Three guesses, and the first two don't count. 

After finding out about Ryan Wesley Routh's colorful history over the last 36 hours, one had to wonder how he'd managed to stay off the radar of the FBI, Homeland Security, and the State Department. Routh had multiple felony convictions involving firearms, had traveled to Ukraine on multiple occasions to join their foreign legion, and had even gotten attention from the media for his extremism.

How could the feds not know about him? Well, it turns out that they did. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that several people tried to warn federal authorities that Routh was dangerously unhinged, warnings that apparently went nowhere:

The gunman suspected of attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump acted so erratically during his years as a pro-Ukraine activist that other Americans who encountered him flagged his behavior to U.S. authorities. 

Ryan Wesley Routh was taken into custody in Florida on Tuesday after Secret Service personnel spotted and opened fire at a man pointing a rifle through the fence at a West Palm Beach club where Trump was golfing. The man fled in a black Nissan and was quickly apprehended.

But it was Routh’s time in Ukraine, where he traveled shortly after the Russian invasion in 2022 hoping to join the fight, where his tumultuous life full of failures and brushes with the law seemed to spiral further downward—and to alarm those who came in contact with him.

The entire article is filled with red flags raised by a number of people. It's impossible to excerpt with any justice, so read it all if you can. It's not as though the warnings came from fellow fringies, either. Aid groups in Ukraine quickly discovered that Routh was a "fraudster," bragging about contacts he didn't have, and tried to warn the State Department about his activities in 2022. 

An American nurse in Ukraine at the same time interacted with Routh and grew so concerned about his violent rhetoric that she started documenting it in a notebook. Later, she alerted a Customs and Border Protection officer in Dulles on her return home in June 2022, talking for an hour about Routh and others. When the CBP officer noted that she had quite a few names, she insisted that Routh was the most potentially dangerous among them. She also alerted CBP and the FBI that Routh was attempting to recruit Syrians to fight in Ukraine. 

Neither CBP or State would respond to the WSJ for this story. 

For that matter, the FBI got alerted in 2019 that Routh had several firearms in his residence in Hawaii. As someone who had been convicted four times on felony firearms violations -- including possession of an automatic weapon -- this would have been a felony and a likely prison sentence that might have kept Routh behind bars this weekend. The FBI never followed up on a referral to local police, however, which is not only sloppy work but another reminder that the federal government doesn't enforce the gun-control laws already on the books. 

The FBI isn't commenting, either. 

This raises a question about certain other federal agencies, too. Routh cut quite a swath in Ukraine, and for that matter here in the US before that. Did our intel agencies have any data on Routh .... or perhaps an interest in him? A retired FBI agent told John Solomon yesterday that they couldn't have possibly overlooked Routh:

A veteran FBI agent said Monday that he would be “shocked” if intelligence agencies did not already have would-be Trump assassin Ryan Wesley Routh on their radar for his travel and apparent efforts to recruit foreign fighters for Ukraine. 

“I asked about it in almost every case I had, especially in counterterrorism Division at the FBI when I was there, what did the other intelligence agencies know about this American citizen out on the battlefield and who was recruiting in Afghanistan?” Jeff Danik told the John Solomon Reports podcast Monday. ...

“So an American traipsing around in that battleground is going to perceive focus, I would be shocked if one of the intelligence agencies didn't have his devices compromised,” he said. “All that data and collection is going to be classified, of course, but my question is, does it even exist? Do we know who he was contacting, who is contacted with it?”

I suspect that Danik said "receive focus," and yes, it would be almost impossible for American intel to miss him. That's especially true when everyone around him seemed to recognize his danger and deceit and multiple reports about him came back to American security agencies. We reorganized intel in 2006 to create a sharing center and a couple of extra layers of bureaucracy to coordinate the different intel agencies, which include CIA as well as the FBI and Homeland Security groups such as CBP and Secret Service. 

Are we to believe that all of these reports got stovepiped anyway? If so, why bother with the Directorate of National Intelligence at all?

Yesterday, several members of these agencies sprained their shoulders patting themselves on the back for stopping another assassination attempt. Perhaps that was an effort to keep people from asking too many questions about how Routh got there in the first place, and why he's been allowed to run around despite a lot of reasons for investigators to take a closer look at his activities over the last five years.