UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal reports assassin used drone to scope the site THE VERY SAME DAY to scope out the site's layout, complete with setup for the rally. 

The Trump rally shooter used a drone to get aerial footage of the event site hours before the attempted assassination. https://t.co/OC8aGSlrQh https://t.co/OC8aGSlrQh

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 19, 2024

A gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump was able to fly a drone and get aerial footage of the western Pennsylvania fairgrounds shortly before the former president was set to speak there, law-enforcement officials briefed on the matter said, further underscoring the stunning security lapses ahead of Trump’s near assassination.

Thomas Matthew Crooks flew the drone on a programmed flight path earlier in the day on July 13 to scour the Butler Farm Show grounds ahead of Trump’s ill-fated rally, the officials said. The predetermined path, the officials added, suggests Crooks flew the drone more than once as he researched and scoped out the event site.

ORIGINAL POST:

You have to admit it is bizarre. 

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump, in the midst of a contentious presidential campaign against the most famous man on planet Earth, has been almost memory-holed by the federal authorities. 

They are saying very little. 

Now it's true that for the most part, the media is doing its job digging. They are generally 2 days behind Dan Bongino, but the mainstream media is stretched so thin these days and often staffed by "journalists" who mostly gave up doing journalism when Barack Obama became president that it doesn't surprise me that they are late to the party. 

This is more due to their modest competence and the rustiness of their skills than any attempt to bury the facts. They know this is a big story, and are doing their best, however bad that is. 

But the FBI, Secret Service, and Homeland Security have gone dark. America is riveted by the story and most people are angry at the failures, but aside from some reluctantly extracted statements and anodyne comments about how it shouldn't have happened, we get next to nothing. 

WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FARK? This is insane, both because it is not the way things are usually done, and because it looks really suspicious. 

🚨🚨 Whistleblowers tell me that MOST of Trump’s security detail working the event last Saturday were not even Secret Service. DHS assigned unprepared and inexperienced personnel 👇 pic.twitter.com/eo4jNmJWFT

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 19, 2024

Americans are faced with two explanations for what happened, and neither is pleasant: 1) the Secret Service was grossly negligent, or 2) people high up the chain of command were in on it somehow. 

I prefer explanation 1, as we all should, both because it seems more plausible to me and because the alternative is too awful to contemplate. (It also seems nutty to think that the US government would rely on a 20-year-old untrained sniper to pull this off). 

But more and more people are wondering about answer #2, and that is mostly on the silence of the feds. 

The American people deserve answers NOW.

Biden’s Secret Service is slow rolling the processing of our FOIA request… https://t.co/Py2kUdGH4L

— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) July 19, 2024

They may be trying to hide their grotesque incompetence, but leaving an information vacuum as they have leads people to contemplate the unthinkable. If we were getting regular updates from the top folks involved, highly publicized and filled with the good, the bad, and the ugly, we all would focus on the first explanation. 

Instead, they appear to be engaged in a coverup. 

I think/hope that it is just a coverup of their incompetence, but is it so insane to wonder about the alternative? Heck, Nellie Bowles at The Free Press muses about the possibility, and she is not exactly a conspiracy theorist. 

Let me indulge in my own alternative narrative footsie, if you will. Like: Thomas Crooks was recorded in the background of a video at 5:06 p.m., about an hour before the shooting, pacing around the boundaries of the Trump rally. It was around then that he was identified as a person of interest by law enforcement while Butler Township police separately received a report of a “suspicious male.” At 5:52 p.m., Secret Service snipers first spotted Crooks on the roof of a building outside the security zone. Various rally attendees yelled and pointed him out to security. Around this time, a Butler Township police officer attempted to climb up on the roof and stop Crooks until he pointed his gun at the officer, scaring the cop away. At 6:12 p.m., Crooks opened fire on Trump. It took 26 seconds after that for a Secret Service sniper to fatally shoot Crooks in the head. 

The roof he shot from is clearly a good roof to shoot a president from, so why wasn’t it secured? “That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” said the head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle. Of course, Kim wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfy by putting them in an unsafe sitch. The Secret Service is for wearing cool sunglasses and whispering a secret into your jacket sleeve every so often. 

Don’t forget: inside that exact building a team of snipers was hanging out, waiting. Didn’t they think to peek on the roof? Slope too scary? Now, honestly, I feel divided on this. Mostly I think it’s just Uvalde levels of incompetence and cowardice. But it is all a little weird. Little odd. A little “someone gave him nine seconds.” 

Senators, House Members, and lots of others want more transparency, but even top-level elected officials are getting the brush off. 

That is, simply put, insane. Both because it is wrong but also because it is suspicious. 

Sure, nobody wants to air their dirty laundry, but it is their responsibility to do so because they work for us, were protecting the former and future president, and because not doing so only makes things worse. 

So drop the silence. Start telling the truth, for once.