Posted on 01/21/2025 7:12:16 AM PST by MtnClimber
I highly recommend that you take the time to listen to the Tucker Carlson interview with Sean Davis, six months after the near-assassination of Donald Trump.
The entire hour and a half is well worth your time, but at least watch the first 15 minutes. Half a year after Butler, there is still a thick blanket of secrecy surrounding Thomas Matthew Crooks. Who was he? What was his motivation? Was he a lone wolf, part of a group, or did he have help? Davis breaks this question into four options:
Option 1: Butler was a “total SNAFU.” An amazing combination of Secret Service incompetence, and an incredible series of oversights, accidents and coincidences allowed Crooks to access the roof unseen and fire eight shots at candidate Trump.
Option 2: “Strategic Incompetence.” The “soup sandwich” Secret Service, under the Mayorkas DHS, deliberately made Trump vulnerable by starving his protection detail of assets and competent agents, on the off chance that some random shooter might take advantage of the weakened security and solve the deep state’s problem for them. (Please note that Strategic Incompetence can also describe California firefighting, our open southern border, and many other areas of deliberate government inattention.)
Option 3: All of #2, (Strategic Incompetence), but Thomas Crooks also had a guide to nudge him into action and help him along the way. Somebody who was looking for “super disturbed impressionable young men to poke with a stick.”
Option 4: The government just plain tried to murder Trump in Butler, and failed.
Sean Davis rules out 1 and 4, and believes that the answer lies between 2 and 3. Strategic Incompetence plus “guides” (my term) to nudge likely assassins into action. I agree with Davis, but I lean further than he does into Option 3. The government will not conduct an assassination on U.S. territory directly. It’s much too politically risky. Instead they will wink and nod toward their countless murky gray-area assets in the “former” and “contract” areas of government service. Nothing of a criminal nature is ever written down, or transmitted electronically. All such communications are made face to face, and couched in deniable terms, moving down the contact ladder into the black-ops underworld.
So how do I believe Crooks was initially discovered and brought to the point of climbing onto the roof in Butler PA with an AR-15? Start with the Blackrock advertisement. I don’t believe it’s just another amazing coincidence that Crooks was one of the high school students featured in their ad before he took up the new hobbies of bomb making and political assassination.
A television production team would have spent at least a week at a school to create that ad. They are going to interview dozens of students to select the ones to include. Somebody in the production team spent time speaking with Thomas Crooks before choosing him for one of the few closeup shots. It’s standard practice in the intel world for “talent spotters” to be on the lookout for useful contacts, potential agents, or even screwball patsies. These names are passed along to their intel world contacts. I think this is where Crooks came to the attention, eventually, of bad actors who over a period of months steered him to Butler.
The next item that most casual observers likely glossed over was Crooks’ membership in the Clairton Sportsman’s Club. This is not some generic small- or medium-size “square range” under the close observation and tight control of range masters. The bad actors studying Crooks would have known of his membership at this large, rural shooting club, and it would have been simple to arrange a “chance meeting,” or, in the vernacular, a “bump” between Crooks and his future guide. From their website:
The Clairton Sportsmen's Club occupies 180 acres of picturesque woodland in the southern hills of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The club, situated in the boroughs of West Mifflin and Jefferson Hills within Allegheny County, boasts a membership exceeding 2000 individuals. Facilities include: Indoor and outdoor archery ranges, Rifle range to 200 yards, CMP competition rifle ranges offer target carriers up to 300 yards, 6 action piston bays, 3 pistol ranges, 2 dog training areas, 3 lighted skeet fields, Wobble trap, 10 lighted trap fields.
From my previous Substack column:
Note the many widely spread out shooting venues, the roofed shooting positions, all surrounded and separated by woods. If you zoom in on Google satellite view, you will see many picnic tables and other locations for private conversations, where laying out gear would be totally unremarkable. The shooting club would provide ample “cover for action” in the spook vernacular. This club would be an ideal place for Crooks to be guided and trained in the physical in-real-life dark arts, not merely the virtual ones to be found on the internet by his inquisitive mind.
My working hypothesis is that a "talent spotter" met Crooks during the Blackrock commercial filming, and then a "Professor Raoul X" was guided to him. It would be child's play for a "sympathetic older gentlemen" to frequently meet Crooks at the club, not only for firearms practice, but for clandestine ops tradecraft education in general. These would include covert communications, manufacturing explosives, remote control detonation, flying drones etc. Untold hours over weeks and months could be spent in private at any of the numerous picnic tables or covered shooting areas going over Crooks’ operational gear, practicing with tactical radios, drones, etc.
It’s notable that Crooks bought dozens of firearm-related and other operational gear over the internet using false names, concealed by VPNs, etc. Did he have help in learning this real-world operational security? It seems likely to me.
This sympathetic “friend” would also stoke Crooks' hatred for Donald Trump, and finally could give him tips about the Butler PA rally site. (All while the USSS experienced a bizarre series of "coincidental" security lapses.) But Crooks was killed by a counter-sniper—after being permitted to get off eight shots, missing Trump’s head by a whisker—so we will never find out about a possible deep state handler from his own mouth. It was shut permanently.
According to Sean Davis in the interview, Crooks even stopped by the shooting club on the day of the assassination attempt. For a final meeting with his guide? Or a chance to pick up previously cached items, such as his IEDs? It can’t be ruled out that Crooks planned to escape, using the IEDs as diversions....SNIP
Matt Bracken Ping
I still want to know more about Maxwell Yearick.
Option 4 is the simplest explanation.
I pray President Trump has trusted security of his own because the same thugs that tried to murder him are still employed in the various gestapo three letter agencies. And now that he is finally sworn in they are more dangerous than ever.
What is problematic with stories like this, is that so many of the past “conspiracy theories” have come true.
Yes. Those who said in 1964+ that Kennedy was assassinated as part of a CIA plot were dismissed as lunatics. This notion doesn’t seem so crazy today.
Three out of a hundred factoids that are very strange about this: 1) the FBI told the family to cremate the body right after the shooting; 2) Heritage Foundation found clicks on his cell phone to a location near the FBI DC Headquarters; 3) it took the police five hours to identify him and get to his parents house where he lived; two hours before, CNN had called his father to tell him of the murder. the house was squeaky clean when the police arrived two hours later.
I think this is part of the reason Trump hit the ground running with EOs and Cabinet appointments... he knows he's going to be in danger the whole four years. He's got to get stuff done as fast as possible.
Hopefully Trump will get to the bottom of this. Speaking of this, hopefully he already fired the acting director of the secret service.
“The government will not commit an assination on U.S. territory”. = what color is the sky in your world?
I’m going with Option #4. Government ‘groomed’ him to become highly agitated and against Trump. Provided him with all the right triggers, and then sat back and allowed whatever to happen.
That is what I think is most likely too.
It should be investigated as an option 4. Let the government prove it wasn’t.
Didn’t corrupt Joe Biden say in the early summer and with a twinkle in his eye, that he didn’t know if Trump would be able to overcome the challenge he faced?
What struck me from the interview:
Crook had a remote detonator to detonate the explosives in his vehicle
So he planned to make a melee after the assassination.
Most likely part of a getaway plan
The detonators were turned off at the car.
Someone turned them off.
His handlers/manipulators were on site at Butler at the assassinations attempt.
1. Government SOP is to hide information from the public.
2. Government takes a long time to sort things out, for a variety of reasons, some of them legitimate. But is the overall slow-walking necessary, or part of managing public perceptions and emotions?
3. Government secrecy and manipulation of public perceptions and emotions stimulates conspiracy theories and distrust.
Q: Does the government consider public turmoil and confusion a bug or a feature?
1. Government SOP is to hide information from the public.
2. Government takes a long time to sort things out, for a variety of reasons, some of them legitimate. But is the overall slow-walking necessary, or part of managing public perceptions and emotions?
3. Government secrecy and manipulation of public perceptions and emotions stimulates conspiracy theories and distrust.
Q: Does the government consider public turmoil and confusion a bug or a feature?
What struck me from the interview:
Crook had a remote detonator to detonate the explosives in his vehicle
So he planned to make a melee after the assassination.
Most likely part of a getaway plan
The detonators were turned off at the car.
Someone turned them off.
They didn’t want him to live.
His handlers/manipulators were on site at Butler at the assassinations attempt.
Great Article, thank you.
This is an amazing interview. Tucker interviews with such clarity!
Two very important aspects Tucker may have overlooked and not mentioned:
1. Crooks was spotted by the crowd for about 1.5 minutes by people in the crowd who pointed out there is a man with a gun on the roof! DURING THIS TIME THE SECRET SERVICE DID NOT REMOVE TRUMP FROM THE PODIUM, ALLOWING TRUMP TO ALMOST BE KILLED, A MAN TO BE MURDERED AND TWO TO BE SERIOUSLY INJURED.
2. The second potential assassin, Routh, was spotted by a SS agent who fired 10 shots at the fleeing criminal. All 10 shots missed! Routh critically injured a 6 year old girl while trying to escape!
No one was fired in these debacles!
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