Almost exactly five months ago, the Republican presidential candidate is shot in the face on camera. The man who apparently did it is killed. The world stops. History changes. But the one thing that doesn't happen is any accounting of what that was. Who was this guy? How did this happen? Even now, on the cusp of Trump's inauguration, it's disappeared. I haven't heard anybody ask those questions. I've heard some dark mutterings. You're one of the people I think was on the story at the very beginning in a rational but insistent way. I thought it'd be worth asking, what was that?

I'm not sure Have you ever seen an incident of that magnitude disappear from the news so quickly? Yes. We got what? Maybe a week of true flood the zone coverage, and then it was gone.

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That, to me, is the weirdest thing about it.

But it was a shooting. It was an assassination attempt, and it raised the most pressing possible questions about a lot of different things. I understand the news media didn't want to give Trump any advantage, didn't want to run the picture of him triumphant. I get it. But you would think that every elected official, every American would want to know, how did How is this allowed to happen? It was allowed to happen, but by whom and why and how? I don't hear anybody, including Republicans, asking those questions. What is this?

Yeah. I look at it as three big questions. Who is the shooter?

Yes.

Everything that puts him together, how did they let it happen, that whole process? Then what happened to everyone who let it happen? Then within that, the framework I have, trying to figure out what exactly happened is you can look at it as option one, just a total snafu across the board. Everyone failed, accidents happen, guy manages to get up there. It's exactly what it looks like. That's option one. Then you've got option Two, which is what I would call strategic incompetence. You have DHS, which runs Secret Service. The Secret Service is a soup sandwich from top to bottom. It's a disaster. Culturally, everything about it. Did you have people who were making that even more difficult, who were deliberately making Trump vulnerable on the off chance that maybe someone would go solve their problems for them? That's my number My number three scenario is it encompasses all a number two, but you have two different hands of government. You've got the secret service hand, just totally incompetent, making them completely vulnerable. But unbeknownst to that hand, you have this other hand. I would call it the Russiagate hoax hand, these people who are just always doing awful evil things.

The John Brennan hand. Yeah.

Was there somebody there looking for super disturbed impressionable young men to poke with the stick? Like, You know what? Trumpson Butler, you should go check that out. You have the incompetent hand and then the devious hand. That, to me, is option three. They weren't working with each other, but they were creating the conditions to allow that what happened to happen. Then I think the fourth one is the government just killed him. I look at everything through those lenses and try to figure out Can we disprove this one? What fits here? Where I am now, between two and three, I refuse to believe this was just a series of unfortunate accidents and incompetence that's put together. It's just not. I just don't believe it because I've been alive for the last 10 years watching everything they do. And yet it's saying to him, I don't think there's evidence for the JFK style. We all know Lee Harvie-Ouswold didn't do it, right? It's absurd. I don't think there's any evidence, or at least I've not seen any, to suggest that was replicated here. I think it's somewhere in between deliberate incompetence to make him vulnerable, and then you had some sell somewhere, finding someone to urge to go do it in ways that would make it very hard to trace.

Thank you for starting with your conclusion. Let's work backward and go through by number the three questions that you raised at the outset. Who was Crooks, Thomas Crooks, the shooter?

Yeah, we still don't know. It's wild. This kid comes out of nowhere, manages to get on the roof, shoots President Trump, fires eight shots before anyone even remotely, tries to bother him. He was able to fly a drone there for 10 or 20 minutes, did recon multiple times throughout the day, had an operable IEDs in his car. Had a bomb in his house, and we still know basically nothing about him. It's crazy. So America First legal, they sued to get his academic records, and it turns out he was a really good student, really good student I think he got his entire time in high school and college, maybe two Cs. I think one was in Spanish and one was in differential equations, and the rest were mostly A's and some B's here and there. He was a smart kid. One of the Congressional committees did an investigation looking into it, and parents really didn't know much about their own son. I think either the mom or the dad at the point asked, Are you gay? You're not dating anyone? What's going on? They don't even know what's going on there. We know the FBI has his phone, his devices, his computer.

They know who he was talking to. They know where he went. They know where he bought stuff. They know what he searched for. We don't know anything about that. There's a Senate report from a Homeland Security Committee that tried to dig into it. There are two congressional committees in the House and the Senate that actually did a really good job given all the constraints they have, figuring stuff out. They asked the FBI all these questions because the FBI took the lead on it. Give us all this information. At the time the Senate put out their initial report, the FBI had given them 27 messages. Total.

How? I mean, it's Congress. They could shut the FBI down. I don't understand what is going on.

Yeah, and you had the other- On what grounds would they not turn that over?

Do you know?

It's this weird thing that happens. They actually don't have any legal basis to do it. They'll say things like, Well, ongoing investigation, that's totally made up. Even when there is an ongoing investigation and not when your suspect is dead, so clearly no one's going to be criminally He tried for that because he's dead. Even that's totally made up. There's nothing in the Constitution that says this agency that Congress created and is funded by Congress can just not give them stuff because reasons. It's totally made up. I think a big reason is most people in Congress are totally weak. They're cowards. That's for sure. They don't want to get crosswise with the FBI. It would take a lot of work. They just like, okay, I guess we won't get it. Ongoing investigation. The House Committee, for example, they They also did a great job. They said that the FBI interviewed over a thousand people in the course of their investigation, and they produced over a thousand. They're called FD 302s, which is how the FBI... It's actually crazy what they're allowed to do. I know. They don't have to have a transcript or anything when they interview you.

They just have a piece of paper that's their recollection of what you said, and then that becomes gospel. They don't have to record it. No. No. That's actually how James Comey got Martha Stewart thrown in prison. Oh, I know. It's so dirty. But so they have a thousand interviews, over a thousand documents. They gave the house 81. It's just mind-blowing. We don't know anything about this crooks guy beyond I think maybe a 15-minute press conference that one of the FBI, I think it might have been the FBI guy out of Pittsburgh who runs that office. Fifteen minutes of him talking in very vague, 50,000-foot terms about what they knew. Oh, he searched for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Do you remember that? Yes. How that came out, and that was meant to make it look like, oh, the guy didn't really have any political motives.

Did he? I mean, what were his motives?

Well, I mean, the base motive was he wanted to kill Donald Trump. Which everyone got lost over. You'd have the talking heads being like, what was his motive? Well, I think he wanted to shoot Trump in the face. Just spitballing here. But so you have the FBI is like, Well, he searched for Trump and Biden, so clearly he didn't have any political views. I'm like, Well, how many times did he search for? What was he searching? That's an important thing. Well, he searched for the D&C and the RNC. Okay, great. That's utterly worthless information that I could do nothing with. They're like, And that's it. We literally don't know.

We know nothing about this kid.

No, we don't know who he was talking. Here are the things I would want to know. All the places he went in the six months leading up to this, not just the week. I want to know every place he went. I want to know every person he talked to in person. I want to know every person he had a phone conversation with, texted with, telegrammed with, signaled with. I want to know everything he looked for on Google Maps. I want his whole internet search history. I want to go through it in real-time and just find out what was happening. I assume the FBI has done that. I know they have the capability to do it. Why has Congress not been told anything about it? Why we not? That stuff is why it's impossible for me to look at everything and be like, Well, it was just a series of unfortunate accidents.

The core question in any crime is, why was it committed? It sounds like there's no progress whatsoever. None.

None. None.

Well, that itself just tells you that the country is in freefall, that it's just so corrupt, it can't even carry out the basic functions of government. You're trying to figure out why murder is murder.

Right. But who is he talking to? Was he just alone in his own silo doing all this? Did he do everything on the internet? I don't believe it because at one point they told us, Oh, he had encrypted text messages, some of which were overseas, and they just let that float out there and then never talked about it Is there any evidence he was in touch with any specific person or group overseas? None that I've seen. None?

None. We just- It's a total black box.

Yeah. Okay. Heritage Foundation, at one point, one of their guys over there, it was a great investigator, Mike Howell, I don't know how he did it, was able to get location data on devices that had been in or near Thomas Crooks' home in the weeks or months leading up to it, and then where those had been. I think this came out maybe a week after. Yes. There was one that had pingsed around the FBI. Yes. Now, that could be a- The FBI building in Washington. In Washington. Now, that could be a ton of different things because everything's around the FBI. Of course. But I'd like to know more about that. But we haven't been told anything.

He had IEDs. He sent up a drone. In order, what were the IEDs? Do we have any idea Yeah.

He had two IEDs in his car that they found afterwards. They were wired, they had detonators in them, they had primers, they were connected to remote sensors that he had a remote control for on the roof to set off. Now, what's super weird about it is in the car, the remote transmitters there were off. Even if he had that remote transmitter in his hand, he couldn't have set off. That to me is weird. You go through all this trouble, you're going to try and kill the President. You've got all these bombs in your car, but then you don't... I mean, they're technically armed, but there was nothing that he could do to set them off.

That's weird. It is weird.

It doesn't make any sense to me.

I should have asked this earlier. No statement of any kind, no manifesto, no description of his own beliefs about anything.

Nope. Of any kind? None. He liked shooting. He seemed to go to a shooting range every now and again.

Clearly, he liked shooting. Right after the shooting, there were all these usual... I was a door kicker of some special operations people on TV saying that's an easy shot, 130 yards. That's just not true. That's a lot. I mean, I shoot a lot. Crooks turned a cop, a local cop, came up a ladder behind him. Crooks, correct me if I'm wrong, pointed a ladder behind him. You're right. Back the cop down and then immediately assumed the prone position, got off shots at that, and I think it was 130 yards?

I think it was probably 150, but whatever. That's plus or minus. It was pretty far. Yeah.

And got as close as the president's ear. So under extreme stress as a 20-year-old with no military training. I mean, luck does play a role in everything, including shooting, but I'm sorry. I have 100-yard rifle range. I know what that is. That's pretty good.

Yeah. It's helpful to know what he had. He had, I think it was a Dpms AR-15, pretty vanilla off the shelf. I had wondered for a long time what his optic was. Was he using iron sites? Because to me, that makes all the difference. It does. For a layman between hard and easy. You take some pipe hitter who's been doing it for 20 years, whatever, he can do what he can do. He only had a red dot on it. He had a hollow sun red dot with a 2 MOA red dot, no magnification. I like to think I'm a pretty good shooter. I shoot a lot. I think that's a tricky shot.

I totally agree, especially under stress. Yeah. Which is always the key. It's like anyone can sit on a Sunday afternoon with your kids and like, bam.

On the bench with like- Completely.

But there's a cop behind you with a gun and you lie down and get off eight shots and one of them is just spot on.

I don't know. He only missed because Trump turned his head. I know. When you know the angle, he started out with a target like this that became this.

Yes.

So He went from probably a 4-6-inch target to a 1-inch target just based on where he was aiming. My friends are going to make fun of me for saying it's a hard shot. I think that's a tricky shot. No magnification, under duress, on a hot roof. It is a tricky shot.

I don't get all these people like, I do that. Okay, show me.

If you have a 18X magnifier on it, you're shooting it paper and you're on a bench and you've got a nice little platform set up, that's an easy shot.

That's not what happened. There's no armed police officer behind you coming up to shoot you. But again, luck does play a role in life, for sure. In life as backgammon, luck is a component. But okay, so he brings these explosives inside what should be a perimeter.

He puts up- It was outside the perimeter. It was in his car. I don't think that was within the security perimeter. It was just wherever he parked his car. But he's got bombs in it. He's got operational bombs in his car.

He puts a drone up. What do we know about that?

We know that he showed up around the park, I think around one o'clock, so the event was starting six-ish, so they probably opened the doors at four, let people in. He was there beforehand, just walking around, looking at things, casing it. Comes back at, I think, 3:45-ish, 3:51, and flies a drone for 20 minutes. Flies it all around, looks at everything, gets a bird's-eye view. They were able to recreate the path that he had when they got the drone and the controller, but there were no pictures from that flight. He's looking at it on his controller, flying it and seeing what it sees. But when they go to the device, there's no images on it. They can recreate the flight path, but that's it. He does that for 20 minutes. What's interesting is the whole day, the Secret Service didn't send their own drones, but they sent some guy who had gotten trained a month or two previous, not on drone mitigation, but on drone detection. He brings his little stuff in where he can go and detect a drone. They can use it to figure out where the controller is and where a person is.

Doesn't work all day. He spends hours on the phone with an 800 number doing tech support.

Time now. Come on.

100% doing tech support. Turns out he had a bad Ethernet cord. You can't make that up. He had a bad Ethernet cord. So he finally gets his working at like 4:15. Literally minutes after Crooks had been done doing his recon with his drone.

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Is it true And by the way, did the drone fly over the podium and the place where Trump was?

I don't know. In the reports that are available, they say that they recreated the flight path and it went all around the area. Whether it went right over that podium, I would assume so. You have 20 minutes. It wasn't a big area.

He gets somehow a range finder onto the site through a secret service screen?

No, I don't think he took it through the magnetometer. So one of the problems was you have this area that really isn't that big. It's a farm show. You've got a horse ring for people doing stuff with livestock. You've got a big field. You've got grand stands here and there. You got a bunch of barns, but it's not a big area. And You would think they would have made the whole thing the security perimeter, like a full circle all the way around. You're not getting in without getting checked for anything. But they ended up carving out this area, which was the American Glass Research, the AGR building, the sprawling, call it a five-building complex. It was from one of those roofs that he shot Trump from. They decided, We're going to put that outside of our security perimeter, so you can get to that area without having been screened or anything. No magnetometers, no pat-downs. That's like 130, 150 yards from the President. I think he may have been around that area with the Rangefinder. He may have gotten in, but they ask one of the secret service agents. He's like, Well, a range finder is not a prohibited item.

It's suspicious. It makes you wonder.

Why would you have a range finder?

Yeah, he's not golfing. He's not trying to figure out, do you use the nine iron or the my pitching wedge. You know why someone has a range finder. It's for shooting. Yeah. By the way, there's a difference between golf range finders and holistic range finders. Of course. It's a big difference. You get a nice ballistic range finder, and it'll tell you not just your horizontal distance, it'll give you your actual shooting distance, compensating for your angle of view and all that. That's not like, Oh, it's 108 yards.

Plus it's a camo. Yeah. It looks like...

They see that, and the local cops flag him as suspicious. The local cops start getting on their radios and saying, Hey, there's a dude with a range finder. Everyone be on the look out for it. Secret Service doesn't really hear this because all the counter snipers, their lead counter sniper, who is the most junior person on the team, which I find fascinating. The counter snipers hadn't been used, I think, on a non-presidential event in ever. This was the first one. They put... Of the four people they send the most junior guy is the team leader. He doesn't even bother to go pick up his radio. That would have given him coms with all of the local police. That's mind-blowing to me. It is mind-blowing. I was talking to a former Army Ranger sniper friend of mine. Was a sniper in combat, was a team leader. Before I even started telling him the stuff I learned and stuff I knew, he said, I mean, a radio is a sniper's most powerful weapon. It's not the gun. That's actually not the sniper's job. That's one of seven things a sniper does. The most important thing they do is they observe and they record and they communicate.

This guy who's leading all of the counter snipers who are there, by the way, because there had been a specific long-range threat against Trump from a foreign actor that they knew about. That's why they were there. The guy doesn't even bother to get his radio. When Trump is on stage, when you've got all the local cops setting their hair on fire, trying to get this guy who they know has a range finder, he's acting super weird, At one point, you have local law enforcement starting to draw their weapons. That's something you would think maybe the secret service people on stage or the guys on roofs would want to know about. They had no idea.

Wouldn't... I mean, the first priority would be to establish communication between all law enforcement agencies on site, right? That just seems obvious.

They didn't even have a unified command post. They had the secret service in one little area, and then they had the local guys over here, and then they had, I think, one or two people who were local in the Secret Service command post, but they didn't actually have a unified command post, which is also bonkers.

Can I ask how Crooks knew that this one cluster of buildings was the one place in the whole area that was outside the security perimeter? How would you know that?

Let's define terms here. Security perimeter is where you can get in, where you don't have to get a pat down or through a magnetometer. That's just superficially obvious. I can walk all the way over there and I don't have to go through a magnetometer. Then you've got the security bubble, which is the area that people are responsible for which is going to be a much broader, bigger area than just your security perimeter. He knew because he'd been walking around there for five hours, totally unmolested. Got a drone up. He had a range finder. He cased the place. He knew it just by having walked around me like, Oh, there's no cops over there. I'm going to go over there.

Do we ever find out why those buildings were not under surveillance just because it was such an obvious shooting platform?

Yeah. This is what I find the most enraging. This counter-sniper team lead been deposed by a bunch of different committees. He gives different answers in all of them. If you want, failure has a lot of people to blame, and so I don't think you can blame it on one person. I think you can blame it on one organization, which is a secret nervous, utterly incompetent from top to bottom. It's a totally rotten culture with no accountability, nothing. Within that, you had a bunch of people who failed. But the last link of failure, which is what allowed the guy to get a shot off, was due to this counter sniper team lead. He shows up, I think, four days ahead of time to do his advance. I think this would have been the Wednesday, which would have been July 10th. Trump shot on a Saturday, July 13th. He has four days on site, puts together his plan, sketches out where he wants everyone. He never set foot on or in that building. Never.

Why?

It's a below your mind. He's testifying to one Congressional committee, and they're like, Well, they ask him that question, so you never set foot over there? Even the day of, you got time to do a final walkthrough. He says, No. Well, you see, because I had to go do a bunch of paper paperwork. I want to make sure my paperwork was good and it wasn't fuzzy and stuff, quote, You live and die by paperwork.

I thought you lived and died by bullets.

Yeah. No, you live and die by paperwork. He was so focused on his paperwork that he never went and actually looked around. The other thing that's crazy- Do you know anything about this guy, by the way? I know a little bit. Don't know his name. He had been with the Secret Service, I think, for six years. No prior military experience, no prior sharpshooter or sniper experience. He showed up, worked for two years because you have to work like a desk or trailing someone for two years before you can be a counter-sniper. Then he had been a counter-sniper for the rest of his time there. Now, I personally find that crazy. I would think if you want someone whose job is to think what a sniper thinks like and be able to have countermeasures and protect against that, you'd probably want a guy who had done that job before.

Yeah.

If you're going to have somebody teach in your basketball team how to do defense, you'd like to know that they've made a basket before.

Of course, yes.

But that's not what happened here. You had a guy who, no prior military experience, no prior sniper experience. He actually wasn't a sniper. He was a sharpshooter. I'm sure he could shoot well from long range. But that doesn't make you a sniper. You have to know much. There's recon, there's observing, there's getting into position, there's communicating, there's recording. Those are all the things that people who go into sniper school in the military spend weeks and weeks doing before they ever touch a gun. They'll talk about the You can teach anyone to shoot a gun. That's the easy part. It's mechanical. It's learning all the other stuff. It's like the real value in the job. This guy never had that. Just, he's a counter sniper now. He He's setting up his perimeter. He had no idea when he set the people up where he wanted them for the event. You've got Trump on stage, you've got three barns behind him. To Trump's three o'clock, which is directly north, you've got that AGR building where the shooter was. The sniper team set up directly behind Trump on two of the three barns behind him. The ones that we've all seen in that shot where you got one guy on the tripod who pops and looks around, and then you've got the other guy who's prone, they never saw the shooter because there's a gigantic tree in their way.

From where they were, line of sight to where the building was where Crooks shot, gigantic tree, blocking like a third of the building. They never saw him. Then you have the team leader and his partner, and his partner is the one who shot crooks. They're on the Southern barn. One's on one side, one's on the other, The counter sniper team leader, he never saw the shooter. The shooter was dead before he ever saw him. You've got one guy, basically, in that whole area who has visibility on that roof, and you would think, Oh, well, he must have been scanning that area regularly. Well, Congress deposed this guy, and he says, No, that actually wasn't my area that I was supposed to be scanning. If you think of a clock, 12:00, 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, 9:00, Trump's in the center where he's looking is 12:00. The position from which he was shot would be 3:00. The guy who actually shot him, he was actually watching from 6:00 to 12:00. East, south, and west of Trump. Yes. He was never looking over there. It wasn't until he heard shots that he turned over there. Of all the people who were tasked with doing counter-sniper surveillance and mitigation, only one person ever actually saw the shooter, even though he'd been on the roof for six minutes.

It sounds like there was a blind spot, an entire quadrant that they weren't even looking at. Correct. How can that be?

Incompetence. That's incompetence, laziness, and arrogance. Afterwards, the secret Service, you might recall, tried to blame the local cops. Of course. They were supposed to do it. We had them in the building. They never told the cops, number one, that their job was to be scoping out that roof. All of the cops from the local police forces who were there to provide sniper coverage. First off, they were never told that they were counter snipers. They were told they were overwatch. They set up in an area in the building where they had a great shot of the crowd, pretty much the entire crowd, and they're watching it the whole time. They had no idea that they were supposed to be looking at a building roof, which is 180 degrees to their left. Because of how the window opened, it was like one of those, I think they call them casement windows. They've got the crank. So you've got to crank it and then it slowly opens. It's not a double sash that opens top and bottom. I don't think they could have seen that if they had wanted to. Just because of how that window opened, they'd have to get around almost leaning out the window to see Cee, which, of course, they're not going to be doing because they think their job is crowd overwatch.

Those guys somehow get blamed in media reports by people who are obviously secret service sources. Well, we put them in that building. That was their responsibility. All of them were like, No, that was never our responsibility. We had no idea.

Also, they're local cops. It's not their job to protect the candidate or the president.

Right. Just because you, Secret Service, have chosen to delegate one of your responsibilities, it doesn't stop being your responsibility.

It's a core responsibility. That is your whole responsibility.

It's yours. You have literally one job. You don't let the president get shot in the face. They're questioning this guy, this counter-sniper team lead, and they're trying to get him to admit that things were done wrong. They're asking him, Would you consider what happened to failure? He goes, Possibly.

The candidate shot in the face, and that's a possible? Possibly.

What's weird is, Does this guy still work for the US government? He still works for the Secret Service. He was put on admin leave for a week, and it was more like a mental health therapy leave. Something traumatic happened.

Like Michael Bird, you murder someone and you're the victim.

Exactly. Then he's right back working full-time for the Secret Service. Now? Now, as far as we know.

Was anybody from Secret Service fired?

No, not that we know of. You had Kim Cheedle, who is the head of Secret Service. He's a total idiot.

I thought she was a hero. She's a woman. She's a hero.

Yeah, obviously. She's strong and brave. She retires. Then you had her deputy, who was the guy who was actually in charge of the day-to-day. He gets elevated motivated, doesn't get fired. Those are the first two people I fire. Instantly. I find the leadership channel, the leadership chain, and I find everyone in it, you're all gone. It's not personal. You might be great people, but Secret Service calls itself a zero fail agency. You clearly failed.

Yes.

To my knowledge, nobody's been fired.

The problem is that these are the bodyguards, and so In the Ottoman court, everyone was afraid of the bodyguards. That's who runs your coup. That's exactly. We're getting to the most basic facts of life, which is the armed people are in charge. You hate to think that's the rule in America, but do you think it's possible that people were afraid to mess with the Secret Service because no one wants to mess with the bodyguards?

I assume that's why we've never gotten the truth on the JFK shooting. I just assume Secret Services was involved somehow, and that's why presidents have been cowed into not releasing it.

Interesting. It wouldn't shock me. That's the most basic interest of anybody is not to get shot to death, if you think. I'm speculating to some extent, but you do wonder. I always wondered and I asked, if you're the Trump campaign, why don't you make a... I mean, I think or I know that Trump thinks he doesn't want to whine about being shot because you seem weak when you want. They tried to shoot me. He downplayed it on purpose. I think that was a manly thing to do, was an impressive thing to do. There's dignity in that. I admire it. However, it is important to find out what happened. I always suspected that maybe they felt a little bit threatened because they've got a campaign. They've got months more of campaigning to do. They want to do outdoor Trump loves outdoor venues. He's brave. He's obviously physically brave. We know that. On the other hand, do you really want to piss off your bodyguards? Do you think that is part of the dynamic here?

How could it not be if you're a human? Yeah, you had the people on the stage, they didn't know anything was going on until Trump had been shot. You would think the people on the stage who are the literal personal protective detail, the ones who physically form- Oh, the fat girls on the stage. Is that even No, I think there was one. One, okay. Yeah, but there were several men on there. Those guys are the ones who physically have to go in, and I think they call it a body bunker they put around the president. Yes. They had no idea anything was going on or there was any trouble anywhere until they hear shots fired. They interviewed the guy who came. If you're watching Trump and you see the Secret Service agents come in, the guy on the left gets in first. I think the House Butler Task Force interviewed him. They said, Okay, take us through what was going on in your head in that moment. He's like, Well, yeah, we heard some scuttlebutt that local police were looking at something at three o'clock to Trump's right. That was it. He said, And then I heard a pop.

He said, My immediate thought was it sounded like one of those poppet fire crackers, just throwing the ground.

Exactly. It always does.

Yeah. He said, So that's That's what I thought it was. I thought it was a heckler in the crowd. There must have been a heckler who got the poppets in the crowd. Then I hear the second shot, and I'm waiting to hear in my ear, heckler. He said, And then I heard the third, and that's when I knew... By the way, he's hearing nothing in his ears at this point, getting no communication. So that's the point at which I go and jump on the president. We hear him going over us. Yeah.

It was I went to a restaurant the other night, in fact, this weekend, and I had a little trouble hearing what people were saying. I thought to myself, I'm a little young to go deaf. Why? Well, because I grew up shooting, bird hunting, target shooting. I remember my father saying, just stick a Marlborough filter in your opposite ear and you'll be fine. I wish we'd had suppressors, but we didn't. You can now check out Silencer Central. Silencers play a crucial role in improving accuracy, maximizing your experience and protecting your hearing. They're not dangerous or scary. It's just the opposite. Not using them can be dangerous. Have dinner with me in a restaurant and you'll know what I mean. Silencer Central can fix your problems immediately. They will find the perfect silencer for you and make it very easy to buy one. It's not the hassle you thought it was. I know because I just went through it. So you get approved and then Silencer Central ships your order straight to your door. No hassle whatsoever. It is easy. It doesn't get any better, in fact. So if you thought it was impossible to shoot suppressed, you were wrong.

Go to silencercentral. Com right now, start browsing, use the code Tucker10 for 10% off your first purchase of banish suppressors. Highly recommended. Of the eight shots, where did they go, those eight shots?

I think they were only able to find actual bullet fragments from two. There were 10 shots fired total. There were eight from Crooks. There was one from a local law enforcement officer who shot almost simultaneously with Crooks' eighth shot. You have one, two, three. You had a burst of three, then you had a burst of five. Then the five all went high. One of them hit a hydraulic line on one of those telehandlers or loles or cranes behind it. It starts spewing hydraulic fluid everywhere, and you see it drop all of a sudden after the hydraulic line gets punctured, if you watch the video again. I think that was from that second group. It was three and then five. As Crooks fired his eighth shot, a local officer fires his gun at Crooks. He swears he got him. There's no forensic medical evidence that he did, but there's no firing from Crooks after that point, after that eighth shot. Then 15 seconds later comes the shot that kills crooks. No way. 15 seconds. The reason that happened was because nobody had eyes on the roof. You had your sniper-15 seconds? Yep.

That's an entire magazine worth of-you could fire an entire magazine.

Easy. With an AR, you could easily unload a mag.

That is crazy town.

Yeah. You have the sniper who's on the roof who takes the shot. He's been watching. If you are crooks, if you're where the shooter is, and I'm where Trump is, the guy who shot him is looking here and all the way over here the whole time. He's looking to his left and back around. Yes. He hears the shots. He has to get up orient himself to where the shots are coming from, where if he's got earmuffs on or ear protection on, that can be hard to do because those play tricks with locating sound. Yeah, it's impossible. He's got to locate the guy where the shots are coming from has to make identification of the guy who's got the gun and then has to fire at him. I don't even blame that guy because he was told to watch this sector. He's watching it. But yeah, 15 seconds, and he fires one shot. Who is it?

With a 308?

A 300 Win Mag. Wow. That's a big boy gun.

That's a scary gun.

It's 300 Win Mag.

Really?

Is that what they use? Yeah, Black Hills Ammunition. The cartridge was Black Hills. It was a 210-grain hollow Point-Oh, my gosh.tip on it.

That ends the conference. For people who don't shoot, that's so much larger than the 223 or 5, 5, 6 that Crooks is shooting.

And the cartridge is huge.

Yeah, it's like four bucks a cartridge, too.

It's a big boy cartridge. When you fire a 300 wind mag, you feel that.

You get fatigued pretty quick. I had someone come to my range just at my house, and with his grandfather's 300 wind mag, we were just shooting on Sunday afternoon, and he just charges the thing, and I was like, Man, no more of that. That's just too loud. I can't deal with it.

It's so loud.

It shakes my molars.

Yeah. You go to a range where someone's shooting 300 around, and you're like, Oh. It's impolite. I don't know. Put a suppressor on it. No, I totally agree.

Wow, that's- Yeah, in 210 grand, that's a big bullet. Yes.

I think he hits him from 155 yards, and it hit him in the lip, goes through the face, out the neck, but then back into his back, and they recovered a fragment of the mushroomed bullet from Crooks' body.

Well, he didn't suffer. Not with the 210 grand from a 300 windmack. Yeah. Wow. Tell me about the cop who says he shot Crooks. Where was he?

There was this furious action going on by the AGR building. I believe there were five, either four or five different local law enforcement agencies. You had the Pennsylvania State Police, you had the Troopers. You had Butler County Police. Butler County was the county where Butler is. You had the Butler Township Police. You had the Beaver County, I think, Sheriffs. They're one county west of Butler. Then you had the Washington County, which is southwest of Butler. You had five different local law enforcement. The Washington guys, I believe, were down by the Horse Ring, which is probably a good 4-500 yards away from everything, but they had fairly good visual coverage of everything. It was mostly the Butler and Beaver County people. They're furiously searching around. You've got one guy who tried to climb on the roof because they're furiously searching. He climbs on the roof. His partner hoists him up. He's holding on like this to the roof, looks up and sees the shooter right there. He says the shooter turns on him and aims him. He said, I don't know what happened next. I don't know if I lost my grip. He said, The next thing I know, I'm on the ground.

I'm on the concrete. He said, There's no way for me to pull my gun because I'm hanging, doing a pull-up. It's like, I'm hanging there. I'm not going to be able to... No. He says, I don't remember exactly what happened. All I know is I saw him Crooks turned and aimed his rifle at me, and the next thing I know, I'm getting myself off the concrete.

Damn. Who is the cop who says he shot Crooks?

I think it was a Beaver County cop.

At some distance, though.

Yeah. He wasn't right on him, but he had him in his sights, fired one round. With a rifle. With a rifle. Swear as he shot him.

But there's no evidence that he did.

There's no forensic evidence in Crooks' body that he was shot, But Crooks stopped firing after the eighth round, which was simultaneous with the round from that cop. So did he hit the gun, maybe? There's some speculation that he might have hit the stock?

Well, it sounds like he stopped the shooting.

He absolutely did. Whether he hit him or not, he absolutely did.

So a magazine has obviously more than eight rounds in it. I assume Crooks did as well. He had unfired rounds in the mag when the rifle was recovered Right.

They recovered, I think, all eight shell casings.

No, but he still had ammunition in the magazine. Oh, yeah. Right. What I'm asking is, it sounds like the local cops stopped the shooting.

Yeah, he didn't stop shooting because he ran out of ammo. Exactly. Correct.

It was not the Secret Service that stopped this assassination attempt. It was local cops.

Yeah, that's when the shooting stopped. It stopped permanently when he got a 210-grain Hornady tip through his upper lip. But the shooting had been stopped prior to that. Wow.

What? 15 seconds, as noted, is a very long time. Why?

Because they had no eyes on him. You had your two snipers on the roof in the north barn, and that was the number two unit, how they were categorized in all the documents. They never saw him because they had a gigantic tree in their way. It was impossible. It's interesting. We all watched that footage, everyone's wondering who got him. They see the guy who's kneeling down. He's on the big tripod. People automatically assumed, Oh, well, he did it. Then he's got the guy prone next to him, No, well, he must have been the one to do it. You see him, like He's either looking through, I think, his binoculars. He might have been looking through his scope. He hears the gunshots and he pops up. Do you remember this in the video? Pops up and he looks around here like, Why is he off the glass? That's weird. He doesn't know where it came from. Those two guys on that North Barn are furiously looking where it is.

There's no way you could know. I mean, it's impossible to know unless you were looking, had someone looking there.

Exactly, which they didn't. Then you have the counter sniper, Team Lee who had convinced himself that because they had local cops in the building, that that was their job to be watching that, even though it was physically impossible for them to do. They were never told they had to do that. Then the one guy who had a sight line to that was assigned a sector that was the exact opposite of it. That's a lot of incompetence.

It's unbelievable. Three people were shot, two in addition to President Yeah, that was your question.

Sorry, I got sidetracked. He said, Where did the bullets go? Three people were shot. Cory Comperator, the firefighter, he was shot. Two other men were shot. We know- Two other men? Yes. There were four people shot Trump, two men who were shot and didn't die, and Cory, who was killed by a bullet.

Yeah, right next to my producer, right next to him, which is wild. Yeah, it was right there. He said he was covered in blood.

Wow.

From it. I'm only saying that because there's a lot of drama. It's not just Trump getting shot in the face.

Yeah, a man died.

Yeah, he was murdered. Two others were shot. Do we know anything about them or how they fared?

They're alive and well. There was an interview with them by one of the networks a couple of weeks ago, but they're alive and well, and they're talking about it. Obviously, they'll carry scars with it forever, but I don't believe they were permanently disabled in any way.

Damn.

But they couldn't account for all the bullets, which makes sense. Something nicks a bleacher and goes off into the ground, you're never finding a bullet.

These are 22 caliber bullets, just to be clear.

So they were 223 caliber bullets in a 5.5.6 Cartridge. Right.

But the bullet itself is 22 caliber. Yeah. These are tiny.

Very small. People who don't shoot guns and think ARs are massive, big, powerful guns, they'd be shocked at how tiny 2, 2, 3 rounds are.

The point is the velocity. Exactly. The point is how fast they're going. But it's not a 210-grain, 400 D-tip, 300-grain mag. Which you could not mistake for anything but a bullet. Right. Wow. Okay. We know nothing about the shooter. We know nothing about why he did this, his beliefs, who he spoke to. We know nothing about He's a cipher.

No, literally nothing.

He's the only 20-year-old with no social media presence, and apparently no cutlery, silverware in his house?

Yeah, I remember that news report. One of my daughters told me that. It was reported that afterwards. My theory is that Silverware was taken as evidence because he was mixing bombs in his house. I did not read anywhere that when officers showed up because they interviewed one ATF agent who was actually in the home and who's the one who discovered the IED in Crooks' bedroom. No mention of no silverware. He's like, No, it's a normal house. It was well-kept. It was clean. It's not like a bunch of sloppy hoarders lived there. It was like a nice normal house in order. I don't know where the silverware... Because I've heard the same thing. I've not read a single report from someone who was there that says, Yeah, we got in there and there's There's no silverware. I suspect that they took it to test it forensically to see if he was mixing bombs with it. Because he had a gallon of nitromethane in his closet. It was openly viewable.

Pardon me, Ingrid. What's nitromethane?

It's a major component of bomb making. It's liquid, has an odor.

Can you buy it at a hardware store? Yeah.

Totally buy it off the shelf.

Nitromethane.

Yeah, so he had gallon of it. The the ATF guy walks in, sees the bomb, looks around, sees in his closet this gallon of explosive material. Then at that point, they immediately clear the whole house, and I believe all the house is one house around it.

Wow. But we still don't know anything about him or why he did this. We also don't know why, according to your account, why the Secret Service made this colossal error in judgment and just left out an entire quadrant of a potential field of fire, just ignored it. We don't know why. No. No.

But we do know- They'll blame it on manpower. That's always the easy bureaucratic solution.

But even that, is it true that Dr. Jill Biden, America's, I think, most famous research scientist- What did Whoopie say?

Amazing doctor. Amazing doctor. She should be surgeon general.

But is it true that she was having an event and that that bled off manpower that could have been used at the Trump event?

Yes, one, it didn't just bleed off manpower. She had an event in Pittsburgh. There was bleed off in the radios. The Secret Service at the Butler event for Trump was actually having issues with their radios because they were getting bleed over from the radios, from the agents at Jill Biden's event. Dr. Jill's. Excuse me. Excuse me, Dr. Jill.

That's incredible. Okay, so that's a whole lot of we don't know. So your third question was what happened after to everybody?

Nothing. Nothing. Yeah. Sorry to break the suspense there, but like, nothing.

Okay. What do you think this adds up to? You said you were vacillating between two and three. Can you remind us what this option? Yeah.

So two was what I call strategic incompetence, where Trump was deliberately left vulnerable. I think that for a whole host of reasons. One, that I'm conscious and I've been alive. But right after the shooting, my wife and I were together working on home projects, and we hadn't been paying attention to our phones, and so started getting texts from people. My wife got a text from her friend, Trump's been shot. We're just stunned. Immediately, pray, because we don't know what the result is. A couple of minutes later, text that he's okay. Then right after that, my phone starts going crazy. I'm getting text and everything. One of the most interesting text I got, which I tweeted about, was that the Secret Service Special Operations division, which is like the elite division within the Secret Service, if you can say that. They had been asking for more protection for years for Trump, repeatedly, over and over and again. It was denied, repeatedly. Denied so much that they just stopped asking for it because it was viewed as if you ask for something you're not going to get, it's like gauche within the agency.

Denied by whom?

Another great question we don't have an answer to. It's secret service is now under the umbrella of DHS.

Yeah, it was always under treasury.

Yeah, it was. Then they moved it, I don't know, 5, 10 years ago. Under Mayorkas, like a real competent public servant there. Patriot. Yeah. You've got him. It Did the rejections come from DHS? I don't know. You've got Chetel up there who's an idiot. Did it come from her? I don't know.

Where did she go when she retired, by the way?

I don't think we know. Actually, I'm going to assume she's doing security for a Fortune 500 CEO.

Yeah, exactly. University of California School.

But no, we don't know where she is now.

But it's not clear why they denied or who denied.

No, don't know why, who, how often. That weekend, I put that out, it gets some traction. Secret Service spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, something like that, spent the whole weekend calling reporters and telling them I was making it up. That never happened. But it's had a statement It's not true. He's never denied anything.

Bobby Kennedy was denied Secret Service protection. They didn't want to run against him. They'd rather he be dead.

Clearly.

Yeah, of course. But that's such sinistry. I mean, that's attempted murder, really. I just don't understand how... I mean, disobedience to the regime is punished immediately. Tax evasion is punished immediately. But attempted murder is not.

You're asking who's Thomas Crooks? We know more about Joe the Plumber. You remember Joe the Plumber? Very well.

He died, unfortunately. He did. I knew him.

Yeah. He asked a question about taxes to Obama, in a rope line.

Yeah.

They gave that dude the media digital colonoscopy within five minutes. We We know more about a guy who asked Obama a question about taxes than we do about a guy who shot Trump in the head.

Well, of course. The media really are a player in all this. They're not just dupes. They're not just the PR office for the regime, they are players. They are active participants in totalitarianism, I would say.

Do you know how Crooks' father found out his son was the shooter? No. Cnn called him. Really? Really? Yeah. While we're talking about weird, creepy media stuff. There's no ID on Thomas Crooks. They get to the body, he's dead. They don't know who he is. The only thing they have is a serial number on his rifle. They call up ATF, and they do what's called an urgent trace to figure out where was this gun bought. I think it takes them. Dettelbach, the ATF director, says it took them 30 minutes. I think it took like 2 hours. But they know by around 8:30, definitely by 9-ish, that the dad bought the gun and where he bought it from. It was from a retailer that had since been closed. They put together a report, a pretty narrow distribution of people. I think it went to Pennsylvania State Police, so local police could go stake the place out. Went to FBI, ATF had it, but it's a very small distribution. We know because we got the testimony from the guy who sent it out. Atf and a couple of cops are sent to go do a stake out on Crooks' father's house.

They get there, we'll call it 10:00 or 10:30. At that point, they're already seeing cars slowly drive by in ways that obviously they don't live on that street. I think 10:56, they get a word from a dispatcher that Crook's father has called 911 to report his son missing. At that point, they're no longer doing a stakeout. They have to go confront him because obviously he knows something. They go up to his door, he meets them out there, and he says, Is it true? Was it my son? They ask him, Why would you say that? He said, CNN called me and told me. He got two calls from CNN and a call from an NBC producer.

That does not make sense at all. How could that happen?

Somebody leaked it.

But how would someone know who he was?

They had it from the the ATF report that had the trace of the serial number. So somebody, the ATF report, somebody had that and decided, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to call CNN in NBC. They don't know who did it.

But it's interesting that they would know it was the son because it was the father on the ATF record. He's the one who purchased the right. But somehow, CNN and NBC knew that it was not the father but the son.

Well, because at that point, did we know the age of the person? I don't think we knew any. Yeah. So yeah, CNN called me and told me. When I found that out, by the way, I'm still angry about the whole Roger Stone rate.

I am just thinking that exact thing. That's so funny.

Cnn happened to be there that morning, right before the cops got there. Liars. They are liars. They are liars. They absolutely had it leaked to them. Oh, I know. I saw that, and it just instantly reminded me of the Roger Stone thing, and then made me angry again.

I was just thinking that to be active participants in the repression of a population by its government is pretty capo behavior. It's really dark and evil. That's who they are. I spent 10 years there, I know. With Donald Trump returning to the White House, this country has a unique opportunity, maybe our last opportunity, to save ourselves from the anti-American and anti-human left. But our efforts may be stymied by the deep state. That's what happened to the first Trump term, permanent Washington, stands in the way of all efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Right now, they are scheming to do the same thing to the second Trump administration. They are determined to keep their stranglehold on power regardless of elections, antidemocratically. That is a fact. So what do you do to fight them? How do you defeat the Deep State? Well, one way you can is by supporting the Heritage Foundation, which is in Washington, understands exactly how it works in such a way that they're a threat and they're under attack. You know who's effective because the other one's under attack. Heritage has a comprehensive plan to dismantle permanent Washington and restore the country to its democratic foundations.

It's important. Visit heritage. Org/tucker to learn more and to support this critical effort. When you make a gift today, you get a free pocket constitution to make certain that you are equipped with the founding principles on your person at all times. It's amazing to read it. Again, that's heritage. Org/tucker. I didn't fully know when I was there, but like, yeah, no, they're not observers at all. They're players. They're players, and they're big players. That's why they hate the internet so much.

But that leak, it materially changed how the police responded. They found bombs. They're trying to get a perimeter. They're trying to keep an eye on things. They're waiting to get the signal to actually go confront the family. Because this guy got... I'm convinced that he called police after being called by CNN. It's not in the report, but you'll never convince me otherwise, materially changed how the cops had to approach the home of the shooter. To me, it's just unconscionable.

Yeah, it's not surprising.

Then let's imagine you're seeing anything, you got this great scoop. What are you out of informing a father of that? Because they didn't report it.

Well, they do a lot that they don't report, a lot, including in the Roger Stone raid. I mean, they were participants in political repression, cheerleaders for it, but not just cheerleaders. They were part of the process. They were used by the Biden administration to...

Well, that was actually the Trump administration. I think that was the Trump FBI still, although it's all the same.

Right. It's just crazy that that could have and the lack of control over the federal agencies by the executive, by the White House, is like, I hope we never see that again because that's really dark. But anyway, yeah. No, CNN, very, very bad. I know I've asked the same question 15 times, but I can't believe there's no real answer. We don't know anything about who crooks talked to?

No.

For this? Nothing. No.

Don't know who he was texting, don't know what was going on on these encrypted apps. We know he went to the range that day.

Why doesn't the Congress issue subpoenas to find out?

Because they're completely weak and neutered. My view is Congress is by far the most powerful branch. It controls the purse.

It's designed to be.

Exactly. Yet in practice today in 2025, it's far and away the weakest.

Except when they do the one thing that they do, which is to preserve the total control over the United States by the national security state. You're seeing this right now where committee chairman in the Congress are saying to the incoming administration, No, it has to be all deep staters. You can't have Tulsi Gabbard or anyone like Elsy Gabbard. It's all got to be John Rathcliff or someone we know and who's obviously under our control. They're insistent on that, exercising that power, which I find really interesting.

I was so naive. I believe that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because they told us there were. Why would they lie? It didn't dawn on me that they were all just corrupt liars until really the Russiagate hoax. But it didn't start in 2001. I feel like it's been that way for 70 years.

Well, it's certainly been that way. I mean, we know for a fact it's been that way since right around late November of 1963. We just know that. But I agree. I I just think it goes back to the Second World War.

Yeah, because they didn't... Their first crime was- The good war. Their first crime was not killing Kennedy. That wasn't like dipping their toes in the water?

No. They had some practice rounds. It's just interesting that this seems like one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, and I do think you're probably the most informed person in all media, though. I don't know if you would admit to being a media, but do you think of yourself as a media?

Well, I don't like to use the J word. I know. It's filthy.

I know. It's funny. You and Schellenberger, two of my favorite, right at the top of my favorite journalist list, and neither one of you started out intending to do this or went to journalism school, you're both doing completely different things. It's interesting.

That's actually how it should be. I totally agree. That's actually how it used to be. I know. It used to be a blue collar job and you work a beat, and now you have to go to Madil or Columbia It's just embarrassing.

No, it's interesting. The journalists I respect more are all people who could be doing something else, making a lot more money who didn't set out to do this, just out of curiosity and patriotism and moral responsibility are doing it. You're in that category. So thank you. But anyway, the reason I want to talk to you was it felt like you can do something as obvious as set up a shooting of Donald Trump in the summer of an election year and get away with it, then you're still in control of everything.

The craziest thing, and people in Trump's circle have told me, there's no chance it could have happened this way. They swear there's no way it happened this way. Do you remember JD's Rogan interview? Yes. He's talking about when he was in his process of interviewing to be VP and all that. Trump was considering bringing him up at that Butler rally and announcing him.

I know. Yeah, I know. That was not just considering, but that was like a much disgust.

Oh, yeah. At that point, JD has been told, you're it. Now we know with Trump, it's never actually done until it's done. It wasn't technically done.

It was done Monday afternoon, though. That was Saturday. Yeah.

But JD has been told they're mulling the idea of him going to Butler, and then Trump's like, no, we don't really want to do that. We haven't done the prep and all that, so we'll just put a pin in that. That was the last rally before he had announced a VP. If you are a crooked evil deepstater and you want to get rid of the virus that is Donald Trump and make sure that he doesn't get to pick the person who would be running in his stead if something happened.

Make sure he doesn't get to reproduce.

That's when you would do it. I've asked, I said, Did anyone leak that? He said, No, impossible. No one leaked it. I Okay, I 100% believe. Just knowing who's around that, 100% believe that. You're telling me it's impossible that nobody heard the conversation through other means?

Who leaked the fact that JD was going to speak at that rally?

Or leaked that he had basically been picked?

Oh, no, that was known. Well, I knew that.

Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah, I did. We're in different circles, Tucker. No, not really.

I'm not living in some weird rural place in Maine. But no, I knew that. Absolutely. A lot of people knew that. I mean, all the people I know who knew that are good people who love Trump. I mean, I'm not suggesting anything, but I'm just in point of fact, a lot of people knew. Yeah.

If other people knew it, that is a- The more people who know, the more people will know. Yeah. I don't know if I'll ever be able to get that out of my head, the timing, based on what was going on that weekend.

But there was at least one subsequent attempt, assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life. Were there others?

You're talking about the West Palm one?

Yeah, but I mean, after mid-July, were there, do you think, other attempts?

I don't know. Were there?

I don't know, but I think there might have been.

We just didn't hear about them.

I think that's entirely possible.

I would totally... I would buy that.

Yeah. Who was the West Palm? The West Palm guy was like- That one is so much wackier than the Butler one. In touch with all these members of Congress.

Yeah. I I think there's a photo of him with that stupid chef, that stupid commie chef. What's his name?

I don't have a TV.

Jose, Andres, something. I think that guy got a presidential medal of freedom from Biden. There's a picture of him with him. He's palling around. Not really. Yeah, I think unless I'm totally getting my wires crossed, I'm pretty sure that guy got a medal of freedom, and there's a picture of him with Ralph, this homeless Hawaiian mercenary bringing troops troops to Ukraine who's camped out on Trump's golf course after Trump's already been shot in the head. A secret service guy happens to see him. I think the report I read was he was 5 feet away, fires 10 rounds at him, misses. It was local cops who got the guy 45 minutes later. How does that happen?

It's all so incredible.

Yeah.

So I just want to put it on the record. The members of Congress, you said that the two committee inquiries were pretty good.

Given the constraints that they have, so Congress doesn't have a lot of staff for doing this stuff. They had no time. They don't have the investigative tools that the FBI has. You had the Senate Homeland Security Committee that did its own report, and then you had the Butler Task Force Bipartisan in the House that did its report. I thought they did a great job, both of them, given the limitations and constraints they have. I don't know how they could have been more thorough, given the FBI trying to block them from doing anything.

Is this the end of the inquiry?

It better not be. I mean, Trump's coming in in a couple of days, he's going to be President. It's hopefully going to get his people in office. It better not be the end of the inquiry.

I feel like there's so much going on in the world right now that maybe people just forget to ask.

I mean, I know enough about human nature to where I can't dismiss that. But yeah, there's always some new story we have to go react to and pretend we're very upset about. It's every day. Remember when news cycles were three days long?

I remember very well. I remember when Natalie Holloway disappeared in Aruba?

Yeah.

I worked in cable news then, and we spent approximately three years talking about it every day. No disrespect to Natalie Hollow or the inherent significance of a story about a dead American. It's important. But yeah, no, that was... You wonder what else is going on while we were talking about Natalie Hollowe. Yeah. I've gone back and thought of all the time I wasted with Gary Condit. Oh, man. How much time did we spend looking into what happened on 9/11 right around zero? Just repeating all the dumb talking points, the hate us for our freedoms and all that stuff and not asking obvious questions. Some people were celebrating it. Who to those people? And what is this?

I think one of the hijacks was living with an FBI informant for a year.

I think that's correct.

Mistakes were made.

It's all still classified, so you can't know. Interesting. The obvious question is why aren't other elected officials so anxious to get to the bottom of this? Because it has implications for them. When this happened, my wife said, Are we ever going to find out what this was? I said, with false confidence, Absolutely. One thing members of Congress care about is not being assassinated. They have every vested interest in finding out what this was and in making the right reform so they can stay safe themselves. I turned out to be completely wrong.

What is that? I don't know what's happened to Congress. I think it's probably a combination of... Obviously, the more responsibility you take, if you're going to take 100% of the powers you've been given by the founders in the Constitution and exercise that every day, you're going to have 100% of the accountability. There's nothing a member of Congress, a politician, hates more than accountability. They are generally happy to delegate all of their authority to the executive, where they can just blame stuff on bureaucrats. It was a bad process. It was a bad bureaucratic. People in Washington love blaming process. Have you noticed that? I have noticed. It's always the process. There's never a person at fault for anything. It's always a process that can be strengthened.

You worked in the Senate. You worked for Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, God rest his soul. You can answer this question, but as I just look on to the Congress where I've never worked, but it seems like the single most corrupt are showing the most infuriating part of the Congress is the Republicans in the Senate.

Oh, my gosh. We fought with them more than Democrats.

Okay, so- Constantly with- You agree with that?

Oh, you have no idea.

Okay, so I'm thinking, who do I dislike most?

Mitch Yes.

It's not Alexandria Osi or whatever she's calling herself. It was like a bifoon. At least has 10% sincerity in my read. But I look at some of the Republicans, Rish, and some of these guys, I'm like, Oh, my gosh, this is really sinister.

Yeah. Man, Coburn, that guy was a unicorn. There will only ever be one of him. He didn't care what anyone thought about him. He hated everyone in Washington. He hated Washington itself. All he wanted to do was go up there and cut spending and restore some sanity and then go deliver babies on the weekend. Then the Senate was like, Actually, we're going to ban you from doing that because it's a conflict of interest. Delivering babies? Delivering babies. He's like, Okay, I'll do it. I'll do it for free. I'll pay MedMal out of my own pocket. I said, No, you can't do that. We're going to ban you. The Senate Ethics Committee went after him four years-For delivering babies. For delivering babies.

It's It's too life affirming for the Senate.

Exactly.

He's killing babies. If he was an abortionist, that would have been fine.

That would have been fine. Yeah. But actually touching and being with constituents, that was too much. But I remember doing stuff with him where we would have constantly people telling us, We don't do things like that around here. Really? Yeah, all the time. We'd be like, What do you mean you don't do things like, No, that's not how we do things around here. Because we were all so young in green and idealistic. It was actually the genius in how he put together staff. It wasn't like an all-star cast of elite players. He just took a bunch of chuckleheads who believed in his mission and was like, Yeah, go do damage out there. And so we did it. And so we were too stupid to know what we weren't supposed to be doing.

Why isn't every... I mean, there seems to be something peculiarly, specifically wrong with the dynamic among Republicans Republicans in the Senate. I don't know what that is. They seem more committed to betraying their voters than any other group I've ever seen in politics.

Yeah, it's super weird. For most of them, it's like their Senate tenure is five years of doing what they want and then a year of promising to do what their voters want. It's like a sickness. I genuinely don't understand it. I don't know if something happens when you become a Republican senator, that happens to 90% of them, where they get there and they just like being important, and that comes the thing they care about. You talked about the media being a player. The media exists in large part to gaslight Republicans into doing what they want. To control them. Yeah. These guys, for whatever reason, they care what CNN thinks about them, and they care what the New York Times thinks about them. They don't understand that if you actually want to be powerful as a Republican, not caring what anyone thinks about you makes you a freaking superhero. I agree with that. It makes you untouchable. The machine doesn't know how to handle someone who doesn't care about their next job or the next puff piece. You're basically an alien to them. They don't know how to intimidate you or how to threaten you. Like, Oh, you'll cast me out of this awful city full of terrible people?

Oh, no. What will I do?

Yeah. I mean, do you see it changing at all?

A little bit. It changes with the class. I've got a friend who's one of the few really good true believers on the right worked in the Senate for a long time. Total genius, parliamentary genius. He says, you can judge senators unlike House members. You can judge senators by the class that they were elected into. That tells you about the character of that whole group of people. You got the guys who came in in 2002, war on terror. Got to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. They're the worst neocons.

The worst.

That bleeds into '04. Then you We had the '06 thing where I don't think we even elected a new Republican Senator because it was such a political bloodbath because the Iraq war was a disaster. Then '08, you've got the Obama years. Then the first big year was 2010. That was all Tea Party. Those guys still have the Tea Party mentality, which is fine. I think the Tea Party was great. But you have to be able to evolve with the electorate. They're still stuck in Tea Party town. Then 2014 was the repeal Obamacare. That was the thing. It really wasn't until 2016, where you actually started seeing a change that was reflective of where the people are, happening in 2018. Then most of the guys coming in now are so much better than the people they serve with who got elected 20 years ago, that's not even close. Yes. And yet, they're still senators, and they still care about what people think about them. Someone like you or me will never, ever be in that body.

Well, no. I I'd rather die. But what's interesting is it's not on questions like, we spent all this time on the training question, which I think is inherently important. I do think if you eliminate sex differences, civilization collapses because they're built on sex differences. That's my view. I'm completely aligned. I couldn't be more pro-life. There are tons of Republicans in both houses who agree with all that or say they do or do a good job of pretending. It's fine. It's the The national security, intel stuff, the police power stuff, surveillance power stuff. Man, that's what they take seriously. That's what they actually care about. Have you noticed this? Yeah.

It's actually, you see guys who really want to get on the Intel committee. Yes. Unless you're going to do real oversight, which I think one person, Devin Nunez, has ever done on that committee, the only reason to be on that is to be cool. You get to be with the spies, and you get read in on it, and they make you feel special and you get to go on Codels. Then maybe one day they'll write a book about you, like Charlie Wilson's War, about how courageous you were in shipping a bunch of weapons all around the world and starting wars that we're still dealing with the ramifications of. It's the Jason Bourne like John LeCoueray stuff that they actually think they're a part of.

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But you don't look at that and say the people who started that are evil They're just dumb or they didn't foresee the consequences of what they were doing. But the people who cheered the murder of Gaddafi or never admitted they lied about weapons mass destruction, the people pushing claiming that we should lower the conscription age in Ukraine to 18 because we haven't killed enough Ukrainians after a million have died or been wounded.

I just think that's evil. It is evil. It's people who, it's almost like they get off on the raw raw team sport aspect of people getting blown to bits and having their lives, if not ended, ruined forever. I swear, I don't see how any of these people, they must not have ever talked to anyone who spent any time actually doing dirty work in Iraq or Afghanistan? Because you can't spend any time- It destroys those guys. It destroyed a whole generation of warfighters and young men. I mean, it's in evil ways.

Not just because they were killed or disabled. We're only looking at a small part of it. I've known some of them well. It's killing people is bad for you. Sometimes you have to kill people. I mean, you do. If I have a home invader and my wife and kids are going to kill a guy, I would sleep soundly after killing them. I mean, you have to. But ultimately, killing people is bad, and it's bad for the person who kills. We don't even acknowledge that. I just know a lot of them, so I've seen it. Would you want that on you?

No. Well, it's why I never joined. I couldn't do it.

Not because you're afraid of being killed. It's because you're afraid of killing, and you should be. It's a very heavy thing to ask someone to do and then not to acknowledge it. Just be like, Oh, yeah, good job.

When you see the scars they bring back to the mental, emotional, spiritual. Yes. Some of them deal with it way better than others. But there's a reason the suicide rate is so high.

The divorce rate and the addiction rate and the weirdness rate and the deep heavy trouble that you feel on a lot of them. God, my gosh, I don't blame them. A lot of them are wonderful, admirable people. They were asked to do something and they did it. They did it under duress and at great personal risk. I admire them. I'm not criticizing them. Just saying not to acknowledge what we've asked them to do, not to acknowledge the burden of having killed somebody. It's like, how shallow and cruel are we?

In the news media, the corporate media, they treat it like it's a fun sport. Let's look what Red Team versus Blue Team did today. Let's look at this footage of this Russian getting killed by a drone. Then it's here, and they, Oh, isn't this great? Isn't this awesome? It's pornography. Yeah, it is.

These are human beings. Yeah. They didn't want to be there. It didn't just like some kid gets his face blown off and you're cheering It's gross. It's disgusting.

It's weird. I look back on how I thought about things in the run up to the Iraq war, and I'm just ashamed about it. Me too. Because I was like the jingoistic, ra-ra thing. You find out it was all based on a lie. You see that it's just that permanently changed how I looked at that entire bureaucracy. I completely agree.

In 2001 and 2002, when I was tepidly cheerleading, I will say this, my only defense was tepid, I knew it was wrong, but I convinced myself it wasn't. But when I was making the case for the Iraq War and repeating the lies of the Bush administration, I never really seen violence, personally seen it. That was a huge change for me seeing that. I was like, I'm not into this at all. I don't know why is this good? I don't think it's good. It doesn't feel good. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's just I don't want that, any more of that. I don't want to see that. I don't want to be around it at all. It's not a turn on at all. It's horrible. That was, personally for me, a huge change. But I just think that it's important to remember, especially as Christians, we're against violence. I don't know. We are. Sorry. We're against violence. We should not ever cheer someone's death, right?

Yeah. I mean, we're the only things made in God's image. That's how I feel. In all of creation. We're infinitely valuable. I feel that way. We shouldn't be cheering. It's like you said, somebody breaks into your home, they're trying to do harm to your family. You're going to do what you got to do, but just, Hey, let's go.

But I don't want to do it.

Yeah. Nobody should want to do it. No. I remember I was taking a gun training from an uncle of mine who's a legendary firearms instructor. He worked with Jeff Cooper out in gun site. Wow. Really? Yeah. He's awesome. I remember him, my sister and my aunt and uncle, and I went with this other uncle and his wife to do this training. He made us sit in a classroom for a whole day, and he drilled into us, What's the number one rule of gun of gun fights. Be somewhere else. Then what's the second rule of gun fights? Have a gun. But he's like, Yeah, if you're paying attention, if you're aware and you know what's going on around you, you should have the ability and the awareness to never be in a position to ever have to do it. I agree. But bar some awful twist of fate.

I wonder, the calls for gun control, which are obviously cyclical, every time there's some tragedy, some mass shooting, some of which do seem like they were inspired by the FBI, but I can't prove it. But anyway, there's always three or four days of the media getting hysterical about gun control, taking your guns away. Those seem more half-hearted than they used to be. Maybe I'm being paranoid. I'm wondering if maybe technology, the convergence of AI and drone technology, isn't advancing to the point where the people in charge know it doesn't matter whether you have a gun anymore.

I hadn't thought about that, but I had noticed the fever pitch of hysteria after a shooting over the last almost like year, six months, two year. They feel like they're just going through the motions with it in the media.

I agree. It's just a fundraising deal for the dumb David hog or whatever. You see these buffoons, media creations who become famous on a pile of dead bodies. It's so grotesque. But I It doesn't seem real to me. I just wonder, are we at a point where your AR is not actually a guarantee of freedom at all because technology is going to give the state so much power that it doesn't matter?

The drone stuff I find terrifying. Terrifying. Why? Especially the mast drones because you can't stop them. I talked to one a couple of months ago. I was talking to a former SEAL about it who thinks about this stuff a lot. I I said, How do you stop the drones? He said, Get a shotgun. I said, Really? Yeah, just shoot it. Okay, what if there's a thousand of them? Shotgun I have doesn't hold a thousand rounds.

No, I shoot with a side-by-side. Two shells.

You have to have a technological solution to it. I don't know how I, as Joe Blow or you, just out mining our business. You're not defeating a weaponized drone storm at all. I feel like Democrats, especially the ones who are all about gun control, know this because they'll say things like, Oh, you think your AR is going to help you? We have nukes and in cruise missiles. Your AR is not going to stop that.

I think there may be something to that. It's just my instinct. I don't know.

But it is weird.

It is weird. I think if you want to understand what's actually going on, watch the rhetoric. Of course, never take it at face value. It's a lie. By definition, the slogans are a lie, but they do change, and they change for a reason. I'm just concerned about that. As someone who's always had guns and ammo at home.

There's an old quote from, I think it was J. P. Morgan, that I've used as my political motivation, finding North Star, and it's that every man has two reasons for doing things, a good reason and the real reason. On gun control, the The good reason that they always give, and I think probably a large percentage of people who espouse it, they do intend well. Well, these hurt people, and I don't want to hurt people. I got it. They don't think beyond the second, third-order consequences, but it's a genuine heartfelt, this thing does awful things to people, and I don't want that, so we should get rid of it. I understand where that's coming from. I don't agree with it. But then that's the good reason. What's the real reason? I think a lot of people putting stuff out just don't want us to be free.

Well, they don't believe in human autonomy, obviously. They don't see other humans as human. They see them as slaves. I think it's pretty obvious that they see them as objects who have no inherent rights, no inherent dignity, whose lives aren't really worth anything. That's why they love abortion. If you really saw people as creations of God who exist independently from you and your desires, then there's a degree to which you can control people. But then beyond that, you can't. Even your own children, you can't really control. Can you? No. Right. You can't.

No, they come fully formed and you can work 5% on the margins. That's exactly right.

I think good parenting is in part recognizing that because you don't own them. Actually, you are more responsible for them. They are your children. They're from your body, but they're not... They're human beings. I just think those are foundational views that a lot of people in power just don't No, we're viewed as cogs, especially the new managerial leftism.

They look at it and they say, Okay, we've got this fixed population of people, and I can move this lever, and I can move this lever, and I'll twist this thing, and then I can get those people to do what I want. We're really just inputs, things that can be tweaked according to them. We're not people who have souls. Exactly. We're not eternal beings who have infinite value. We're just things to be manipulated so they can get what they want. It's gross.

What Last question. It does feel like this, I think a lot of people felt this, whether they said it out loud or not, but this election was the last chance to turn away from what was a certain future of enslavement. That's not an overstatement. Who wins? In five years, what's your best guess for where we are?

I'm not an optimist, and it has nothing to do with politics. I I agree with you. I think this election was a last chance, but it wasn't a guarantee. My worry is that our politicians are a function of the people. It was either John Adams or Franklin said, Our system of government is wholly unsuited to an immoral people. We were a nation found on Christian principles by Christian men who put Christ and God as the foremost things in their lives, and everything else was built around Our government was built around it, the way we organized the States was built around it, and it worked for a really long time until that foundation started to crumble. I don't know when that started. Was it the industrial revolution? Was it Vietnam in the druggy era? I don't know. But our moral fabric as a people is totally unrecognizable to someone who helped start the country. My view is, absent a true collective Christian revival where we collectively repent for what we've done as a nation, because God cares about nations. He cares about the fate of nations. He cares what nations do. He blesses them and he curses them and he judges them and he lets them prosper.

Our nation had a covenant with God. It was obvious why we were formed, because we wanted to have a place where people could come- One nation under God.

They said it. They weren't hiding it.

Do you think that is the moral nucleus of our society today? Because I don't. I don't see, absent a true foundational change in us as a people collectively, I don't see how we ever turn the ship around. I pray, obviously, I pray for the President, I pray for mayors and our leaders, even when I don't like them, because that's what we're commanded to do, and because God has put them in place either for our judgment or our blessing, our fate is not going to be sealed by the politicians we pick. It's just not. No. That's my worry going forward.

Do you feel like... I do see around me, just in my tiny little weird world, but people who I don't think I've ever thought about God talking about God. I read that Bible sales are the highest they've been in a long time. I feel something changing.

Something has changed. It feels like on election night, scales came off people's It was a weird thing. Suddenly, people are just saying things that they weren't supposed to say. Got NFL players. You had John Jones, UFC, doing the Trump dance after finishing a dude. Words that people use and sentiments they espouse were completely verbotent, and that that seems to have changed. I completely agree. There appears to be a spiritual aspect in hunger in people now that I find really, really heartening, but it's like seeing the seedling sprout. I want to see the giant hardwood. Of course. But of course, it has to start with the seedling. Of course, it does.

But do you see it in your world?

Absolutely, without a doubt.

I mean, that's something worth celebrating.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I appreciate you taking all this time.

Well, thank you.

Thank you. Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson. Com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson. Com.