly concerned about biometrics being tracked.
And I can imagine if I went, you know, if I went to a Bobby Kennedy rally and there are cameras on poles on the one, I'm going to have two conflicting thoughts.
One is.
I don't love that.
Who's monitoring who's going to a Bobby Kennedy rally?
And here I've just said that I think the Secret Service ought to be collecting a full set of data for every place that they're protecting somebody so they can always figure out what happened.
But yeah, if I'm going to one of those places, I don't love it.
On the other hand, I can't imagine that you have an expectation of privacy if you're going to a rally of somebody under Secret Service protection because Obviously the Secret Service is you know there's body cams on the cops for one thing right so one should expect that you're going to be at the very least recorded in such a circumstance because the cops doing their jobs are going to end up recording pretty much everybody.
So anyway let's just say I have I have conflicted emotions about the suggestion but at the end of the day it seems to me that in those circumstances You are going to be recorded lots of times by private citizens and by law enforcement.
and that not having a consistent set of data in this case it would be data because it's carefully collected having a consistent set that fully covers the entire event so that you know if somebody takes a shot at somebody you can track their movement every instant they're never off camera we know where they were at all times what happened somebody leaves their post we know who it was where they went you know we can see
All of the things that you would want in this case.
It would be the opposite of the circumstance where we are forced to speculate against factual material that should have been known within minutes.
Indeed.
And, and, you know, just this case of the muni cop who was boosted up, fell down.
Right.
That story changed over and over again.
Right.
And this was from their own law enforcement, Sloopy and also the district attorney there gave different stories.
It was seconds after he dropped down, he twisted his ankle.
He actually got a shot off.
No, he didn't.
It was like this ever changing stories.
Like they had the data, like on his body cam.
within like right then like that's the first thing you do you review that like they should have had that story nailed down within 30 minutes tops for weeks it was ever changing right long after it was implausible to have an ever-changing story and they could have cleared it up right away but chose not to and even now we have all this body cam data and it's all missing the same chunk of of early time you know where they zeroed it out for reasons and and again we're struggling with that so okay
i'm now getting something i didn't get before is it It's the muni cop who wasn't supposed to be at the event at all?
If he was on if he was at the event he was super distant patrol because he is five minutes away at high speed he has to drive to this event after getting a text on his phone.
So that's interesting.
The point is whatever was preventing communication between the local law enforcement and the Secret Service was more effective than the rando communication that a muni cop five minutes away receives.
His information is better than people on the ground and he is now... okay I've gotten used to the idea that lots of things that we see are The thing they're supposed to be but raised to the negative one.
They're the inverse of what they should be.
So this muni cop is the inverse of rogue.
The cops on the ground are not pursuing this in a rational way.
The guy who's remote hasn't gotten the memo that's supposed to dissuade him from pursuing this in a rational way so he comes blazing in he's like the only rational cop on the scene and he starts behaving rationally and what do you know he finds crooks he gets a weapon pointed at him right so that's a very odd fact right like the renegade cop who decides
To do his job, finds himself at the center of the story like almost instantly.
It just... Again, it's a really bad movie.
From screeching in to finding Crooks was a minute and 49 seconds.
And we have all these civilians on the far side going, he's right there!
They're all yelling, he's right there!
Right the civilians also haven't gotten the memo because they're civilians and they don't get the memo.
And then there's a there's a there's a little retaining wall there in a grassy knoll like you can see him we have those videos of crooks bear crawling up right just people standing there right but if you stood on that retaining wall you have complete like you could he's totally exposed 100% But then we have that building with three open windows that's right there.
And magically, the guys who are manning that overwatch leave.
They abandon.
They just dial out of there.
But even still with that, there's chatter.
There's a guy on the roof.
It's 6-0-8.
There's a cop who says clearly it's keyed into his mic.
He's on the roof.
He has tan shorts or light shorts.
Something, I think, light shorts.
608.
So, oh no, I'm Greg Nickel and or this other guy.
And I'm like, on the roof?
Say, I had a clear view of that from the place I'm supposed to be.
Let me go back there post haste.
Yes, the stairs.
The stairs.
Oh no, the stairs.
How do I get to the stairs?
However will I find the stairs?
All we know is about two minutes after the shots are fired, he wanders casually out of the door.
He doesn't, we should note, come out like you would see in a movie, because he doesn't know what's happening outside.
His gun is drawn, but it's just loosely at his side.
He's a boxer with his guard down.
He just walks out.
There's no threat, right?
It's just a bizarre thing.
I would think in that situation, my first assumption is, I don't know what's happening.
I've heard one guy is down.
My first assumption is there's more.
Right.
Yeah.
How would you know?
You might know, you know, you don't know that there wasn't another shooter who didn't take a shot and you, you know, days later you might conclude that.
Um, so.
I know that early on you did a lot of sonic analysis and I know that it convinced you that there was a second shooter and you've said that you are now of two minds about this.
You don't know which way the evidence really points.
If it wasn't so, I remember your analysis of the sound pattern.
I'm wondering What changed your mind and if there was one shooter what would explain the difference in the sonic characteristics of the two sets of shots?
Okay so we're gonna get this is all pure speculation at this stage but but let me This is, um, so this is taken from a cell phone that was recording off to the side and has typical problems, which is that the person's facing this way, but then the shooting starts and they dial around.
So the microphone is now shifted position.
Yep.
These are omnidirectional mics.
When you put it into video mode, their, their job is to catch sound all out there.
They're not directional.
Like when you're on a cell phone call, they have different mics that they, they like to go with.
But so that's why, um, the actual tenor of it, the amplitude, there's things we can't analyze, but echoes are echoes.
So let me just show you, this is the piece where I'm still like, I look at this and I'm like, Oh, this has to be two shooters unless I get really creative with some ideas.
Okay.
So what we're looking at here are two separate things stacked on top of each other.
This is the standard waveform you would see, and that's just amplitude over time.
Time is the X axis in this story.
So this is from a given cell phone?
From a given one cell phone.
So I've decomposed it into two things.
So first thing is just the sonic.
This is a standard waveform you would see.
And here you can clearly see shots one, two, three, four, five.
That's the string of five.
Here's what I call the ninth shot that comes in and probably takes him off his game.
But this is the sonic analysis under here.
And so this is devolved.
X-axis is still time, but now it's waveform.
So it's frequencies.
So this is 20 Hertz on the bottom and 20,000 Hertz on the top.
And it's just sort of banded up as we go.
So you're getting the layers there are harmonics.
Well, this is people screaming and whatnot.
So let me just clearly show you a, these are shots of this right here.
This is a shot that is the report.
So this, this cell phone is off to the side.
So we're not going to catch the sonic report of the bullet flying down range.
We're just hearing the boom only.
So this bright line right here.
So let me translate that.
This cell phone is far enough from the bullet traveling that you do not get the sonic boom.
It's too low amplitude.
Doesn't reach the microphone of the cell phone.
You do get the shot from the gun itself.
The report.
Let me be more clear.
If we were in a different orientation, we might pick up the sonic.
But here's the problem.
We're 90 degrees off from where the shots are happening.
So as that bullet leaves, and it leaves the barrel supersonic, it leaves a trail, a cone of sound that's trailing behind it.
Okay?
Yep.
And that cone is now progressing from in front of the barrel outwards, so very little of it is going to travel, wrap all the way back around, and come to the side 90 degrees.
Behind the gun is a terrible place to hear the sonic snap.
In front of the gun is a great place.
So this is to the side.
We wouldn't expect to hear any sonic snapping here, and we don't.
So this is the shot right here.
This is shot one, the very first one.
And the first thing we can notice, because you would hear this auditorily, is there's very little happening up here in the higher registers.
These are lower thunk sounds.
These are principally at about 400 hertz and under.
These shots, which is the five you hear, you see all this upper range stuff here?
Crack, crack, crack, crack.
This gives it a much sharper sound.
This is people screaming.
This is these are people like yelling some ladies yelling Ross.
So that's what a lot of this noise is.
But we're just going to look at these little things right here.
First, if we said what's the center mass of these, it centers up at about 250 hertz.
And if I keep drawing flat and fair, these are all higher.
And the second thing that's a real problem is this is an echo right here.
This is the shot, but this little thing right here is an echo.
And you can see when we dial them out the best I could measure, this echo comes off at .083 or 83 thousandths of a second after the shot came over.
the report of the gun here's 0.77 so we'll average that we'll say 0.08 is kind of that reflective surface that gives us a range of possibilities for what it could be right now again sound doesn't have to go out to a barn face and then slap back to us it can travel away from the shooter and bounce off something and back towards us We have to start accounting in 3D space.
Like, what could this possibly be bouncing off of?
But a problem I have is that these have really much stronger, very clear echoes.
You can hear them clear as day.
You can even see them on the amplitude line above.
Shot.
Echo.
Shot.
Echo.
Echo.
These are really big, meaty echoes, okay?
They're almost as loud as the gun itself, and worse, they're 0.17 seconds away.
That's way outside of measurement error in this story, which usually is in a thousandth or two.
So I don't know how to account for that.
How do we suddenly get a gun ostensibly fired?
Null hypothesis.
Crooks takes all eight shots.
I'm having trouble with that one.
And so my one explanation is he has to change orientation.
This is only 2.7 seconds between these two.
So he has to take three very careful measured shots.
The first one is the one that almost takes Trump's head off.
That's his most careful measured shot.
These two come, again, 0.8 seconds, 0.7 seconds.
It's like very measured shooting.
And then how far can you travel in 2.7 seconds?
And the only thing I can come up with is he's suddenly like, oh dude, I missed.
He slides back and there's this big ridge cap, big metal ridge cap up there.
And so maybe now he's shooting enough behind the ridge cap for those fast five.
that some of that the big chunk of that signature is now actually bouncing off of that ridge cap and going behind him and finding some other building face back there and bouncing in now what I but what I would have wanted to see Brett is I would want to I still want to see this close surface echoing
I can't account for how you can get that much motion in the gun barrel so that he's changed enough that he's completely changing which reflective surface he's coming off of to the exclusion of there is no 0.08 surface in here it's just it's not there and there is no sort of faint 0.17 second echo surface in here it's just not there these are two completely different echo surfaces and I I'm just I'm struggling Honestly, I'm a scientist.
You know what I want to do.
I want to go to that building and shoot.
Make some noise.
Yeah.
In a bunch of directions with cell phones everywhere and see what happens.
Yeah, it's the obvious thing to do and it's, you know... If we didn't have the distinct impression that... Do you remember when OJ dedicated himself to finding His ex wife's real killer.
Yes.
If I did it.
Well, no, before that, he, he vowed to find this mysterious person.
But the investigation that he embarked on seemed to lack dedication, as it might, if he wasn't looking that hard, because You know, look, if you ate the cookies, and your wife says, Hey, have you seen those cookies?
And then you go on an investigation to find the cookies, but you know, there are no cookies, the investigation might not be as thorough as it might otherwise be, right?
Do you have a raccoon?
Well, I'm pretty sure I don't have a raccoon because I ate the cookies.
So the investigation here does not appear to be An exhaustive search for answers.
It appears to be an investigation to placate people who would expect an investigation.
That's alarming.
Because if the real answer is this was crooks.
Ruling out that there was anybody else ought to be a high priority.
Figuring out how Crooks succeeded, high priority.
What's with all this incompetence?
Where else is it?
And who else's life's in danger?
Right?
All these things ought to be the focus of a system earnestly trying to sort out what happened.
And a lot of this just feels like it's not that interested because maybe they ate the cookies.
Mm-hmm.
Well, we've had an absolute team of audio specialists and engineers, and like all good engineers, they're just dueling it out and, you know, calling each other names, and it's just a beautiful process.
And there was one gentleman who said, listen, the analysis you did there is a time for frequency, but instead what we do is we just, we devolve the frequency at any point in time and we say, how much amplitude did it have at any given frequency?
And you get what's called a, it's a fingerprint.
Right it had this many at 10k and this many at 9.8 and so you can see sort of this thing and so he took this exact sequence we just looked at and said wow the fingerprints of 1 through 3 do not even remotely match those of 4 through 8.
And more importantly, the exact type of frequency pattern you see on the on those first three, they have this arcing shape across the low frequencies.
And he said, in criminal training forensics, in audio forensics, those are called formants.
And I had to look term up and get familiar with it.
But a formant means that that there was a standing resonant frequency that's blah, blah, blah, it's most consistent with if you shoot in a box, these things bounce off of each other and the high frequencies tend to cancel each other out and the low frequencies come out and wrap around and off they go and they go to do and they travel more easily he said um without knowing anything i would have um told you that those first three were shot they came out of a A room, potentially.
Right?
That's just what the fingerprints say.
Now the problem is, we then were like, well where is this room?
Right?
And we can't find a place where you could reasonably have a second shooter.
The angles are all wrong if it's those open windows we talked about.
The windows directly below him seem to be closed because we have some video that seems to show.
I can't find a place for a second shooter.
that maps into this.
And that's been that's been my problem is like, okay, I have a theory, hypothesis that's consistent with formants and echoes, and all sorts of stuff, but I can't find a place to put them.
I just can't.
All right, that's interesting.
And you're looking for a box.
Some kind of a box.
Some kind of a box.
Yeah, no, it's interesting.
The evidence does not... The evidence seems to falsify both possibilities.
Right, that's a very rapid pattern of fire, a very different auditory signature.
I formally understand what you're saying about the sound bouncing off that ridge cap if crooks had slid back.
But I don't know how much sound, how much, I mean, again, your point is, yeah, Yeah, the way you find out is you go there and you take some shots and you record so that you can figure out what the effect of sliding back would be and whether or not the ridge cap effective.
I sort of feel like the ridge cap, when I have encountered ridge caps, they tend to be, you know, sheet metal suspended by...
Oh, they're sheet metal, and so there's a lot of flex in them.
Now, I don't know.
This is an industrial ridge cap.
It's not a house ridge cap, but I'm wondering how effective it really would be at bouncing sound.
I feel like a lot of it would get sort of sucked up and muddied.
but I don't know yeah it's it's odd we have this one uh it's just this this is the great frustration of these investigations so somebody's filming thank you and we see him right before the first shot is about to to get taken we know that his gun is upright and he's sighting down um and then the first shot happens but but it's it's literally somebody walks in front of the camera uh about I don't know, maybe a quarter second into that whole thing.
So again, we have three frames to work with at 30 frames per second, and we're just staring at him.
And it doesn't look like his shoulder moves, right?
There's, there's no appreciable kick.
Now, 223 doesn't kick a lot, right?
And it's from a distance and it's been zoomed in.
Got issues.
Um, so what we're lacking is, is any sort of evidence though, that he took that first shot or second or third or any of them.
Right?
We don't have any, I have literally zero direct evidence of that so far.
Yep.
No, I worried about this too.
You know, if he's the Patsy, then, you know, you could get a single shooter, sonically speaking, that was near enough To match Crook's and then somehow shell casings end up on the roof that implicate Crook's, but we don't have the ballistics from his gun.
You know, we don't have anything.
So, you know, that is a possibility here, is single shooter somewhere else.
Slightly else, I guess.
But you say it doesn't match the windows below?
It would match perfectly.
Unfortunately, they all look closed.
And again, nobody was shooting through those windows.
They're not broken after the fact.
Yeah, it's very tricky to pull that off.
And there's no... That's a metal-clad building?
Yeah, and there's little vent-y things.
So people have speculated, well, what if somebody was hiding up in a false roof and shooting out the little vent-y things?
It's a possibility, but...
You know, we're grasping at this point.
Yeah, grasping.
On the other hand, if somebody was, you know, if this was an operation, not like an invitation to a groomed kid, you know, somebody who's been groomed to be an assassin, MK Ultra style, you might imagine a metal clad building.
I mean, you'd want to go look at it because if what you need is a box, And the windows falsify that possibility.
You could have all kinds of little ports on that wall.
Has it been scrutinized?
There are ports on that wall.
They could be pretty darn subtle.
You could have, you know, you could have a little door swing down over a hole that would look like an access panel or something.
Yeah, there are little vent-y things there.
Let's see if I can find a picture of them.
So, it's a possibility.
But the weird part is there are a lot of people all up along that line.
You would think that would create quite the concussion if you were right in line with that.
This might be tricky to pull these up right away.
I forget where I've got.
I have so many presentations now.
Whoops!
And remind me, I lost the thread.
Who was in that building and were people in the building right under where Crooks supposedly took these shots?
That story changed variably as well.
So all I can tell you for sure is that about two minutes after the shooting happens, Greg Nickel walks out.
So I know that.
And then he's locked out.
This is a self-closing, self-locking door because we see other people come up and try it and he tries to get back in and then a uniformed cop comes up and then somehow he pulls on the door and it opens so either he's Superman or more likely somebody else is already inside.
So I think there's we can account for one other person in there.
And Greg was in there, but that's all we really know about on that side of things.
Um, and so, uh, yeah, this is a picture of that side of the building here.
Um, let me zoom this up so we can get a full view of this.
So this is where, um, this is building six and these are the four vent stacks over here.
And this is the drain pipe that allows us to say, if we followed this metal rooms ridge seam up perfectly, this right here is where Crooks would have been.
Right there.
And so these would have been the windows, but there's also these little vent structures here.
Yeah.
We can see.
And if we assume that this is the ceiling height of the room, you know, it's possible that these vents are somehow that I don't know what the inside of this room looks like.
We had one quick picture.
People came in and it has a standard false drop ceiling kind of a look to it.
So that's a possibility.
Yep.
Yeah.
All right, well, so back when I was following this story carefully, it occurred to me that the sonic analysis is complicated, is very complicated, for several reasons.
You've got the sonic boom from the bullet itself that would be audible near its path, You've got the report from the gun, which would be audible everywhere.
You've got the sound of both the sonic boom and the report as picked up by Trump's microphone and then rebroadcast by the PA.
You've got the sound processing software which is going to do something with those very sharp sounds.
And then you've got cell phones that have individual sometimes moving locations relative to the original sources and the rebroadcasting speakers.
So that's a lot of different positions that don't inherently have anything to do with each other.
In other words, if you're hearing the report of the gun as picked up by Trump's microphone broadcast through speakers at two locations hanging from forklifts or cranes or whatever they were, Then that has some implication for what you should expect to hear from the location of any person with a cell phone.
So how, how did that play out in the sonic analysis?
Well, this got, um, fairly, it took a while to unravel.
So good news.
We had Trump's microphone, which is fixed in stationary, right?
And it did have some signal processing on it, which took a while to resolve.
So it turned out.
Including presumably some latency.
A little bit, but it, I mean, the audio engineers are arguing over exactly what happened, but here's the behavior we saw.
Here, let me just show you what it looks like.
Because this is, this was fascinating, took a while to resolve this.
So this is taken off of Trump's microphone.
This is one of the first three shots that's taken.
And what we're seeing here is you see, you see this sonic crack from the bullet come.
And then there's this, you see how this is ambient noise.
Just look at the fatness of that line.
See how quiet it gets right here.
Yep.
So what's happened is that there's some sort of a, either it's a compressor or it's a limiter or possibly even a gate that says, wow, noise got above a certain threshold and it goes into protect mode and it shuts down the microphone's processing for a while.
It doesn't do that, but it really did like, takes like strips like 25 dB off, just like crushes it down because it doesn't want feedback.
It doesn't want, you know, the crowd to have their ears bleeding because something happened.
So it has that function.
These bullets were loud enough to trigger that function.
And the confusion for a while was because in that string of five, they're so close together, the recovery time of the microphone's processing overlapped the arrival of the shot.
So people got all confused.
I was confused until we figured out oh Shots six and seven their sonic the crack of the gun is completely obliterated Because the bullet has snicked over and shut the microphones processing down long enough that you can't really hear it So it was a lot of confusion.
Was it this many shots?
Was it that many?
You know, we had to work all that out.
Got it.
Ironically, this is exactly how the modern ear protection for shooters works.
It allows you to hear somebody talking and radically attenuates the microphone input As you fire a gun.
So anyway, you've got a protective circuit that's there in case somebody shouts into a microphone that's been tuned to normal speech.
And in this case, the bullets are triggering that.
And by the way, this is how I know where that final last tenth shot came from, because that is a big muscular bullet.
It snicks over Trump's microphone and shuts it down so completely, you know, that You can track along just how long it's quiet for, and the report of that gun had to be in that window.
And people mistake this a lot, Brett.
We had to work through this.
People are like, oh, maybe they were shooting with a silencer.
They're not silencers, they're suppressors.
Good ones will strip 30 dB off of that sound, but this is 150 dB to start with, so it's still $1.20.
That's chainsaw, right?
It's still a loud report.
It particularly these guys weren't shooting like 300 blackout subsonic they were shooting 300 wind mags supersonic that bullet screams over the mic puts it in shutdown and that allows me to say it didn't come from 400 yards away because that would have been so delayed that the microphone would have detuned and we would have caught it very clearly on his microphone.
Got it so that that's so that falsifies the shooter in the water tower at least for that shot we have zero that can map to the under this that can map to the water tower zero okay there's just no there's no data for that whatsoever yep yep and the video that supposedly shows it is so distorted you can't
Well, I saw some people pulled a single frame from that distortion thing.
You can't do that.
So, so, um, somebody ran that for us and just ran it through, uh, uh, uh, an averaging program.
And there's like, no, you can clearly see there's, there's no, there's, there's nothing there.
Nothing there.
So I have that in the red category.
That's all it took.
That's in red, red land, barring some piece of evidence that would shift it back into some other category.
Yep.
Alright, so what else is worth knowing?
What are you tracking?
What information, if you had to prioritize it, would you most want?
Well, this is where I think my investigation sort of slows down, because now it's down to getting people in rooms and asking them uncomfortable questions.
If I had my druthers, I would pull all the cell phone data, because we know that you have very aggressive geolocation.
Now, even Amazon probably knows where all these people were.
So I want the cell phones of everybody who was supposed to be on a post.
I want to know everybody who was around that north building.
And I'm going to pull all the cell phone data, not just the LEOs.
I want to know everything, right?
So I think this would be standard.
You would yank all the all the cell phone data and you start asking questions.
You're talking about all the cell phone data for people involved in protecting the president or all the data for everybody?
I would grab everybody in case there was a somebody else helping that we didn't know about yet.
I mean that to me seems like standard investigative practice.
I want to ask a lot of questions about who was in the command post, who was interfacing with Secret Service, And I want to know who in the Secret Service knew what and when, right?
Because we saw the South Tower, the Hercules One, they, the South team, they swiveled around full 30 seconds and they are slapping and dialing in.
How come Trump isn't being yanked off the stage in that moment?
These guys are alarmed enough to swivel off of their duty area and we're leaving the, the president on the stage, vice, former president.
I don't understand.
Yeah.
Alright, here's one I'd like.
I would like an analysis of Secret Service protection at all of the other prior campaign events.
Yeah.
Right?
Because you would expect that this level of incompetence ought to show across the board.
Or it doesn't.
- I'll share a video with you.
There was this amazing, there's this woman, and she'd been to like 150 rallies, right?
And she sells wares there.
So she knows all the other people.
It's a little ecosystem, and she sees the same people over and over again, and often their booths are set in a per-place order.
So she's been to a lot, and this was like the day after, or two days after the shooting, She put this beautiful 10-12 minute video out.
Somebody's interviewing her and she said, I knew immediately something was wrong.
I walk on the site and I said, I can't believe they're going to leave him out here.
She said, with those lines of sight, this is just an average person like you or I, right?
But noticed obviously very observant.
And so she said, Every other one I've been to, they park like dump trucks full of sand if there's a line of sight to any particular roof.
So she was used to the cadence of this whole thing and said, this is all wrong.
And she knew it right away.
Wait, wait, wait.
They put a truck to actually block the line of sight?
Is that what you're saying?
Oh yeah.
Yeah, she said they would always bring in big trucks full of sand and equipment to sort of, if there was a line of sight, they had to protect.
They always did that.
Interesting.
So that is what I was suggesting up top as a as a know-nothing.
Hey, if I couldn't cover the roof, I would I would block it with something.
Yep.
Wow.
Okay.
All right.
Well, go ahead.
I mean, you know, so the So listen, I enjoy an investigation, so that's fine.
The reason I'm doing this though, Brett, is because of what it implies and where we're headed.
And I'm really, I'm about as alarmed as I've been.
And I've been, you know, me, I live on a farm.
I got, got some basic preparations.
I've been a little worried about the monetary system, but this represents a level like they don't care.
They don't care enough for plausible deniability.
And that alarms me.
They don't care that we can see that they're using AI images.
In fact, maybe that's the point that we notice.
They don't care to, they didn't even care to find a presidential stand in who was roughly the same height, right?
They don't care.
And that alarms me more than anything, because if they don't care about that, what's coming next?
I feel like we have to unravel this because otherwise I were lost.
Yeah.
And I'm hearing a lot of people say things that I'm sure they think are clever about.
Um, I'm sure.
Things are going to be fine.
And I don't think they understand how anomalous what we're seeing is and that it implies either a level of control or an anticipated level of control or events that will render all of this unimportant.
Yeah, you and I don't know what the game plan is, but it is clear that this is not... I think it is clear that we are looking at something shameless.
It doesn't care that it looks incompetent, that's irrelevant to it.
Because we're not looking at it, we're looking at...
Something it has commandeered and rendered incompetent for its own reasons.
And yeah, I think rather like the COVID debacle, we are, we have to insist on getting to the bottom of these things because they are the only thing that's going to allow us to correct course and our current trajectory is going to be fatal to the Republic in the short term.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it feels like that Western Civ dismantling project.
This is just another paving stone in that.
In that project, and if we don't disrupt it, you know, we end up in a place I really have no interest in ending up.
Not for me personally, selfishly, but for my kids, for your kids, for everybody else.
I mean, it just feels... This is very dangerous where we are.
And the words of Matthias Desmet just keep haunting me, you know?
That if you don't derail this thing, you end up with mass atrocities.
It's just where these things go.
And the confusing part to me is that all the people who are toting water for this don't understand that they're usually lined up against the wall with everybody else at some point in this.
Yeah, no, all of the little people are depending on us succeeding in unpacking this stuff, and by little people I'm including us.
Those who think that they are going to be looked upon favorably by the new powers that be do not understand what they're looking at.
No.
Yeah.
All right, well...
This has been fascinating, if disheartening, to see just how terrifyingly incompetent we are supposed to understand the protection at the Butler Rally to have been.
I'm tremendously grateful to you for sticking with it and doing such a Courageous and diligent job of exploring the evidence.
You clearly have the epistemic humility when you make a wrong turn.
You are very willing to come back and say, no, here's what I got wrong.
And anyway, it's admirable.
So on behalf of all of us in the Republic who are depending on this being properly understood in the end, thank you.
Well, you're welcome.
And thank you for that.
I appreciate it.
Just, it has to be done.
This has to be done.
It's for all the marbles.
All right, good.
So, uh, let's agree that, uh, we don't let this fall off the radar any more than we let the, uh, COVID debacle fall off the radar.
We need these stories, uh, fully unearthed.
Indeed.
Indeed, we do.
All right, Chris Martenson, people can find you at peakprosperity.com, where you put all your content.
And I must say you have not only a tremendous amount of very high quality stuff, but you also have a wonderful community of people who have taken your lessons to heart and learned to think with the tools that you have delivered.
People can read your marvelous crash course, which I see you have over your... I think that must be your right shoulder?
Almost.
It feels like your left shoulder.
It's my other right shoulder.
Okay.
Well, I guess, okay, if the peak prosperity behind you is written without, it's not backwards, then it's your right shoulder.
Even though it looks like your left shoulder.
All right.
What else?
Where else can people find you?
Uh, well, Twitter at Chris Martenson.
Um, I, I'm pretty, pretty active there.
Twitter turns out to be my number one source of news.
In fact, it's rapidly becoming my only source of news, uh, just because, hey, and it's a scrum, but at least it's a fair scrum.
There's garbage, but there's nuggets and, uh, I get to choose.
So it's, uh, it's working, working pretty well.
Yeah.
I mean, I would say it's not working, but it is, there is at least information buried in the noise there.
There's signal.
Whereas if you go to any one of your other go-to news sources, what you get is false signal and you don't necessarily know whether that's what you're looking at.
So at least the sort of raw, noisy exploration of what the hell is going on might contain the information you're looking for if you know how to look for it.
