Since Saturday I’ve been focused on news of the near assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Most of the coverage has been disappointing, as the prevailing legacy media narrative is that Trump was nearly killed by a lone gunman who lived with his parents and was barely old enough to vote. I had planned on staying out of the fray. These days anyone accused of not accepting the prevailing legacy media narrative is immediately dismissed as a “right wing conspiracy theorist” and a host of other put downs.
Never mind there have been loads of incidents where the media, particularly the New York Times, was quick to smear legacy media narrative deniers as racist or sexist and the blasphemous media skeptics were subsequently proven correct. Speculation about the Covid virus escaping from a lab in Wuhan, China, was one such example. New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli suggested only racists could think such thoughts.
This morning, I opted to read an email I received from American Thinker, a conservative website with a prehistoric design that publishes commentaries of various quality and polish. Among the mix was this reporting and analysis by Andrea Widburg, which far and away runs circles around everything I’ve read about the assassination attempt on Trump. Widburg toiled as a litigator for three decades in San Francisco and her LinkedIn profile says she now works from home providing legal research and writing services for other lawyers and law firms.
Widburg’s litigation skills are abundantly clear and so are her reporting talents. She’s amassed considerable publicly available information and judiciously avoids reckless speculation.
“I am not accusing anyone in the Secret Service (or in the Biden government as a whole) of deliberately trying to get Donald Trump killed,” Widburg concludes. “However, I am saying that the Secret Service’s performance was completely inadequate in many instances, that it appears that the obsession with DEI was a factor in this inadequacy, and that it’s possible that an underlying animus toward Donald Trump created an environment in which Trump’s protection was dysfunctional, both in terms of staffing and attitude.”
The most charitable explanation for the near killing of Trump is that the Secret Service is a woefully incompetent agency overseen by a leader more focused on diversity and increasing the percentage of women in the organization’s ranks. It’s been known for months that Secret Service insiders were concerned about the capabilities and loyalty of some of their colleagues.
Bloomberg White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs tweeted May 9 that a petition was circulating inside the agency raising concerns about “inadequate training,” a “double standard in disciplinary actions,” and a vulnerability to “potential insider threats” imposing risks to national security.
In response, Secret Service Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi told Fox News that, “It’s evident that this anonymous petitioner does not embody the U.S. Secret Service’s values of service over self.”
Two weeks after Jacobs’ tweet, Kimberly Cheatle, who was appointed in September 2022 by the Biden Administration to oversee the Secret Service, appeared on CBS News as part of a segment the network aired featuring the rigorous training Secret Service agents must undergo. Of course, CBS made no mention of the petition Bloomberg reported alleging inadequate training and other serious concerns. Instead, CBS featured Cheatle boasting that her goal was to increase diversity with a target of woman comprising 30 percent of the Secret Service’s workforce by 2030.
Recall that CBS earlier this year fired veteran journalist Catherine Herridge, an investigative reporter specializing in national security issues who pursued some critical stories about Biden, including a special prosecutor’s findings questioning the president’s mental acuity, the Biden family corruption scandal, and the Hunter Biden laptop. In its interview with Cheatle, CBS reported that the Secret Service in 2022 had a 48% turnover rate but didn’t ask her to explain why or how she would stem the alarming degree of departures.
Notably, before her appointment as Director of the U.S. Secret Service, Cheatle was Director of Global Security at PepsiCo, a company that deftly woke washes its decidedly evil and harmful business.
Videos circulating on the internet appear to lend credence to the petition warning that Secret Service Agents were improperly trained.
Widburg in her American Thinker analysis notes that it’s intuitive and obvious that the Secret Service must secure every rooftop or high floor within range of a politician that could serve as a potential assassin platform.
That wasn’t done in Butler, Pennsylvania where Trump was shot addressing a rally. The Secret Service not only failed to secure a rooftop within easy shooting distance of Trump, the BBC featured an on-air interview with an eyewitness who said he saw a man with a rifle crawling on top of a building and alerted Secret Service agents, but they ignored his warnings.
The interview is “must see TV,” if you haven’t already watched it. The video left me in such a state of disbelief I’ve watched it a half dozen times.
Widburg focuses solely on the inadequacies of the Secret Service, but how little is known about Thomas Matthew Crooks, Trump’s attempted assassin, is alarming. Crooks was only 20 years old and lived with his parents, both licensed counselors, in the middle-class Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, which is about an hour’s drive from Butler where Trump was holding a rally. The New York Times reported that Crooks recently graduated from the Community College of Allegheny County and was employed as a dietary aide at a nursing home.
Crooks wasn’t known for having radical political views and never appeared on the radar screens of law enforcement authorities. Yet he drove an hour to Butler and seemingly knew that a roof would be easily accessible for him to climb and have a clear shot at Trump. According to the New York Times, Crooks fired eight shots before a Secret Service sniper wasted him.
Dallas Alexander, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran and part of the sniper team with the world’s longest confirmed kill, said he’s certain Crooks didn’t act alone.
“I have no doubts in my mind that the shooter had help from somewhere within an agency, an organization, or the government,” Alexander posted on his Instagram account. If true, that would lend credence to Bloomberg’s report in May that Secret Service insiders were worried the agency was vulnerable to “potential insider threats” posing national security risks.
The New York Post reported that Matthew Murphy, a retired Green Beret and an elite sniper, also doesn’t believe that “some 20-year-old kid that looks like he played Dungeons and Dragons in his mom’s basement” acted alone in trying to kill Trump.
“You’re gonna tell me that that kid went through all those levels of security, somehow got into the closest building to the president and accessed the rooftop, then had the time to unpack his rifle, lay down and then take five to eight well-aimed shots at the president before he was decisively engaged?” Murphy asked.
“There’s absolutely no way possible that kid was able to get up there and take those shots at the president without a lot of internal help,” he said.
Meanwhile, one must be awfully naive to believe President Biden was sincere Sunday night in promoting unity and urging Americans to tone down their rhetoric. Biden has repeatedly declared Trump public enemy No. 1 and as recently as a week ago said that Democrats should put Trump in a “bullseye.”
Less than 24 hours after Biden’s appeal for less inflammatory rhetoric, here’s a portion of the statement his campaign chair issued after Trump announced J.D. Vance would be his running mate.
The Biden Administration and its legacy media enablers repeatedly maintain they are the true guardians of democracy, but on Saturday America’s democratic process was attacked and a presidential candidate with a formidable chance of winning nearly killed. Joe Biden’s administration ultimately was responsible for the security debacle and the threat to American democracy he claims to protect.
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