“The FBI would only be authorized to come to AZ when they knew Roll was dead. I wonder how soon they got there, ...”
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I’m pretty sure there is an FBI office in Phoenix. So it would just be a matter of hours to Tucson.
More information here: http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0111/Judges_final_actions_key_to_federal_charge_for_his_murder.html
Which also links to the official charges against Loughner.
Turns out that the feds couldn’t be involved in the investigation regarding Judge Roll if Roll had just on the spur of the moment decided to go visit his friend, as the sheriff claimed he did. So the FBI officer who filed the charges said that Judge Roll was there to do official duties. Claims he spoke to Giffords’ aide for a couple minutes, as evidenced by aerial video of the event.
I wonder who took aerial video of it.
The FBI filer says that Roll was informed of the Giffords event on or near Jan 7th, but didn’t say who informed him of it. I would love to know who informed him of it, and whether that person then expected that Roll would be at the event. How did the FBI confirm that he was informed of the event, and why did they not say who informed him of the event or in what context?
The charges only claim that Loughner INTENDED to kill Giffords and her aides but doesn’t say why it distinguishes between the deaths.
It does mention an envelope in a safe which had the words “I planned”, “assassination” and “Giffords”, and what they say appears to be Loughner’s signature. I don’t know if that’s all that was on the envelope or not. The assumption is that he’s saying he planned to assassinate Giffords. If so, he wanted everybody to think that Giffords is the target - provided that the envelope was genuinely written by him.
Which is kind of silly, since he could have made it very clear that Giffords was the target by actually shooting until she was dead and then shooting himself. For some reason his plan had to include seemingly random shots at the crowd as well.
That envelope - which seems to have had no grammar, his big fetish - could also mean that he planned to assassinate somebody else at the Giffords event. Filling in the blanks goes more than one way.
He did not end up assassinating Giffords. IIRC, she was still talking after she was shot. If that’s so then he knew she was still alive, and he didn’t bother to shoot her dead. The two people he supposedly intended to kill and in all that shooting he didn’t manage to kill either one.
He did assassinate Judge Roll, who the prosecutor claims did not just decide on the spur of the moment to pop in there.
The FBI definitely wanted to be able to investigate Judge Roll’s death. They contradicted the sheriff’s claims in order to be allowed to investigate.