Well, This Whole Thing Is Hinky, After All

Jennifer Van Laar at Red State broke the initial story, at least on a national platform, that there may have been an as-yet-undisclosed medical event, not just a positive COVID test, that caused Joe's sudden premature departure from his Las Vegas campaign tour on July 17. But this is just one of the whole series of events between the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, PA, and Joe's July 21 announcement on Twitter from his Delaware basement that he was withdrawing from the November race. The juxtaposition seems at minimum incongruous.

The most extensive analysis of that chain is on Seyumour Hersh's Substack behind a quasi-paywall, which I've so far been unable to bypass, even though it's theoretically possible. However, Van Laar now provides a pretty good summary in this piece at Red State. In her interpretation of Hersh's story, there are many unanswered questions:

According to Hersh's latest reporting the Democrat inner circle plan was to keep Joe's impairment covered up, apparently until he was re-elected. . . . What was the end game, then? For Biden to be re-elected and for whomever is running the country currently to continue? Or for Biden to be re-elected and for Harris to take over when the decline was too big to deny? That doesn't really make sense, since they could have had Harris invoke the 25th Amendment and take over at any point - unless they didn't think Kamala could get elected on her own.

. . . Until thnat fateful debate.

But the additional question for me is that the debate was on June 27, and whatever may have been said behind the scenes, the official line from Obama on down was that it was just a "bad night", and in fact, as commentators have been saying ever since, it didn't affect Biden's standing in the polls. Although Pelosi in particular had begun to make noises about Joe deciding to "do the right thing", there was no public sense of urgency -- until after the assassination attempt, which had nothing to do with Joe. That bothers me. Van Laar continues,

Hersh went through the days leading up to Biden dropping out, beginning with Monday, July 15, when Biden flew to Nevada. On the 16th he spoke to the NAACP and was successful in quashing some of the "He must drop out!" talk. On the 17th he was scheduled to give a speech to a Latino group, but after a meet-and-greet at a Mexican restaurant that speech was canceled, Biden's motorcade sped toward the airport - and the President wasn't seen publicly for a week.

. . . The official story was that Biden had tested positive for COVID and had some symptoms, so was rushing back to Delaware to isolate. But everyone saw the writing on the wall, and the events in Las Vegas set off a cascade of events culminating just a few days later in Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 campaign. It didn't help that Biden was unreachable[.]

But Van Laar makes it clear that while there had been some pressure for Joe to drop out, things didn't become urgent until the weekend of July 13, in other words, after the assassination attempt:

Congressional leaders were involved in pressuring Biden for at least a week before Obama was "deeply" involved, and Politico reported that Pelosi had an arm-twisting meeting with the Bidens over the weekend of July 13 imploring him to drop out.

But Obama didn't start the final, decisive push until Joe was back in his Rehoboth basement. This confirms for me yet again that the June 27 debate, while problematic, wasn't a decisive factor for the lizard people -- they could continue to discount or excuse it as they'd been doing all along for earlier episodes like his wandering away toward the skydivers at the G7 meeting or freezing at the Hollywood fundraiser. Bad as all this was, it apparently didn't get urgent until the weekend of July 13.

As homicide detectives say, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Hersh's version, reported widely, is that Obama called Joe the following Sunday morning, July 21, and threatened to have Kamala invoke the 25th Amendment. Apparently Joe had been unreachable since July 17, and maybe this was the soonest Obama could get hold of him. But what was the efficient cause of the call? An unspecified medical episode in Las Vegas, something to do with the business in Butler, or some combination of those factors?

Now we get to the FBI. The official statement from the FBI's deputy director as of yesterday is,

Thus far, though absolutely nothing has been ruled out, the investigation has not identified a motive nor any co-conspirators or others with advance knowledge.

Nevertheless, in the same statemeent, the FBI deputy director said,

Something just very recently uncovered is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with the shooter in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe. There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature.

While the investigative team is still working to verify this account to determine if it did belong to the shooter, we believe it important to note, particularly given the general absence of information to date reflecting on the shooter’s potential motive.

Yeah, and while the FBI doesn't know for sure, maybe the security guard Richard Jewell planted the Atlanta Olympic bomb. Deputy Director Abbate's version was immediately contradicted by the platform on which Crooks is thbought to have posted:

BREAKING: The FBI is now claiming that the Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks had an unspecified "social media account" in 2019/2020 (when he was 14/15 years old) that posted "anti-immigrant and anti-semitic" content.

This is not consistent with Gab's understanding of the… pic.twitter.com/UPPJSAkPqp

— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) July 30, 2024

Elon Musk replied,

It sure looks like the FBI leadership engaged in perjury … https://t.co/tU1M7fs9lj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2024

As homicide detectives say, a lie is as good as a confession. If I had to come up with a working theory of the case, I would say that if the July 13 Butler attempt had been successful, it would have left the November race wide open. Trump hadn't selected Vance as his running mate yet, and Joe was still the presumptive Democrat nominee. It would have been possible -- maybe a stretch, but just possible, with Trump out of the picture -- to present Joe as the stable alternative to a Republican nomination process thrown into chaos, especially absent the medical emergency on July 17 that supposedly did change the picture for Joe.

The weekend before the Rpuublican convention was in fact both the perfect and the last opportumity for the insiders to pull this off -- but as far as I can see, that particular window is now shut, with Vance as Trump's backup and Joe out of the running, and now people are starting to ask questions. As I said on July 21, the unexpected set of circumstances of the prior week has left the lizard people without a Plan B.

I don't think we've heard the end of this, and it's at least strange that so many days after the event, we've been told so little.