Proof Positive

Preliminary guesswork guides further inquiry

As If, photogravure etching

The message. The attempted assassination of President Trump follows an eight-year-long series of administrative, investigative, false-flag, and prosecutorial attacks, coupled with nonstop character assassination in the talking-points media. All of these backfired, leaving his attackers no option but physical assassination.

Every hit squad worth its salt sends a message to all associates of the target; in this case to Trump's campaign staff, rally-goers, voters, and the entire populace. For messaging purposes, 'a miss is as good as a mile'. Leaving an obvious rooftop vantage-point with a direct 130-meter line-of-sight open and readily available to a 20-year-old kid with a scoped AR-15, with a conveniently placed ladder, with plenty of time to fire multiple rounds, sends an unmistakable message. That message is: 'We can do this to you too'.

Precautions for those in the line of fire. Evidence suitable for convicting high-level perpetrators in a court of law is not yet available, and may not become available for several years, if ever. Does this mean we are forbidden to make reasonable inferences from facts known so far? Certainly those in the line of fire are not precluded from drawing reasonable conclusions and taking precautions based on them. Indeed it is positively their duty to do so. Trump and staff have to make life-or-death decisions in real time, while still uncertain about who directed the hit. They must act not only for themselves, but for everyone who might attend future rallies, and for the entire populace. President Trump and staff would be well-advised to direct their own inquiries to those in the Federal Government who have been laser-focused for the past eight years on eliminating him. It would be irresponsible to wait for court-of-law-type evidence or the report of an official commission. Because everyone really is in the line of fire.

Situations like this call for a different type of knowledge from the 'beyond reasonable doubt' required for a criminal conviction. People actually or potentially in the line of fire don't have the luxury of patiently accumulating evidence, ferreting out incriminating documents, and interviewing fearful witnesses. They must determine whether the threat persists, as the messaging suggests, and protect themselves, without absolute certainty as to who organized, directed, and carried out the attempted assassination.

To be sure, evidence will be sifted and sorted for several years, whistle-blowers will come forward, FOIA documents will be extracted, responsible officials will be questioned, their stories will be compared. Suppositions and preliminary conclusions will be accepted or rejected, and a more complete picture of what led up to what actually happened in Butler Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 will emerge. Instead of dismissing such preliminary guesses as 'conspiracy theories', it would serve truth and justice to use them to guide inquiry, and check them empirically.

The kernel of knowledge in such guesses — tentative, uncertain, subject to correction — can help focus investigation to where it is most likely to yield answers. If a group equipped with the organizational resources of Federal agencies acted in secret to assassinate a former and future president, that would leave traces despite strenuous 'cleanup' and coverup efforts.

The typical official commission inquiry operates with a radically different model: It assumes in advance that Federal agencies normally adhere strictly to their legal responsibilities and carry out their assigned tasks in accordance with established procedures. It assumes further that they normally operate in a non-partisan manner, and are not used to reward political allies and punish political opponents.

However, top officials of the lead agency in the Trump attempted assassination case, the FBI, have accused President Trump of treason, of collaborating with Russia. In making this accusation, the FBI relied on a fabricated 'dossier', containing numerous allegations that later proved to be false, which it circulated to complaisant media. The FBI illegally spied on and investigated members of Trump's 2016 campaign in a failed effort to obtain evidence of such collusion. To gain legal authority to spy on Trump's campaign staff, the FBI repeatedly violated FISA law by presenting knowingly false allegations to judges who had no means of verifying the FBI's assertions. A former FBI Director, Robert Mueller, led a two-year rabidly partisan investigation that failed to find a single impeachable offense.

Were the FBI a trustworthy nonpartisan agency, it might compare established Secret Service procedures with those actually followed between July 3 and 13. After elaborate and lengthy review, it would find what we already know — 'lapses', lack of coordination with local police, failure to check obvious gunshot vantage-points such as nearby rooftops, failure to heed warnings from numerous rally attendees who saw and pointed to the rooftop shooter, etc. These 'lapses' would be attributed to an incompetent Secret Service Director, who has already resigned. The investigation would stop there, without considering who else might be involved, because criminal intent by Government agencies was simply ruled out-of-bounds from the outset.

Motive, means, opportunity. Positing intentionality on the part of Government officials — as a tentative hypothesis for the sake of investigation — naturally guides inquiry in a different direction. Multiple extraordinary 'lapses' from standard event-security procedure make it plausible that the same agencies or officials who have been trying to eliminate Donald Trump from presidential contention, having failed by other means, would organize his assassination. In the classic triad of criminal investigation — motive, means, and opportunity — they had plenty of motive, from fear of prosecution for their crimes, and possible career damage. Their exemption from prosecution depends entirely on the current regime remaining in control of 'prosecutorial discretion'. Opportunity, as previously mentioned, was provided by the wide-open unobstructed rooftop vantage-point a mere 130 meters from President Trump. The means include the shooter who was killed after he had fired several rounds, his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle with telescopic sight, the ladder he used to ascend to the rooftop, the drone he used for prior aerial reconnaissance of the rally site, and his undetected passage through several checkpoints. Supplementary means at this moment (July 26, 2024) are a matter of conjecture.

Suspicion has centered on what could be an intentional withdrawal of Secret Service agents, the substitution of inexperienced or temporary agents for more experienced ones, and overall such gross negligence as to surpass mere incompetence. Audio analysis of the seven or eight gunshots, based on the time gap between a supersonic 'snap' and the rifle-muzzle 'pop' arriving at the podium microphone, yields an estimated distance of 130 meters for the first five gunshots. Two of the other gunshots, according to their snap-pop time-gaps, are estimated to come from a distance of 400 meters. This suggests there were one or two backup shooters who, having seen that President Trump was only slightly injured, tried to finish the job. The audio analysis indicates distance only, not the direction from which the shots originated. An obvious line of inquiry, then, would be possible rifle-placement positions in a 400-meter radius from the podium. Shell casings collected from the podium area would also identify the rifle(s) used by backup shooter(s), if any. [August 3 update: Audio analysts are now saying that the ballistic sound pattern is consistent with a single shooter (Crooks) firing the first three shots from a rifle rotated 90 degrees using iron sights, then five more shots from a normal position using the telescopic sight. Others have stated that the 2nd-floor room of the building behind the AGR rooftop (where Crooks shot from) was unoccupied at the time. This seems to confirm the single-shooter thesis, for now.]

Further inquiries as to the 'means' part of the triad of criminal investigation focus on the possible 'grooming' of potential shooters by 'psy-op' (psychological operations) professionals. If impressionable youngsters are taught they can become heroes by murdering someone who has been extensively characterized in the media as hateful, fascist, or Hitler-like, then they may be willing to follow instructions to that effect. Apparently social media and video-gaming groups supply abundant human resources for such purposes. As we have seen from psy-ops applied to the general populace, ideology and allegiance are surprisingly malleable. The methodology of recruiting and 'turning' unaffiliated and lonely individuals from violent thoughts to violent actions is well-developed. If it was used in this case, then another line of inquiry would be to identify the shooter's handler or groomer.

Recruiting violently inclined volunteers. John Leake cites an example of an FBI agent encouraging known Islamic terrorists in Phoenix Arizona to shoot up the Curtis Culwell Center in Arlington Texas in 2015. The FBI agent adopted the guise of a fellow Islamist in text messages. The two Phoenix Islamists drove to Arlington, with the FBI agent tracking them all the way. They walked toward the entrance of the convention center 'with the FBI undercover agent following right behind them', and opened fire at a perimeter security checkpoint. The FBI agent did nothing to intervene. Only a local security guard stopped what could have been a massacre. The FBI agent then fled the scene and was apprehended by local police.

Why the errant FBI agent allowed the two Islamists he had encouraged to proceed with their attack is unclear. Perhaps he sympathized with their cause, or hoped to highlight the Islamist threat, or wanted to use a mass shooting to argue for restrictions on gun ownership. Whatever his motives were, this case shows that FBI agents do identify, recruit, and encourage suspects toward violence. This seems to be a well-established protocol in the Bureau for intercepting terrorist plans. It's possible that a similar technique was used to get the would-be Trump assassin on board. To find out, investigators would have to comb through the shooter's on-line accounts; but those have all been completely scrubbed. Whether his mobile phone contains any clues has not yet been disclosed.

‘Gold-standard’ science and preliminary guesswork. The covid episode displays a similar bifurcation of thinking: One, scientific, the other, instinctive guesswork. Note that these two ways of thinking don't break by pro-vax versus anti-vax. Scientific analysis could produce either pro-vax or anti-vax positions, and so could real-time guesses.

In science and medicine, double-blind, placebo-controlled, large-sample experiments are the 'gold-standard' of proof of safety and efficacy. If scientists predict that a new drug will be safe and effective, and their experiments turn out as predicted, then the new drug progresses toward clinical usage. With the escape of a lab-crafted virus from Wuhan China in late 2019 and early 2020, public health authorities worldwide proclaimed an emergency that justified short-circuiting the normal scientific experimental procedure, while at the same time claiming the mantle of science for their hastily implemented policies. Journals of science and medicine published articles filled with elaborate statistics purporting to prove experimental mRNA injections 'safe and effective'. Constant hectoring to 'follow the science', plus draconian censorship of alternative conclusions, plus computer projections of mass death, seemingly established the scientific basis for those inclined to the scientific way of thinking. Within a few months, however, every element of this narrative was found to be false, and in many cases intentionally and knowingly fraudulent.

About two-thirds of the U.S. and global populations took at least one injection. The other one-third chose not to 'follow the (fake) science', and rely instead on their own common-sense observations. Lacking definitive scientific proof, they nevertheless understood the glaring conflict-of-interest inherent in drug suppliers profiting enormously from secret Government contracts, and found the rapidly changing natural-origin stories — snakes, pangolins, bats, frozen foods — absurd. Forced injections and Government-organized social pressure campaigns, combined with drug companies' immunity from accountability for harm done, struck many as suspicious. The whole project reeked of authoritarian excess from the outset. The conclusions of those who said no to all that were tentative at first, due to relevant facts and research being censored, but increasingly firm as the truth emerged. It took two to three years for those initial tentative responses to be verified with objective scientific proof. Another one-third of the targeted people stopped after one or two shots, as clear evidence of both inefficacy and harm emerged, despite extraordinary Government censorship. Finally after about two years, scientific 'gold-standard' evidence appeared, by which time more than 90 percent had already stopped taking 'booster' shots. Sadly, Government authorities in league with drug companies continue (as of July 2024) to push their deadly products onto uninformed groups such as children. Those who relied on their own common-sense to refuse these experimental drugs, without waiting for 'gold-standard' large-scale laboratory studies, improved their health and longevity in comparison with those who 'followed the science'.

The target of an assassination attempt clearly does not have time to wait for proof that would satisfy a legal or scholarly standard. Because he could be killed while waiting for such proof to be painstakingly assembled from witness interviews, forensic analysis, Deep State defectors, FOIA requests, inadvertent disclosures, and (as sometimes happens) boasting by those responsible. President Trump must also consider the safety of his campaign staff, and of rally attendees. One rally attendee at Butler was murdered, and two others were severely injured. In fact, everyone, the entire body politic, is potentially in the line of fire. Security 'lapses' convey the unmistakable message to all: 'We can do this to you too'. Anyone can 'read' this message, those who organized the hit could hardly spell it out more clearly. Everyone in America is in the same position as Donald Trump, compelled to make sense of what happened on July 13 before all the facts and evidence are in. While staying empirically grounded, self-censorship of questions 'outside the box' of what officials deem acceptable must also be avoided.

Asking questions, highlighting suspicious circumstances, examining who was doing what, 'dogs that didn't bark', analyzing communications between headquarters and field staff of all the relevant agencies from July 3, when the schedule and venue for the rally were established, to July 13 when the assassination attempt occurred -- are all relevant scientific endeavors. Even if they don't provide conclusive answers at this early stage, they help frame further inquiries. For example, the shooter appears to be one of the very few people in America with no Internet presence whatsoever. Whoever scrubbed his social-media accounts missed one — on Gab, where he posted pro-Biden covid lockdown messages. His mobile-phone communications may also have been deleted. Efforts to suppress preliminary inquiries, on the grounds that 'all the evidence isn't in yet', miss the point. Of course preliminary indications will be revised in light of new information. That is the nature of scientific inquiry.

What if the assassination attempt had succeeded? As a thought-experiment, imagine what would have happened if the assassination had succeeded. The Republicans would have had a hard time replacing Trump, and Joe Biden would probably not have quit. Many of the millions afflicted by TDS would be dancing in the streets, celebrating. Articles would appear in the NYTimes, Axios, the New Republic, and Atlantic, tut-tutting about political violence, but suggesting that Trump had it coming with his 'divisive rhetoric'. They would have denounced as 'conspiracy theory' or 'Russian disinformation' any attempt to answer the numerous questions about why security at the Butler rally was so obviously inadequate. Government-directed censorship of such questions would be fully activated. Denizens of the Deep State would not have to re-calibrate their precious careers in expectation of a Trump Presidency. Inflation would dip momentarily before the election, then continue rising, making food and energy increasingly scarce for ordinary Americans, who would consequently depend more on Government.

This suggests that more attempts on President Trump's life will be made. Should Donald Trump entrust his life to a Government agency controlled by those who wish him dead? It would be foolish and very likely fatal to do so. He may have to vet every Secret Service agent assigned to his protection and to the security of his campaign events, and their superiors, up to and including the DHS Secretary, the FBI Director, and the Attorney General.