Trump Shooting Questions Keep Increasing

Answers Remain In Short Supply

Amazingly, it seems we know even less about the events surrounding Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump than we did at the time.

Each news story brings still more questions, and corporate media is doing an absolutely horrid job of providing answers.

Conspiracy theories always swirl around assassinations and assassination attempts, but this time the media seems almost complicit in feeding them.

Small wonder, then, that the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General has opened its own investigation into the shooting, to ascertain what happened and whether there was any violation of DHS protocols or procedures.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said Wednesday it has opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security for former President Donald Trump on the day a gunman tried to assassinate him at a Pennsylvania rally.

In a brief notice posted to the inspector general’s website, the agency said the objective of the probe is to “Evaluate the United States Secret Service’s (Secret Service) process for securing former President Trump’s July 13, 2024 campaign event.”

There was no date given for when the investigation was launched. The notice was among a long list of ongoing cases that the inspector general’s office is pursuing.

Given what has been reported already by the corporate media, we may safely presume the DHS IG has a lot that needs investigation!

With that in mind, let us consider but a few of the ongoing questions that keep arising about could-have-been-fatal shooting of Donald Trump.

First and foremost, how did someone carrying a rangefinder get past event security?

A Beaver County police officer warned a command center of seeing a man with a rangefinder before former president Donald Trump was shot on Saturday. The officer had also warned the man was scoping out the roof of the building he was stationed in as a counter-sniper, and that the man returned with a backpack before ultimately scaling the building.

Despite all of those warnings, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park was able to continue in his plan to become Trump’s would-be assassin.

A quick word on rangefinders: they are optical devices which may resemble ordinary binoculars or perhaps a handled video recorder, used, as the name suggests, for finding how far away a target it. They are not the most obtrusive devices in the world, but neither are they invisible, such as this Sig Sauer Model illustrates.

These devices have one purpose—determining distance. For hunters—and that includes snipers—they are quite the useful tool to have.

Which begs the question: how in the Nine Circles of Hell was anyone able to walk through a political event carrying one? There might be other things that would scream “active shooter” more loudly than a rangefinder, but not many.

Even more damning for the Secret Service is the fact that local law enforcement reported seeing the shooter seemingly reconnoitering the building used for the shooter’s perch up the chain of command and apparently nothing was done. The individual was not detained, was not questioned, was not approached in any way, based on what has been reported.

One of the snipers inside saw Thomas Matthew Crooks outside and looking up at the roof, observing the building and disappearing, a local law enforcement officer tells CBS News.

Crooks came back, sat down and looked at his phone. At that point, one of the snipers took a picture of him. Crooks took out a rangefinder and the sniper radioed to the command post. Crooks disappeared again and then came back a third time with a backpack. The snipers called in with information that he had a backpack and said he was walking towards the back of the building.

Officers believe that Crooks might have used an air conditioning unit to get on top of the roof.

One does not need to be a security expert with a background in law enforcement to understand that at an event such as Trump’s rally, anyone carrying a rangefinder would automatically be suspicious and should at a minimum be questioned. That is what should have happened. That is what did not happen.

According to Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle, there were snipers inside that building but not on the roof, for reasons of safety.

‘That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,' she told ABC News in an interview Tuesday.

'And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.'

However, this only begs the question of how the shooter got on the roof in the first place? A person crawling on a metal roof on a metal building would make a little bit of noise—and yet no one inside the building heard him? No one inside the building stepped outside to investigate what he was doing constantly hanging around with a range finder, and then a backback? The reporting indicates that local law enforcement lost track of him, but how much effort went into keeping track of him?

Why the snipers were inside the building at all is its own question. From a ground floor perspective, all of their lines of sight would have been of the crowd, making it difficult for them to engage any targets.

The notion that a sniper team could not safely deploy on the roof itself is simply absurd, as the buildings where Secret Service sniper teams were deployed also had sloping roofs. If the one roof was an unacceptable safety risk for the sniper teams then the other roofs should have been as well, and they obviously were not.

Thus we are left wondering why in the Nine Circles of Hell was a sniper team not on the roof used by the shooter? If even one police officer had been on that roof this shooting would not have happened. If even a reserve sheriff’s deputy with a set of binoculars and a radio had been on that roof this shooting would not have happened—that’s how little deterrence would have been needed to deny the shooter his perch.

Nor is that the end of the oddities being floated in corporate media without any sense of irony. In the midst of these quite reasonable questions about the state of security at the Trump rally (or the lack thereof), we have this reporting tidbit from CNN that the Secret Service had increased Trump’s protective detail because of intelligence indicating that Iran was plotting an attempt on Trump’s life.

US authorities obtained intelligence from a human source in recent weeks on a plot by Iran to try to assassinate Donald Trump, a development that led to the Secret Service increasing security around the former president, multiple people briefed on the matter told CNN.

Let that thought sink in: the level of security surrounding Donald Trump represented the Secret Service upping the protection around him for fear the Iranian mullahs might take him out.

It is not surprising that Iran would want to assassinate Donald Trump. That would be merely payback for the 2020 assassination of Iranian Quds commander Qassim Suleimani.

Getting The Trump Presidency All Wrong

So reasonable is it to believe Iran would want to assassinate Donald Trump that even without specific intelligence suggesting an actual threat, one could argue the Secret Service should have presumed such a threat.

That “increased” level of protection ignored the ideal sniper’s perch outside the even perimeter. That “increased” level of protection placed sniper’s in the building used by the shooter but not on the roof. That “increased” level of protection failed to respond to reports from local law enforcement personnel assisting with event security of a person with a rangefinder reconnoitering that ideal sniper’s perch.

Bear in mind this is what is being reported by the corporate media. These are the facts being presented to us as part of the corporate media narrative on the shooting.

Does any of this make sense? Does any of this speak to a Secret Service protective detail that was in any way prepared to do the job at hand?

When we turn our attention to the shooter, even more questions emerge.

At present, the only thing we are being told about the shooter’s political inclinations was that in 2016 he did not like politicians.

A former classmate of would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks says the 20-year-old gunman once mocked him over his support of former President Donald Trump and had a general disdain for mainstream politicians across the political aisle.

"I brought up the fact that I'm Hispanic and, you know, I'm for Trump. And he said, 'Well, you're Hispanic, so shouldn't you hate Trump?'" Vincent Taormina told Fox News Digital Tuesday. "No. He's great. He was a great president. He called me stupid – or insinuated that I was stupid."

It happened during a discussion in an English class at Bethel Park High School during the 2016 campaign, he said. Trump, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders were all still in the race.

Apparently, he made no mention of political leanings one way or another in the eight years since. Because people rarely like to talk about politics, I suppose!

We are told that he only thought he was taking the day off from work, and that he intended to be back at work the following day.

The shooter who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Saturday normally would have been at work that day, but he told his boss he needed that the day off because he had “something to do,” according to multiple law enforcement officials.

One can just picture the setting now: “Hey boss, can I have Saturday off? I need to shoot Donald Trump at a rally, but I’ll be back on Sunday for sure.”

What we are being told is approaching just that level of absurdity, for not only did the shooter have a rangefinder to aid in accuracy, but he had also thought to bring along a bullet proof vest, 100 rounds of ammunition, and two remotely controlled explosive devices—all safely stored in his car, which was nowhere near the building he selected for his perch.

After the shooting, multiple law enforcement sources said investigators found a bulletproof vest, three fully-loaded magazines, and two remote-controlled explosive devices in Crooks’ car.

Investigators are uncertain as to whether Crooks had a plan to use the body armor, nearly 100 rounds of additional ammunition from those loaded magazines, and two remote-controlled bombs, had he escaped after the shooting.

Presumably, he had been preparing quite the terroristic spree of violence, if the warnings put out by DHS and the FBI are at all accurate.

The agencies said that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year–old shooter in Saturday’s attack at the rally, had improvised explosive devices in his car as well as his home and ordered packages potentially containing hazardous material over the last several months.

This is the scenario we are being given: the shooter planned to take out Donald Trump, get off the roof, get back to his car, find some place to place a couple of remotely controlled bombs and presumably detonate them, and then be back at work the following day as if he’d just spent the day running errands.

Never mind questions about the shooter’s mental health. Reporting like this makes me question the corporate media reporters’ mental health.

How is it that the only person able to comment on the shooter’s political leanings only could recount a classroom incident from eight years ago? How is it that he was a complete cipher since that time? How is it that no one at his job could offer up anything to say about his state of mind?

Are we really supposed to believe that he approached this act of murderous violence as if it were an ordinary errand, something done without a moment’s thought? Even sociopathic killers are not that casual about their violent impulses.

Indeed, but for the fact that police were able to identify the shooter after killing him, would we even think to look at this individual? Had he made good his escape from the scene, would anyone have thought him a prime suspect for such a deed?

Yet how were police able to identify him? We are told by his DNA.

Thomas Crooks had not been carrying ID, so investigators used DNA and facial recognition technology to identify him, the FBI said.

His DNA? Consumer DNA tests require multiple weeks to return their results. There are some paternity test kits that offer “same day” results for a fee.

Yet all DNA testing is fundamentally a question of matching. In order to identify the shooter by his DNA police would have already possessed an exemplar of either his or a relative’s DNA with the name attached. How did the police come to have that matching DNA exemplar? Corporate media has not told us, and corporate media is not asking that question for us.

That question is being asked….just not by corporate media.

Which raises the question of how we know the shooter’s identity at all. We know what has been reported in corporate media. Yet alongside the cipher that is Thomas Matthews Crooks there has been a reporting in the fringes of alt media that a “Maxwell Yearick” was the actual shooter.

Maxwell Yearick is the shooter who shot Trump, despite what the media or the FBI is trying to project. Former President Donald Trump was injured in a shooting incident at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13, 2024.

Maxwell Yearick, 30, of Perry South, who pleaded guilty in connection with a police altercation during an anti-Trump protest almost in 2016, was then sentenced to three to 12 months in the Allegheny County Jail.

Yearick returned to the United States in April 2024, after fighting for the Ukrainian army. His facial features and ears are an exact match to the photos of the Shooter’s body released by the most honest and truthful ‘FBI’.

Those same fringe sources earlier identified the shooter as “Mark Violets”, a radical with strong ties to several Antifa organizations.

Investigations into Violets’ background reveal deep ties to Antifa, a decentralized, left-wing political movement known for its militant opposition to fascism and far-right ideologies.

Going by these sources, so did “Maxwell Yearick”.

Left unexplained is how either of these names were connected to the Trump shooting.

Judging by some of the Twitter/X traffic, the “Maxwell Yearick” identification at some point involves Roger Stone.

So significant has been the social media traffic on “Maxwell Yearick” that Reuters, PolitiFact, CheckYourFact, and German media outlet DW.com all felt compelled to issue “fact checks” rebutting the claim.

However, a key part of that rebuttal is that photos of Yearick presumably do not resemble those of Thomas Matthew Crooks.

One of the posts sharing the photo states, “The shooter, initially misidentified, has now been confirmed as Maxwell Yearick, a 30-year-old left-wing extremist from Perry South. Yearick, who voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, had a history of violent protests and clashes with law enforcement.”

However, the image does not resemble Crooks.

However, a few posters on Twitter/X have voiced the opinion that Maxwell Yearick’s photos show more in common with photos of the dead shooter than do Thomas Crooks.

The provenance on the Maxwell Yearick identification is not as robust as that for Thomas Crooks. While we should question how authorities had Crooks’ DNA so quickly, claims of DNA and biometric identification are grounded in accepted means of forensically identifying individuals. Absent clear detail to impeach the Crooks identification, at present that has to be regarded as the more reliable.

Yet we cannot completely ignore that Maxwell Yearick identification, simply because neither law enforcement nor corporate media have learned anything substantive about Thomas Crooks. Several days after the shooting and he remains a near-total cipher. We know little about his motives, his plans, his associates, or his movements leading up to the shooting. What we do know only leads to more questions such as are detailed here.

We must at least remark upon the Maxwell Yearick identification merely to reiterate that corporate media has so far told us next to nothing about the shooter. Corporate media has not told us much of anything at all about this shooting, except to illustrate all the ways in which the Secret Service and local law enforcement completely failed to protect Donald Trump.

Indeed, that is the one thing we do know. We know that Donald Trump is alive solely by the Grace of God, because neither his Secret Service detail nor local law enforcement did anything to prevent the shooting.

We know that Corey Comperatore is dead because the Secret Service and local law enforcement did nothing to prevent this shooting.

We know that David Dutch and James Copenhaver were seriously injured because the Secret Service and local law enforcement did nothing to prevent this shooting.

That is all we know. We are four days and counting after the shooting, and fundamentall all we know with any certainty is that there was a shooting and that the people charged with making sure it didn’t happen completely failed in their mission.

A presidential candidate came within half an inch of being killed. One of his rally attendees was killed, and two others seriously injured. And for all the media attention focused on this story, after four days that is all we know.

After four days, that’s just not a lot. And that’s frustrating.