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I don't think you need any sort of third shooter conspiracy style thinking to get to the real problem here. I'm a big fan of conspiracy theories and love exploring them, but the facts on the ground are damning enough on their own. The secret service rebuffing multiple requests for additional security, ignoring multiple reports of the shooter, ignoring the call from the shooter's parents warning them about him, letting him get through the metal detector with a rangefinder, having a sniper aiming at him before he actually took the shot, ignoring the multiple people who are recorded on camera pointing him out, ignoring the police officer who went onto the roof and saw he had a gun... and worst of all, letting Trump go onto stage for ten minutes when they knew there was somebody with a sniper rifle taking aim at the stage!
The most straightforward conspiracy theory that is practically jumping out of the page and requires no mysterious phantom gunmen or bizarre codes of silence is that they wanted the shooter to succeed. They rebuffed Trump's requests for additional security and then allowed Crooks to take his shot before they did anything. This kind of conspiracy also doesn't require any extremely tortured codes of silence - nobody who isn't directly legally liable for what happened would know anything or need to keep their silence.
I can't see any argument against this other than incompetence, but claiming that this is incompetence not only beggars belief, it raises the immediate counterargument that every single person remotely involved needs to lose their job for gross misconduct. If they actually made all these mistakes earnestly I'm surprised they can put their shoes on in the morning and don't routinely shoot themselves in the head when looking down the barrel of their gun to make sure there's a bullet inside.
Most straightforward? I think it's about equal in complexity with a regular incompetence narrative. Like, who is "they"? Although apparently some requests were denied for extra support, but others were granted, so it's not so clear-cut. The Trump shooting also took place just after a big NATO event in Europe, where presumably the USSS needed a few more hands for. Also, there are variants that range wildly depending on who you think was in the loop, and all of that is resting on the background assumption that "they" even wanted the shooting to happen, which is pretty doubtful given the USSS's documented and historical pro-Republican leanings. If "they" refers only to top leadership, presumably political appointees, it's extremely doubtful they would have the means to directly and without a trail interfere in specific event planning. They are just too far up the chain of command.
No, the simplest explanation is that they attempted to stop the shooter but did not do so due to a combination of laziness/complacency (it's been several decades since a major attempt; it's hot outside; local police can handle it; someone else's problem), communication troubles (USSS over-delegating in the planning stage, bad day-of communication about the exact status, location, and threat level of the person of interest)
Okay, fine, second simplest. Again, who exactly is "they"? Like, if we say that one of the two counter-sniper teams deliberately withheld their fire until after the shooter fired, that's probably the simplest explanation, but even there we can see at least one less-damning explanation accompanies it, such as the team declining to fire due to rules of engagement/not knowing if he was armed/over-caution at creating a PR nightmare by shooting first. I'm hesitant to actually advance a theory given the paucity of the info we have to work with right now (new stuff is only coming out slowly recently, such as today we discovered per the FBI that the shooter fired 8 shots, or at least they found 8 casings) but I strongly disagree that the ingredients that we currently have lean more towards a conspiracy angle. Not that a conspiracy is impossible, on the contrary we absolutely need to keep such in mind.
And even beyond that, it's far from clear that a lot of heads in the USSS won't roll, but to fire someone in an agency like that practically requires that a formal investigation runs its course first. So that's still on the table.
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