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July 22, 2024 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
47:09
What Went Wrong at the Butler Trump Rally

Maybe the best analysis you will ever hear about this shameful security fiasco. Thumbnail credit: © Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts via ZUMA Press

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Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Radio Renaissance.
This is not our usual podcast.
We have a special guest, and he is Officer John.
He is a man who, as a police officer, has done just about everything it is possible to do.
Today is July 21st, 2024.
And without further ado, I would like, Officer John, please tell us something about your background and what you have experienced as a law enforcement officer.
Well, it's great to be back on the show, Mr. Taylor.
I'm very, very pleased to be here.
Very privileged to be here.
I'll just talk about my experience very briefly.
I started in the early 90s in Southern California.
Went to the Academy.
I graduated the top shooter out of a Combined Academy of 125 people from all over the county that I was in.
I went to patrol where I was a field training officer and then about after two years I was assigned to the gang unit where I was a gang officer just basically going out making gang arrests.
Became a member of the SWAT team and once I was on the SWAT team you start as a perimeter officer and then you work there's different specialties in SWAT and I became a sniper so my job is If there was a sniper, an incident that would require the use of a sniper, I would be put in place in that category.
After that, I was selected for a multi-jurisdictional drug task force where we basically went after
three strikers.
We went to find the worst parolees, the worst dope sellers, the worst gang members and everything.
By three strikers, you mean guys who had already been convicted of two former felonies, and
this is the idea to put them really out of circulation?
Right.
We would hand-select people that were really a detriment to the community, that were doing
the most violent crime that belonged in the penitentiary, and then we would find a way
to put a case on them because they were inevitably on parole.
We would do fourth waiver searches where they'd waive their Fourth Amendment rights, where we'd go search their house for dope and guns, or we'd stop them.
We were just kicking the hornet's nest, basically.
So, after about six years in Southern California, I found out that I was going to have kids and I didn't want to raise them down there.
So I moved up north to a different agency.
I was selected number one overall out of hundreds of applicants.
Went to the academy again.
I was the top shooter in that academy again.
And then I came out, became a field training officer again.
Then I was selected to be a part of a neighborhood street crimes unit where we didn't answer the radio.
We were just out there solving neighborhood problems and just basically all the hardcore street criminals.
That's what we went after.
I made the SWAT team again.
This time I was the most coveted position on SWAT is the entry.
You want to be the entry team member and I made that.
And I was also the gas grenadier there.
So this was my second SWAT team.
I went to the SWAT Academy for a second time.
I was the number one shooter in that SWAT Academy.
I was the number one shooter in my second police academy up here.
Then I promoted to sergeant.
Became a patrol sergeant for a while.
Took over the gang unit.
Worked at just nothing but just In your face just the worst of the worst we were just out hunting bad guys all day long every day.
I was promoted from there to the tenant where I took over the training division of my department and then I was later promoted to captain where I was in charge of the entire patrol division.
So in the span of 30 years there's really everything that you watch on TV where you know all every single TV show you see is about cops doing this and cops doing that.
I've I've literally done everything.
If you watch the movie, the show The Wire, that's literally what I did for a living.
If you watch that stupid show SWAT, that's literally what I did for a living.
The movie Colors, that's what we did for a living.
I mean, pretty much every movie you've watched about law enforcement, I've actually done it.
And so I have kind of a wealth of knowledge about the topic we're going to talk about today.
Wow, that is really impressive.
I'm one of those guys who has never done a job anything like that.
I have just a little experience with firearms, but I can't tell you how much I respect you guys who are out there Prepared to face down bad guys, no matter how bad, no matter how well armed, no matter how much they hate you.
I think guys who are on a force, especially in a big city with a big black population, you all have the hardest job in America.
And I say hats off to the boys in blue who do that kind of work.
So it is a real pleasure and an honor to have you on this podcast with me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Well, I guess because everybody's talking about it, and you have also done work with the Secret Service, have you not?
You've been the local police representative who's in contact with the Secret Service when some bigwig comes by?
I have, and I have a funny story to kind of lead us into that.
We were at SWAT training one day.
I was still just an operator.
I was an officer.
I hadn't been promoted.
But our SWAT commander comes to us and says, OK, we have a presidential visit.
I believe it was Clinton.
And he says, we have a presidential visit coming to town, so we're going to be working with the Secret Service.
So I immediately get these delusions of grandeur.
Oh my gosh, I'm going to get to protect the president.
I'm going to be right up there front and center.
And I'm a fierce patriot, just like everybody listening to the show.
And I'm like, oh, this is going to be great.
OK, I'm going to be on point.
I'm going to make sure I look sharp.
I'm going to be defending the president.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
are given the crap detail of any presidential visit, which is fine.
Oh!
I mean, every one of these is it's a it's a federally it's a federal event.
So it's run by the feds.
And if anybody doesn't already know the feds look down their noses at at locals
and locals consider feds to be chumps.
I mean, FBI stands for famous, but incompetent.
And DEA stands for don't don't expect anything.
So it's a mutual we have a mutual kind of disdain for one another.
We call them accountants with guns and they think we're all, you know,
mouth breathing backwoods morons, which we're the ones out there
going to cause dealing with danger every day, every now and then.
They'll get a search warrant and then they'll have either the local SWAT team
do it or they'll call in their regional SWAT team.
They're not what you see on TV with the FBI running around, running and gunning
with their vests out with their vests on. And.
Okay, so it sounds like a reasonably friendly rivalry, I hope.
I would challenge any FBI agent, unless they're assigned to some fugitive task force to prove
me wrong.
But it's just a fun little head-butting that we always did through the years.
Okay, so it sounds like a reasonably friendly rivalry, I hope.
But because you guys are ultimately on the same team.
But yeah, I can see that.
Compared to a man like you, breaks down doors, who is dealing with guys who are blazing away or prepared to blaze away, these guys almost never see real action.
Right.
I probably would estimate I've done, in all honesty, whether it was with SWAT or with narcotics in both agencies, I've done at least 300 high-risk entries where we're kicking down doors, going in guns a blazing.
And there's FBI agents who will never do that.
Just never.
That's a fact.
And I challenge anybody to prove me wrong on that.
But we're the ones running and gunning.
Like I said, the stuff you see on TV is just pure fantasy.
You know, I guess it's sort of obvious if you think about it with any imagination at all, but I never realized that the Secret Service, you know, they project this aura of super competence.
We guard the President.
We are the best of the best of the best of the best, and they hardly ever see any real police combat style action.
That had just never occurred to me before, but as you pointed out, it's obvious.
Yeah, okay, please do.
I had a friend that was on SWAT and he wanted to be, he wanted to work for the Secret Service.
So he was in the hiring process.
He was very, very close to being hired.
And I think they even gave him an offer and he retracted it at the last minute.
We're like, well, dude, what'd you do that for?
And we never really considered you.
I mean, nobody goes straight to guarding the president, right?
I mean, you, you get the job, you're going to get assigned to some, you know, backwoods Arkansas congressmen, you know, if you ever, if you ever even guard the president ever, The odds of that are remote.
I mean, you have to be, you have to know somebody or you have to be the absolute elite to get that gig.
Well, that's at least that's how it used to be.
So he rescinded the job.
He took away his, you know, application because he realized that the odds of him ever really protecting a real high level dignitary were, were very slim.
I mean, it's a huge agency and it's, they've got to defend all of these members of Congress as well as the president.
And he, he didn't, he failed to think about that, that he would, he might never get the dream gig.
I see.
I didn't realize all Congress—well, I guess Congressmen don't get 24-hour protection by any means, but if they do something that's high risk or exposed, the Secret Service protects Congressmen and Senators, too?
As far as I know, to at least some level, they get some type of protection.
I mean, you figure like, you know, one of the idiots there now, Mitch McConnell, or Yes. Nancy Pelosi.
Right. You know she gets Secret Service protection, which makes it all the funnier that they're
screaming about gun control when heavy hitting guys with guns are the ones protecting them
on a daily basis and sitting outside their house. So it's, at some level, they all receive
some type of protection.
Well this is a little bit of a sidetrack, but through a strange combination of accidents,
I got to know Mayor Ed Koch of New York reasonably well.
And I would go up to visit him in New New York and we'd go out to a restaurant.
He loved being recognized.
This was after he had stopped being mayor.
He would refer to himself as the, I'm the Mayor-tola, modeled on the ayatollah.
In any case, he always had a guy who followed around him very discreetly, always armed.
But he was so in favor of gun control for the rest of us, and I used to tell him, come on, Ed, come on.
You've got a guy who follows you around all the time, armed to the teeth, trained probably to absolute killer qualities, and you don't want the rest of us?
You've got an armed guard all the time, and you want to disarm the rest of us?
And he never had a good answer for that, but that just seems so hypocritical, just like Nancy Pelosi and all the rest of them.
We're so important.
We're so important.
And whenever there's an incident and the Capitol Police ever stop a bullet or they get in trouble, oh, they lower the flag.
They talk about how wonderful the police are, and wonderful if they are protecting No, it's just so hypocritical.
It's sickening to me.
Well, look at Chicago.
I mean, it's pretty much illegal to even look at a gun in Chicago.
On Fourth of July weekend, they had 108 shootings and 19 dead.
I mean, gun control is against law-abiding gun owners.
We could go on and on about that off-topic.
Yes, we could.
It's just the absurdity and the hypocrisy of all that.
It's just beyond.
But you were about to tell me what it's like to be local agency dealing with the Secret Service when the big cheese comes in, or a relatively good-sized cheese comes in.
Right, so conspiracy theories abound on this story now.
We're a little stale on it now.
I mean, it's gone completely off the rails.
Oh, I don't care about any of that stuff.
You know, I'm a simple-minded guy.
I believe what the mainstream tells us to happen.
Nothing else makes sense to me.
I just would not go into any of these what strike me as kind of harebrained ideas.
Yeah, I'm going to keep it base level here.
So this every incident like this is based on something called the ICS system, the Incident Command System.
It started back in 68 when they had the California wildfires and anytime you have multi-jurisdictional involvement with different radio frequencies, different assets, different jobs, you do You fall into this plan called the Incident Command System.
It's very convoluted, and as a side note, the higher you get promoted, the more of these classes you have to go to.
It goes from 100 to 200 to 300, all the way up to like 800, I think.
And it is, without a doubt, in the 30 years I was a police officer, the absolute most painfully boring, tedious training you've ever been to.
So once again, this is to prepare you for multi-agency actions?
Is that what it's for?
And so what this, we can boil this whole, the whole Trump thing boils down to two things.
Yes.
It boils down to allocation of resources and communication.
That's why what happened happened.
So, you know, either they didn't have enough people or they didn't have them in the right place or something wasn't communicated in the briefing and they asked who's to blame for this.
Without a doubt, the incident command system, the ICS system was implemented in this incident.
There's only one person to blame.
And that's the incident commander, who was undoubtedly a Secret Service agent.
So, a high-ranking Secret Service agent oversaw the planning, the briefing itself, and the operations.
And that's it.
That's where the buck stops.
Now, everyone's talking about, should this cheetah woman, you know, resign?
And so, I thought about that long and hard.
You know, as a captain, every time one of my officers did something stupid, or even something criminal, Yes.
Did I feel obligated to resign?
Of course not, because that's something where I would discipline that person individually, and if I had to change policy or procedure, I would do that.
But the problem here is, from what I know about the Secret Service, she had to have seen this briefing packet.
I don't see any way around how she could have not known, this is our plan, this is what we're going to do, do you approve?
So the feds are, just to give an example, if we wanted to buy, if we were working with the DEA and we wanted to buy a gram of dope, they had to ask Seattle, And that Seattle had to give permission to the local office before we could spend $180.
No, no, no.
I beg your pardon.
Buy a gram of dope?
I don't quite understand that.
Why would you want to buy a gram of dope?
If we wanted to do a controlled buy using an informant, like you see on TV, and we wanted to spend federal funds on that, they would have to ask the Seattle field office.
Just something that minor would have to get approved through the field office.
So you can guarantee That a former president visiting would require them, you know, sending the briefing packet to DC and getting a sign off.
So if she signed off on a plan that was lacking in resources and had poor communication, she is definitely to blame for it.
But on its face, without question, the person that was in the incident commander in that briefing, the Secret Service guy, the highest ranking, he is ultimately responsible for it.
Because you have the, if you look up it, people can do it on their own.
They can look up the ICS system on Wikipedia.
And it has a little command structure with the incident commander at the top.
And then he has liaison.
You know, the police liaison, that would be like a captain from the police department, at least.
Maybe the chief.
I doubt that the chief would get involved with that.
It should be a captain.
And then there's an operations, planning, logistics, and financial section.
So every one of those is run by either a Secret Service agent or a police officer, depending on the assignment.
And then the incident commander is just supposed to stand there with his arms folded and say, yes, go ahead.
No, don't do that.
All the decisions are made below him or her, and then he or she approves it.
So the incident commander will have looked at every single detail of the plan, and he would have said, okay, this looks good.
This is the plan we follow.
Forward march.
Correct.
Now, just here's a side note.
Do you remember when Trump's place got raided in Mar-a-Lago and he was saying they authorized deadly force against me?
Do you remember when he was doing that?
Every federal agency's briefing packet, it doesn't matter if it's the controlled drug buy that I told you about, or if it's a presidential visit, every single federal briefing packet has their entire use of force policies, especially deadly force, included in the briefing packet.
They do that with everyone for liability reasons, because those briefing packets are discoverable.
Yeah, the hard copy is discoverable by the people.
I mean, you don't get to keep copies.
There's one, only one copy is allowed to, no copies are allowed to leave that briefing room.
Well, just to interrupt you here, then this briefing package should be discoverable by a FOIA Act, the briefing packet for this Butler appearance.
100%.
Wow, so that'll come out sometime, somewhere.
It should.
Won't that be interesting?
Huh, okay, sorry I interrupted you.
I would be on, just as an example, I would be on a SWAT raid, and we do our briefing packet, and somebody would put a little bit of levity in there, like a, you know, you know, you get the crap detail, you know, put some type of language in, and I'd say, no, we're not putting this out, take it back, take that out, because if something goes wrong, if we have a deadly force incident, this is discoverable, and then it's going to look like we weren't taking it seriously, and so I know very well How discoverable and sensitive those documents are.
I see, I see.
Before the incident commander does any kind of briefing, there's a pre-briefing.
So he's going to meet with the SWAT commander and the captain of the police department at the very minimum.
And he's going to say, this is what we need you to do.
And it's almost, I saw a story that says we were assigned to traffic control.
That's almost 100% of what it is.
We block certain roads, we clear the ingress and egress for when they approach, we clear the escape route and we would clear the route to the hospital if necessary.
So, and this was an open air event, so it's infinitely harder to do an open air than like in an arena like you did last night.
So, on one of my particular incidents where I was assigned, you know, I thought I was going to be protecting the President, nothing could be further from the truth.
I was put up on the roof.
Oh yeah.
I've done the whole traffic thing in SWAT gear.
And I've also been stuck up on a roof.
You know, when Dick Cheney came to town, I was up on a roof for about six hours in the blazing heat.
I had to build a lean-to.
Me and my partner were just getting obliterated.
But we stood up there for hours.
Because you have to monitor.
It was downtown.
You have to monitor every single roof.
Every single building has to be cleared.
Ingress and egress.
Wow.
At the end of the day, this briefing packet came out and they said, this is your job.
This is what we're going to do.
This is the route we're going to take.
This is what we need you to block.
If this happens, this is what we need you to do.
If that happens, that's what we need you to do.
So it should have been very clear.
So you're talking about the briefing package that comes down to the local police department from the Secret Service, right?
Right.
So the Secret Service will brief.
The cops don't get to go to that briefing.
It's just the commanders.
Then the commander will take that briefing packet, and then he'll make his own briefing packet.
This is what we're going to do.
This is our job.
This is my list of personnel, and this is everyone's assignment.
The problem is, and what I think contributed to this situation, is the feds have their own radio frequencies, their own different types of radios, and the police have theirs.
We don't have the Secret Service channel programmed into our radios.
And we never will.
There's all kinds of FCC rules.
If you were to add the Secret Service's channel to every radio, somebody would have to physically touch every single one of our radios and program them.
You just can't enter in a number.
It's a huge, huge deal to add that.
So, the way that has gotten around is the police commander and the Secret Service incident commander are standing right next to each other and the The police incident commander is receiving the radio traffic from his guys on the ground, the Secret Service guy is receiving his traffic from his guy on the ground, and they communicate with each other.
There's no direct line.
No police officer was allowed to click his radio and talk to a Secret Service officer.
Unless, in the highly, highly unlikely scenario that they had enough federal radios to hand to the cops, which I've never seen happen.
I see.
So basically, let's say, let's say you and I are on a position on a perimeter, and we see a suspicious guy.
We'd say, Taylor and Patterson to Incident Command.
Go ahead.
We see a weird guy on this perimeter here.
We're going to go check it out and then he would say copy and then he would tell the Secret Service guy what his guys were doing and then the Secret Service guy would put it out to his guys.
That's where the communication lag comes in.
Well, that shouldn't take long.
If they are sitting just cheek by jowl, then say the local police commander, he just turns the guy and says, hey, we've got a guy with a gun at spot X, and the word should get out quickly.
Right.
Okay.
Right.
So just as an example, when all the George Floyd Black Lives Matter stuff was going on, I was the incident commander for several Of the protests.
Yes.
And we ran the same ICS system.
I was the boss.
I had every roof covered.
I had three sniper positions.
I had three drones up.
I had traffic blocked off.
I had just as much locked down as they should have had for a former president's visit.
So somewhere along the line, they either intentionally shorted him, Secret Service personnel, or they didn't communicate what needed to be done or both.
So in any type of an outdoor gathering like this, the number one thing you do, you start your perimeter from where's the dignitary going to stand, and then you work your perimeter out, and then you work out again, and then you fence that part in.
So everybody that was there, as a spectator, was fenced in, because there was obviously a metal detector and, you know, security checking and everything, just like they would at a sporting event, for God's sake.
Yes, yes, right, right.
The police are resigning.
The second thing you have to do is block the roads, the ingress and egress, make sure nobody can drive by, make sure nobody can Drive a, you know, a truck bomb into it.
So I'm sure there was concrete barricades blocking anybody from doing that.
And the third thing you do is you have to take away the high ground.
It's very, very simple.
You don't leave the high ground unmanned and just rely on your sniper team to make a good shot.
So what should have been done is you take two of your, if you don't have enough secret service guys, that's fine.
We'll call, we'll use the local officers.
And this is, this is basic one-on-one stuff, Mr. Taylor.
This is not 3D chess, okay?
You take, you take two SWAT operators, you stand them on that sloped roof, as they called it,
And they just stand there.
And every Secret Service sniper knows that that roof is not in play for me.
I don't have to watch anything on there because there's two policemen standing there.
Same goes with the other outbuilding.
And there's like three or four outbuildings.
There should have been two policemen standing on every single roof.
That way the snipers just have overwatch.
And if anything gets by those guys, that's what they have to do.
You can't... It's ludicrous to have...
You know, two or three sniper positions, scanning the crowd, hoping to find something.
And so, as we talk about snipers, there's three things.
There's three weapons conditions.
There's weapons hold.
Weapons hold means you are not to take a shot unless I authorize you.
Weapons tight.
Weapons tight means if you see a threat that you can reasonably articulate that is a threat to the former president, you may take the shot.
And then there's weapons.
Then there's weapons free, which means anything Moving it looks like a threat far away.
I mean weapon spree is That's like a hostage situation where if you get if you get a shot take it type thing So this was a weapons tight situation where don't take the shot unless you see Something that's an obvious threat.
So they need to make that snipers job easier Yes.
By taking away all of the high ground.
All you had to do was put two SWAT guys standing on that roof in the blazing sun for seven hours.
They're there on overtime, they don't mind, right?
And their job is just, their job is nobody comes on this roof.
So now that threat has been eliminated for both the sniper teams and for the incident commander.
So then they can just, then they can hone their observational skills into different areas, the nooks and crannies.
You saw the video of him wandering around?
Yeah.
By the building?
Did you see that?
Yes, I did.
Every single police officer that was on foot should have descended upon that guy.
The sniper should have said, Incident Command, Sniper 1, I have a suspicious subject on the northwest building.
Can you send the locals?
And he relays that to the Incident Commander for the police.
He tells this guy, here's the... They had a picture of the guy.
Why?
You know, the reason they take pictures is because they're sending that to the command post saying, is this one of our guys?
Do we know this guy?
We're looking for him.
And they send it out to everybody's phone that's on the perimeter to be on the lookout for that guy.
So they let this guy wander around, which should have gotten everybody's hackles up.
And they're letting him wander around.
Every officer on the ground should have descended upon that guy.
This is before he even got up on the roof, right?
Right.
Yes.
Yes.
He was already looking weird and acting weird.
Yeah, he should have been contacted long before that.
If somebody's wandering around outside the perimeter, that's who you pay attention to.
If you're one of the locals on the ground and I don't, I have a rule.
I don't disparage cops ever unless I was actually there and I wasn't.
So, I mean, there could, I don't, I don't rely too heavily on conjecture when I'm analyzing these, but for some reason.
That guy, that straggler, that was totally out of place.
I mean, even a lay person could see that was weird, right?
Yes.
I mean, people were pointing him out.
He should have been contacted.
So, I don't know if there's, there was a communication error there or what happened, but he should have been addressed before he even got up.
So, and when he gets up on the roof, what I think happened was, I think the sniper teams, the Secret Service sniper teams, saw him and said, hey, do we have a friendly on the roof to the northwest?
And then the incident commander looked at the police commander and said, Do you have any of your guys up on the roof?
And then it was just this complete cluster.
And they didn't take possession of, they ceded that roof to anybody.
And by doing that, they create this communication cluster that was unfixable.
And by the time they figured out that it needed to be addressed, it was too late.
And so you have these two officers, the one that boosted the other guy up
and he was like hanging onto the roof by his hands and the other guy trained his weapon.
So I think, I'm confident that that officer peeking over hastened the sniper's shot and is what made it miss.
I'm confident.
Because he knew.
He said, okay, the jig's up.
They saw me.
I got to hurry up and hook off around.
I think that's what saved him.
Wow.
Well, yeah.
Now, that just strikes me as the oddest thing.
That you have somebody finally getting up on the roof, and this was a team of two officers.
One guy is standing on the other guy's shoulders or sort of boosting him up even with his hands or something.
And I understand he was hanging on to the roof edge with both hands.
And so, he couldn't draw a weapon or anything.
Oh, no.
Yeah, there's no way.
And so, when Crook, or whatever his name is, turns a weapon to him, he is going to bugger out of there quick.
And he let go and he fell down and he actually injured himself, I understand.
So, my assumption is, and there's probably been reporting on this that I haven't read in sufficient detail, but my assumption is that it was only a few seconds after that that the would-be assassin fired off his rounds.
Because, as you say, he must have known at that, whoops, the police know I'm here.
I better get right to work.
Right.
I have no doubt that that hastened his shot and which was probably what made this end the way it did.
So what I think he did is he said, I have to hurry up.
I've got to get this round off.
He took the first one off and he did what an amateur does.
He pulled himself up off his scope to see if his round was effective.
And then when he saw the president hit the deck, then he just started indiscriminately firing into the crowd.
Because if he was still If he was still on target, he would have hit those secret service agents in the back.
This guy was a loner in cell.
He was a loner in cell who wanted to commit suicide and he wanted to go out with his name in lights.
So he took a shot.
When he saw it didn't work, he decided, okay, I'm just going to become a mass shooter now and just spray it into the crowd.
That's what I honestly believed happened.
And they're talking about, Oh, what was his motive?
What was his motive?
He was a loner in cell, which is what all, all these mass shooters are.
They all have the same thing in common, almost to a man.
And he decided, OK, I'm going to take this shot.
I don't know if that worked or not.
While I'm here, I know I'm going to die, which is what I wanted in the first place.
So I'm just going to spray into the crowd.
And then he killed that brave fireman while he was defending his family.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, so if he had been a pro, you say what he probably did.
He was looking at the president's head through that sight and not and he lifted his eye above the sight to see what the consequences of his first shot was.
Do you think that's what he did?
I have no proof, but I'd be willing to bet that's what he did.
Because if he was, if he was, you know, skilled, he would have fired his first shot.
And because he stood there for another three seconds, he had more than ample time to put an effective shot on.
So what I think he did is he said, did I hit him?
He pulled up to see if it was good.
And then when the president went down, then he started spraying it.
If you look at, I've seen some reanimations of it.
If you look at where the other shots weren't, they weren't even close.
It was just clearly him spraying into the crowd.
They weren't in any type of pattern whatsoever.
Huh, well what a swine.
He just thought he'd start killing anybody he could reach at that point.
Yeah, he's the typical loner incel that wants to put his name up in lights by, oh look at me, I got rid of the threat to democracy, or whatever the pejorative of the day is for Donald Trump, and he thought he was going to put his name in lights, and he knew he was going to die, and he went out trying to be famous. You know the odd thing is, unlike a lot of these
guys who do a similar stunt, he doesn't seem to have left any documents. He doesn't seem
to have explained his motives at all. Everybody seems to be utterly baffled by what he did.
That we know of. I mean, right. Remember the, I mean, how long did they hide the
manifesto that one school should have the transsexual should have? Oh yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We've still never seen it.
They released a few pages, a few handwritten pages.
I'm sure it just put this transsexual and the whole transsexual bandwagon in a very bad light.
They didn't want us to see this.
At least we knew there was something, but in the case of this guy, I haven't heard of a thing.
Well, so I guess the mystery still remains.
What the heck?
How could something as elementary as this happen?
As I say, even a bonehead like me, who's never ever had the slightest possibility for correcting and for protecting a perimeter, That would occur to me.
That's 145 yards away.
I mean, gosh, I have another range.
I can hit something at 145 yards.
I can hit something the size of a head at 145 yards.
If I'm lying down with a bipod, for heaven's sake, it's just so obvious.
Prone position, that's an iron sight shot.
I mean, an amateur would take that shot with a long rifle.
That's right, that's right.
So, I just don't understand it.
And I suppose eventually, once, maybe if we see that document, I forget what you called it, the one that the Secret Service puts together, the briefing packet.
Yes, the briefing packet.
Once a FOIA request ends up putting that on everybody's screens, now how long a document, I bet that goes to what, 30, 40, 50 pages, something?
I mean, for something like all this rigmarole.
The feds are notorious for it.
So yeah, it's going to be, it'll be, it'll be at least 20 pages.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what they have to, what they have to answer to is why did they man that building from inside?
So the building, the shooter used, there was officers inside, but that's completely pointless in an open air situation.
When you see the high ground, that's LM, that is basic one-on-one.
And you know, when that officer got lifted up and you saw that shooter, I'll bet you what went through his head was, We should have had somebody on this roof.
Well, I bet the first thing out of it, I bet the first thing that flashed through his mind was, I might die.
Here's a guy with an AR and he's swinging it my way.
But, uh, yeah.
The roof was sloped, right?
The sloped roof, we could, uh, it's just too dangerous.
The fact that she said that out loud is one of the most absurd things I've ever heard.
The sloped roof one, that was, she's, that, that's, that's the most ridiculous part of this whole thing.
Policemen can't stand on a sloped roof.
Give me a break.
Well, the odd thing is we have over and over seen photographs of the Secret Service snipers.
They've got their sniping nests set up and they're on a far greater slope.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, if you use a slope correctly, it gives you defilade and cover from a... Yes!
It's a preferred position.
You're less flat.
You're almost kind of upright.
That's just an absurd notion.
Everyone should just wave their hand dismissively at that.
Well, but for a woman who is supposed to be an expert in providing security, important people to say something just so manifestly ignorant.
I mean, it's hard to believe.
We can get into this whole female thing later on.
So, okay, whatever the case, there was a glaring, gaping hole in the security.
And I know that a lot of people believe that you could not have a hole this gaping in which you could drive 10 Mack trucks without somebody deliberately leaving it open.
But I think, and what do I know, that we happen to have this gaping hole.
I don't think it was deliberate.
Maybe it was.
But, and we also, coincidence of coincidences, we had this loser in cell, as you call him, who happened to walk through that gaping hole, blind luck, strange coincidence.
I mean, that's the way I see it.
But maybe enough facts will come out later on so that we'll find some sort of nefarious goings-on.
We'll see.
Either the federal incident commander or the local incident commander dropped the ball on that.
The first position you occupy should have been that one.
And hindsight is always 20-20, and I would always put that disclaimer in when I said something like this, but that is just so glaringly obvious that it was either a complete lack of communication or an intentional or shortage of personnel in some way or the other.
The thing about it is, what makes me very, very skeptical about any kind of intentional assumption about this is that it makes everybody look so bad.
I mean, these people, somebody, somebody, as you say, dropped the ball.
He didn't just drop the ball.
He dropped a 500-pound barbell on the collective feet of the entire country.
This is just a hair-raising, astonishing bit of incompetence, incompetence absolutely squared, cubed.
And the feds, in their normal fashion, something goes wrong.
If something goes wrong, they blame the locals.
If it goes right, they take credit.
And that goes for every single federal agency I've ever worked with, and I've worked with every one of them.
It's the same way.
If we've been doing a drug investigation for six months and they contribute money at the very end because it becomes a federal RICO case, the headline will read, FBI takes down RICO case.
Every time they would do that.
Notorious.
Have you ever had a federal agent who in private will concede that or will say, Officer John, I know we hog the credit here, but really, we appreciate all the hard work you all did in the months leading up to this.
Have you ever gotten that from a federal agent?
I've been pretty tight with some DEA and ATF guys, and it never gets more than just ribbing.
They'll never admit it.
We make fun of them.
Local police make fun of feds incessantly.
I can remember one agent from the ATF that I would just tease into oblivion in every one of his briefings, because he knew who was doing all the work.
He knew who was doing all the entries.
He knew who was making all the arrests, but still, they'll never admit it.
Is that right?
I mean, that's kind of disappointing to me.
You guys may be in different teams, but you're sharing, you got the same job in a way.
You're trying to accomplish the same things.
I'd like to think that there could be some mutual respect rather than this sort of constant ribbing, but I've never been in a military or police environment.
Maybe that's just too much to expect for guys who have got testosterone poisoning ever since they've been 12 years old.
That's what it is.
If you've had a hundred officers on here that have worked with the feds, they'd all say the same thing.
Well, that's kind of too bad.
Well, let's move on to this other absolutely hair-raising, eye-opening public display of incompetence, and that's these lady Secret Service agents.
I mean... So there was probably You see the one sniper position, there's probably at least two others you didn't see.
They usually have one that's very overt, that kind of hides the other two.
But they have three females and they all happen to be the ones that are guarding the president.
Why do you think that is?
Oh, to make them look good, to make it sound as though... Wow.
Yes.
They're the ones that are shown on national TV.
Yes.
Oh, by the way, by the way, before we talk about them, and there's a lot to say about them, what you just said about snipers sounds very interesting to me.
You have some snipers whom everyone can see.
And the idea there is you've got other snipers who are not sort of center stage and so the bad guys are going to try to get away from the obvious snipers and they don't realize they're walking right into somebody else's prepared field of fire.
Is that the thinking there?
Yep, we set up an intentional crossfire that nobody knows about.
So, they think they're out of the field of view of the ones that are visible and they're right in the crosshairs of the other one.
So, they set up overlapping fields of fire and they don't tell you about the other two.
You'll probably never hear about it because the ones you see on TV, those aren't even the ones that took the shot.
There was only one shot fired and it was from one of the hidden positions.
Now, by the way, would that be a .30 caliber round?
What kind of round would a sniper ordinarily use under a situation like that?
I use 308, but I think what they're using is 300 Winchester mag, because it's about 400 feet per second faster.
I see.
So, if you're anticipating up to a 500 yard shot, you want that faster round.
But they're all the same diameter, a 308, 30-06, and a 300 Win mag.
They're all the same diameter.
But the 300 Win mag is the fastest.
That's a hell of a wallop.
So, I was always a fan of the 308 because I was pretty surgical with it.
Yeah.
The 300 Win Mag is so much faster.
I'm pretty sure that's what they're using.
Bolt action.
Bolt action?
Wow, so you got a single shot.
And that's all you need if you do it right.
Should be all you need.
If you've made it to the point where you're a Secret Service sniper, if you're in a prone position with the 300 Win Mag, you should only need one shot.
And that's exactly what happened.
Well, you know, back to the shot on President Trump.
I have seen animations in which you get the impression that If he had not just moved his head to the side, he would have stopped that bullet.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
I haven't seen that animation.
So now I have shot a lot of squirrels in my life.
Many, many squirrels.
The thing about squirrels is they are moving almost all the time.
You may think you may think I mean I shot them all with an air rifle and you the you know the kill zone on a squirrel with an air rifle that I was using is about the size of a quarter and so you've got to be right on target and The fact of the matter is you got to hit that you got to hit him in the head You want to put that round right down their ear?
That's about the best shots you can take now if you right when you're about to squeeze it up that squirrel is gonna move and Or it can very well.
You have to be very careful because they are dodging.
I got to know the way squirrels operate very well.
I think they instinctively do this.
They instinctively do this because they know something could be coming at them.
A fox or it could be maybe a hawk.
If they are moving all the time, then somebody's coming after them might miss.
And I hate to say it, I would say about I don't know, maybe 20% of the time.
No, maybe not that bad.
15% of the time, I've got the perfect shot lined up and that little swine moves just as I squeeze the trigger.
So, in that sense, it seems to me that a sniper rifle, a bolt action, what if the guy suddenly moves?
That must happen.
That must happen in sniping as well as squirrel hunting.
So, now I have to tell you a story.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
I love your story.
I went to sniper school in Monterey, California at Fort Ord, and on the last day, it was this big, long dirt range that we used, and on the very last day, we had all just finished qualifying, and we were all from different parts of the country, and we were all standing up saying, hey, let's go have some beers after this.
It was great to meet you.
Let's keep in touch, and all of our bolts were out.
Everybody was done qualifying.
We were standing up, and all of a sudden, we all look up like a bunch of dogs, and we see a squirrel skittering across the firing range.
So we all look at the instructor, and the instructor shakes his head back and forth and rolls his eyes like, oh boy, and he puts his ear protection on.
So now here's this race, 50 snipers that have just qualified, us getting down, putting a round in, reinserting our bolt, and I'm next to the guy, he cooks off the first shot, it puts the squirrel in the air, he nailed him, and then right as the squirrel hit the ground, boom, I hit him with the follow-up.
Are you kidding?
A moving squirrel?
But I have, I have a great picture of it.
We made him a little grave out there on the, uh, on the firing range.
But, but yeah, it's like, it's, it's, it's a couple of things.
I mean, two things happened that I think prevented him from being dead.
And one of them is him looking, like you said, this moving target.
I mean, obviously waiting for the, either the tip of the nose is usually the best spot.
Cause that's what will shut you down the quickest.
But I think his inexperience as a, as a shooter, the fact that the police spooked him and he hastened his shot.
And the fact that the president moved his head.
Those three factors are why he's still alive.
That's what I think.
But you're telling me that if you're trying to take me out and all of a sudden I decide there are baked beans that are about to be overcooked and I make a dash to the kitchen, you're gonna follow me and you can still take me out as a moving target?
If you can take out a moving squirrel then, gosh, for your next trick you could burst into flame.
That seems quite remarkable to me.
Let me show you how we do it.
While we're talking on the phone here, put your finger on the tip of your nose.
Yes.
Now, without moving your finger, now move your head anywhere.
Look to the left, look to the right, and that's where we're going to put that bullet.
So if you look down, it's going to go towards your forehead.
If you look up, it's going to go towards your chin.
If you're looking straight ahead, your nose is where we want that round to go.
Sure.
So it doesn't matter, because obviously it's like anything else with shooting, you want
Sure.
the largest mass, you want center mass.
So the absolute middle of the head would be where your nose is.
So that's the point of aim.
So this guy was, obviously he had tried to join some shooting club and he said he was
like shooting two ranges over, he was so bad, thankfully.
So this guy was just, I bet he had to swing his rifle over to address the officer, then
he had to get himself back into his prone position where he was using the magazine as
I don't think he had a bipod.
Oh, I see.
Which is a total, that's a total no-no.
And then he probably hammered the trigger and then looked up off of his scope.
I would be willing to bet that's exactly how it happened.
Huh, huh.
Cause you hear the first round go, you hear it go crack and then you hear his pause.
Yes.
That's him, that's him assessing his shot.
And then you hear, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap.
That's him just indiscriminately firing into the crowd.
If he was still on target, the Secret Service agents would have got hit.
Right, right.
So he was just shooting into the crowd.
Well, I'll tell you one more story.
This is not a story of mine, and it has a less impressive ending, but this is a guy who went to Vietnam.
He was in rifleman training on a range, and I don't know where it was, but they're all down.
They're already prone.
They're just blazing away, and A deer happens to run right across the range and maybe I don't know it was 150 200 yards downrange and they're all blazing away trying to hit the deer but the deer is prancing and jumping and the deer runs all the way across the range right to left maybe maybe 30 riflemen every one of them misses the deer and uh apparently the range officer what's that 30 cases of buck fever
Well, the range officer, cool as can be, he gets on the PA and says, well, I can see the North Vietnamese will have no fear of you gentlemen.
Goodness.
Anyway, that's a less impressive, though these were just regular grunts who were going, who were shipping out to Vietnam.
But they were probably using M-16s.
Yes, they were.
Yes, they were.
Nothing special.
But still, I mean, as I say, I wouldn't even try to shoot a moving squirrel, so hats off to you guys.
Moving on, moving on to these rather unimpressive ladies, or you know, I'm almost tempted to have you back another time to talk about these ladies.
You've gone on for nearly 50 minutes here.
What is your preference?
I think I'd like to have you back for part two.
Let's do it.
Let's have a part two.
Okay, great, great.
By all means.
Well, I tell you, Officer John, again, Your profession is one that I absolutely, deeply admire, and it is a pleasure and an honor for you to be my guest.
And we'll set this up, and we'll go into the whole distaff side of this debacle, and I know you have a lot to say about that.
So, I tell you— Very excited to be back on Amaran with you.
This is my daily read, and it's an honor to talk with you, so I'm more than happy to come back.
Wow.
Well, it's just been great.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate your wisdom, your insight, and I'm sure that our listeners are going to feel absolutely the same way.
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