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I could easily imagine a strategist thinking "we don't need someone on that roof, we've already got snipers on two other roofs covering it", without thinking ahead to the snipers' dilemma of "there's someone on that roof now - is it one of the local cops from the building below? did our own plans change? just how suspicious does that guy have to look before I kill him?"
But the trouble is, that's not what the "strategist" reported thinking; her official thoughts were "That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point. And so, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside," and the trouble with those thoughts are that they are the most obviously false excuses that I've ever heard, and yes I am including all the "gosh he just fell out of that window" stories about Russian politicians. Sometimes people really do fall out of windows; at this point the odds are a quadrillion-to-one but who knows? But if you say you're keeping your teams off of roofs where the slope is too high, after there have already been many photos published of your teams at the same event on roofs with higher slopes, then that is an outright lie.
I still suspect that this lie was an attempt to cover up incompetence, not an attempt to cover up conspiracy - conspiracies being pre-planned, you'd expect one to come up with a less ridiculous cover story! - but lying in the middle of the investigation is still the point at which the failure here crosses the line from dereliction of duty to betrayal of it.
The sloped roof thing sounds like confabulation to me. In the moment she judged that “I don’t know” would be a terrible response and so had to come up with something plausible, but came up with something terribly implausible.
Either that or that’s what a subordinate told her and she’s easily fooled.
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They planned for Trump to be dead, and their cover stories reflect that.
The cover-up is often the first, best evidence of the conspiracy.
if i set a barely out of highschool, no training guy up to plink cans off of a fence i dont think i would put all my chickens in the "yeah hes gonna hit one" basket. if dude was some ex marine maybe i could see the angle, but i dont think any type of spooky spies would make a plan that 100% rides on the efficacy of an untrained man to peg a target at medium range with a very short time window and essentially all the pressure you can imagine without being under fire.
I don't believe there was a deep state plot to kill Trump less imaginative than the CIA's innumerable attempts on Fidel Castro's life. But that is a bad argument simply because we don't know that this twenty year old kid was untrained- for all we know, he could have taken professional shooting lessons.
we know he wasnt trained by the millitary, fair enough though that there are more ways to get good at shooting.
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If he did, I'm pretty sure there would be a record and we'd find out? Usually people who shoot guns regularly aren't very quiet about the fact. Of course, might depend on how cooperative the parents are. We do know that he had gone to the range with his dad's AR a few times before.
I should further add that he clearly wasn't a pro. If he were always planning on using the roof, why would he have shown up near the metal detectors in the first place?
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If Trump were dead, the issue of how the fuck the kid was allowed to be on that roof would be absolutely, red-hot critical and way more than it is now. That there isn't a good cover story indicates that they're either incredibly, unbelievably stupid or that this was really unplanned.
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