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Not a large post, but a brief update on something I've been keeping an eye on. It looks like the Washington Post got their hands on some transcripts of at least police comms the day of the Trump attempted assassination here and, these are the three most relevant pieces of info you should know:
The first report that the guy had a gun was not until 30 seconds before shots broke out. Local police were tracking him down in the last few minutes, even mobilizing their own QRF towards the building, and apparently some felt until very late in the game confident they would nab him. He was spotted on the actual roof only about 3 minutes before (two minutes after first scaling the roof) and the sheriff inside the USSS post was told 1 to 2 minutes before about someone on the roof, though where on the roof was unclear to almost everyone. That the roof guy was not a cop was communicated however. Photos of the suspect had first started circulating 25 minutes before, but bad cell service means if many of these went through or not is unclear, at least some pics did not (these circulated photos include the 4chan pic, meaning it could have been any of the dozen or more cops in the loop who leaked it). So the most crucial period of time, that last 30 seconds, did not see the local post contacting the USSS at all, instead they were mobilizing the local QRF towards the building at the time shots broke out.
The local police and Secret Service command posts were different, far away from each other (900 feet or so and twice the distance of the rally site itself, and separated by a pond to boot), and with no direct communication line (they were using ad hoc cell phone calls, for example local cops would call a sheriff in the USSS post, which happened at least 3 times in 30 minutes). It’s unclear how quickly info disseminated to the USSS but it appears to involve at least four layers in the telephone game. With this in mind, we must ask ourselves how quickly did info make it down the chain in those 30 seconds? Apparently, the answer was not fast enough: the USSS was not notified that the shooter had a gun by the time shots broke out! We had seem some claims that the Secret Service perhaps did not open fire on purpose despite knowing about the threat, and those claims are much weaker now.
What was the local PD counter sniper team in the second floor of the building doing? Apparently at least one person was very mobile looking out several of the windows and moving internally, trying to track where the shooter went. He was responsible for the initial rangefinder call 20 minutes before and possibly the picture too. Most of their attention was in the opposite direction. The new timeline only has the shooter on the roof for about three minutes and identifies where he scaled the roof which was kind of in the middle of the complex - local PD including some taken away from traffic duties was tracking him around the outside, and where he scaled was on the opposite side as the window where you could lean out and see the final shooting position that was featured in Eli Crane’s video. The local sniper second floor's initial setup direction was a third direction away from the rest of the building entirely. I wonder how many people were on this floor and if any considered getting out on the roof themselves, I don’t think the article says, but it sounds like there was likely only the single guy! It's unclear what actions they were taking in the final two minutes.
I had initially said this was more likely a combination of bad inter-service communication, plus poor planning, plus maybe some local cop incompetence and a chance of ROE type concerns, and so far the info lines up pretty consistently with this. In other words, organizational issues, not malice, so far seem to be the overriding factors. Note we do not yet have or know many details about the Secret Service comms side of the story, AFAIK.
The comms failure is, to use a popular parlance, "weird." If the Secret Service is in charge of security for an event, and commonly enlists local LEO as support for their mission, it's baffling to me that it's common practice to silo local LEO's ability to communicate with the SS. If it's not common practice, then it's doubly "weird" that it happened to coincide with here with so many other seemingly obvious breeches in protocol.
In security, in the event of a breach, speed of communication between different layers of the responding force is crucial, and this system seems to have been designed to prevent responder communication from the bottom to the top.
It does call to mind the comical depiction of the FBI in the movie Die Hard, which suggests a derisive elitist attitude from the Feds toward the locals, but it's shocking to see it play out in real life like this.
Tropes often have a basis in real life, IMO. Much of the classic media we've grown up with was created by people who had the real-life experience to back up their storytelling, so it should figure that the trope of "fed-vs-non-fed tension" has very real roots in reality.
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While we're discussing this: any news on motives? I'm amazed that no one has doxxed the guy on Reddit/chan/whatever by now, no friends have come forward.
That would've been before the Gab posts.
As for his general internet use
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It’s definitely odd given his age. You would expect at least some internet profiles somewhere to have popped up by now.
Based on all of the public information, my speculation is that he was simply a classic school shooter type (wanting attention, to remind society of his existence) that decided to target a politician instead.
That's my current theory too based on at least the fact he also made at least some Biden searches too, but it's complicated by the fact that it's at least possible that he was actually self-aware that he had a decent chance of being caught (despite his remote bomb distraction idea to get away after the shooting) and thus would have watched his own searches and online activity at least in the near term lead-up accordingly. My degree of confidence is still quite low however.
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Unironically, even though this incident was bungled pretty badly, national politicians are much harder targets than elementary schools, and I'd much prefer suicide-by-countersniper to a bunch of dead kids. This does assume that those counter snipers are willing and actually manage to shoot first, though. And maybe that's asking too much.
Agree that we’d be way better off as a society if these psychopaths decided to target politicians or shady businessmen or something.
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I've read somewhere he had a Gab account he used to troll people with (of all things), but I couldn't confirm this to any certainty.
The angle where he got rejected from the shooting team is the closest I've seen to a coherent motive, i.e.: "I'll show them.", but I may be biased by the irony of him missing such an easy target.
Thing is, even with historical perspective, would be regicides surprisingly often lack coherent motives. Especially those that act alone. So while it is certain that law enforcement now suppresses political manifestoes and the like, it's still quite possible he's just a random nut who got lucky.
The posts Andrew Torba shared don't seem particularly charged. I have no idea if that's a selection of his posts or all of them, but those aren't the comments of deranged 20 year old leftist shouting online. Without further context those read pretty close to the median internet argument. We can go read far less reasoned comments on reddit all day. For all we know those comments are evidence he liked to pass time as a devil's advocate. This forum has seen a few.
If Torba provided that selection to demonstrate Crooks as frothing leftist I don't buy the framing. Which makes his actions more puzzling. He probably wasn't a committed online ideologue, so why do what he did? More evidence towards CIA LSD mind control device from beyond the Ice Wall.
He did not. He provided it to rebut the FBIs claims that Crooks was a frothing rightist.
Yeah, specifically the pattern of events was that Paul Abbate, the FBI deputy director, testified to the Judiciary Committee that:
The interesting bit from Torba is not so much that the content of the linked social media account is particularly extremist, but that the EDR less than a week before thought the account was specifically "associated with" the shooter. Allegedly, neither account has been confirmed as the attempted assassins, nor to my knowledge has the FBI said that the Gab account has since been found not to be the shooter's (or proven to be that of an associate of the shooter).
But it makes it quite hard to argue that the federal investigation representative in charge of this wasn't lying before Congress in order to present a more politically useful scenario.
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According to Andrew Torba of Gab he posted on Gab arguing in favor of Biden/Democrats on various issues such as migration and mandates.
https://caldronpool.com/fbi-forced-to-backtrack-gab-account-suggests-trump-shooter-was-biden-supporter/
And here is Elon Musk responding to it: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1818340245139554333
The FBI claims he had another social media account with over 700 posts including the anti-semitic and anti-immigrant stuff. There's no independent confirmation or refutation of that one, so you can believe it or not.
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I've seen a lot of "confirming" he was a groyper, but I generally disbelieve that anything so convenient can happen to the worst people in the world.
Did you mean groyper?
No.
Internecine elite warfare between the lizard people who rule us and the fish people who do their dirty deeds
Stay woke, friend
I always knew there was something fishy about this whole story…
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Thanks. Not a word I use frequently.
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The stakes are such that anything but hard evidence for his motives is suspect.
We may never actually know.
At least this isn't as conspicuously glowing as the Las Vegas shooting.
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So incompetence , facilitated by maliciously denying Trump additional SS resources. As I understand there weren't many trained SS protection detail agents because of some Jill Biden event.
And let's not forget the constant Hitler comparisons in media.
Malicious? Ehhh, maybe? but probably not? We have definitely seen reporting that in general, resources were denied to Trump, and we also know that the USSS just as a policy (probably a stupid one, but it is what it is) simply does not provide sitting-president level support to nominees. Around the time of the event, there was a Jill Biden event, also an upcoming Joe Biden Austin event, but also crucially there were some resources working on the upcoming RNC convention too, and some agents had just come back from the NATO thing in Europe as well. WaPo for example specifically said that "multiple counter-sniper teams and hundreds of agents" were already sent to the convention! They also always have a fair amount of people moving around, but the core details don't seem to change all that much, so for example it's somewhat doubtful that Jill Biden specifically reduced resources for Trump, that doesn't seem to be how their scheduling works according to what I've read (though at the end of the day it is at least a little bit a zero-sum game, but that's just intrinsic to the process).
And in fact, both people in Trump's orbit as well as the Secret Service were, around this same time, apparently tussling to a high and loud degree about how big the security perimeter should be at the RNC, so it's even theoretically possible (I'm not sure how highly to weight this) that his own team's requests for more protection would have reduced, or even did reduce, protection at the Butler event. One thing we know for sure however is that at least for the Butler event specifically, there were no denials. (Still, as I think Jim Jordan put it, "Maybe they got sick of asking"). Examples of denied requests mostly related to wanting more metal detectors and related resources (potentially impactful in this case), and rarely but still occasionally counter-sniper teams, though most of these requests seem to have been centered around bigger, more public/natural appearances like in the middle of a city or at a football game or the like.
One thing I should have mentioned is the updated timeline answers one key question, which was "Why wasn't Trump delayed on taking the stage?" Trump had already been speaking for about a minute when the shooter climbed the roof. So I think most people would think the shooter's status wasn't quite on the level of delaying the event, and it's always a tough call to interrupt Trump mid-speech.
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The comms situation sounds more and more like an absolute shitshow. Podunk or small-time operators underestimating how much impact even a small surge crowd can have on cell reliability is a pretty common sort of mistake to make -- even local femtocells/microcells often struggle badly, and you aren't going to get them in place for a one-off -- but the flip side is that it's so common that the USSS should not only consider it in planning but also have some (if jank) solution, here.
That doesn't necessarily mean indoctrinating every police officer near a USSS operation into Slack (b/c there's a few CJIS-compat other tools), but ... 900 feet is the sort of distance you can close with 150 USD in 2.4ghz links for data, and almost any radio for voice. Frequency deconflict (and since Butler County does seem to have used encryption, getting signed into the right trunk) is not trivial, but it's a minutes thing, not an hours one. There are arguments against introducing new technology in mission-critical situations, but 'train a handful of people to use new comms' is literally someone in that room's job.
All of that said, that this a) supposedly including transcripts and b) almost all of the local police leaves me more than a little skeptical its origin came from a pure-hearted interest in solving problems. There's been a lot of effort on the feds side to not-so-subtly point at the local cops, and this sorta release, especially with the pointed gaps for any comms to the USSS depot, would fit in that category very readily. Some of this is genuinely bad comm discipline -- the report's trying to highlight the Sheetz misdirection, but "we got him" is the sort of thing that should never be going over a voice channel in this sort of circumstance -- but they're the sort of problems that pop up when your swiss cheese model is down to the last bit of wax paper.
I don't know how much to trust Grassley (politician, mouth moving), but he's been claiming that the local police had a meeting that morning at 9AM, including specifically passing radios to sniper teams, which is what I'd expect, and that the feds didn't attend.
Plus, cell phone jammers aren't hard to get, I understand, and would be a pretty obvious part of any plot that was more sophisticated than "one guy with a boomstick." I can hardly believe that SS was comfortable relying on "let's swap cell numbers," that seems crazy to me.
I'm pretty certain that the USSS are used to a threat model of "one guy with a boomstick". The vast majority of people who shoot at a President are uncomplicatedly crazy.
Absolutely true, but imho they ought to be prepared for something more sophisticated than that. (It's been reported, for instance, that Iran is interested in retaliating against Trump for bombing Soleimani.)
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The new USSS director seems to have yo-yo'd a bit between taking the blame directly and shifting it to local PD, and at least in public has stressed that the USSS is taking ownership. Of course at the end of the day, "we trusted local police" is not a sufficient answer for the Secret Service, it's their responsibility, and ultimately their plan too and on some level they obviously realize that. I'd also say that it's likely a little bit easier for local police comms to leak than Secret Service stuff just due to classification type stuff and more people in the loop. It will probably make it into the final report, due in December (at least the House one will be). It's fair to suspect some PR angle. Such as, he's saying things like they'll fire someone if they find a "policy violation", but that's totally missing the point!! We get that you're short on manpower but at least one head needs to roll, there's no way the blame is that distributed. However, based on the info we have, even with its bias, it current seems that the most direct, practical kind of blame is indeed on the police, even if that responsibility ultimately lands upwards in the chain. Final judgement remains pending in most meaningful ways.
Personally I don't think the USSS have truly respected how different the MO and incentives of a county police department are from their own. And of course, Secret Service can't run purely on trust either. They need to be more intimately involved with local PD if they are going to rely that heavily on their manpower. Really, they need to take a leaf out of the book of orgs like the NTSB and NASA about how to handle both investigations as well as tighten up their way of doing things to avoid common mistakes. There's a reason both pilots and the actual military are so anal about saying things a certain way and using phrases and comms efficiently. But there's always the human question -- why fix it if it aint broke? They hadn't had such an immediate threat for a while, maybe even decades depending on the severity of the cutoff, so someone being a squeaky wheel about how the make communication better might not be listened to.
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