Why There's No James Kallstrom To Manage This Crisis

The other day, I mentioned James Kallstrom, the FBI manager who quickly became the face of the investigation into the July 17, 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800. He represents a textbook execution of crisis management: at first, there were equal competing theories of the disaster, ranging from a terrorist bomb to a misfired US antiaircraft missile.

Kallstrom was able to establish himself as a credible central figure who made information available no matter which way it led, and by making himself the best single source, he was able to establish the consensus that the explosion was the result of combustible vapor in a fuel tank, ignited by an electrical short circuit. As a result, other competing theories remain at the fringe.

While TWA 800 was unquestionably a corporate crisis for TWA, which had already declared bankruptcy the year before, it was also a crisis, and probably a bigger one, for the FBI, whose credibility had been badly damaged by the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992 and the Waco massacre the following year.

Kallstrom's performace gave the FBI a brief respite from bad publicity, but it's woth pointing out that only ten days after the Juy 17 TWA 800 disaster, the Atlanta Olympic bombing took place on July 27, which led to the FBI wrongly identifying Richard Jewell, a security guard who actually alerted the crowd to the bomb, as the suspect. One Kallstrom clearly wasn't, and isn't, enough to rescue a corrupted FBI.

And as I've been saying, the one figure who's missing from the current crisis -- a crisis not just for the FBI and the Secret Service, but for the Biden administration, which is in lugubrious collapse, and the federal intelligence and law enforcement communities in general -- is someone of Kallstrom's character and integrity. As a result, we're getting piecemeal reports from leaks by frustrated agents lower down in the orgainizations, for instance:

Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, made his final search for pornography before the Pennsylvania rally shooting last weekend, according to a new report. A senior law enforcement official told the Daily Beast that the FBI found this… pic.twitter.com/LuFRIaSwJx

— josette caruso (@josettecaruso) July 20, 2024

No doubt in following days we'll see some of these claims retracted or contradicted, while other new ones will arise willy-nilly, precisely because the FBI currently has no James Kallstrom, when it badly needs one. Kallstrom had one factor working for him in addition to his clear aura of integrity: the FBI didn't have a dog in that fight. The competing theories involved terrorists, none of whom worked for the FBI, or possibly the US Navy, which might have had an antiaircraft missile fire by mistake from a nearby destroyer, but the Navy didn't work for the FBI, either.

In contrast, the agencies involved in the Butler assassination attempt, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Secret Service, are all closely associated organs of state security, and they have an incentive to cover for each other. The FBI could tolerate a Kallstrom, even if he had the potential to be a loose cannon, because no matter which way he got loose, it couldn't hurt the FBI, and on balance, whatever he came up with, it could only make the FBI look good.

In the Butler assassination attempt, no matter which way the investigation goes, the FBI is not going to look good, and if anything, the Secret Service and Homeland Security will only look worse. So we have Missouri Repulican Sen Hawley commenting on the secret briefings the FBI and Secret Service are providing to insiders:

I mean, let’s be honest, the Secret Service is out there and the FBI now doing these secret calls, these behind-the-scenes briefings, where, by the way, they don’t really answer questions. They limited — strictly limited the number of questions. The Secret Service director herself did not actually brief. She was present on the call, but didn’t do hardly any briefing.

When she did try to answer a question or two, it did not go well. She was not well-prepared. This needs to be done in public, bottom line. We need public hearings. We need a full and thorough investigation.

Neil, what we know about this is that there were 62 minutes, 62, between the time that the Secret Service identified the shooter as a person of interest, somebody acting suspiciously, and the time he started firing shots at the president.

I mean, what in the world is going on? We have got to find out.

At this point, the crisis is out of control. Biden has retreated to a Delaware basement and likely has little knowledge of what's going on. He could rescue the crisis, and potentially even his candidacy, by firing Secret Service Director Cheatle and appointing a Kallstrom-like figure to take over and make the facts public whichever way they fall -- because, realisically speaking, Joe doesn't have much of a future no matter what happens now.

Instead, we're starting to get the predictable second-gunman theories, and there's really no credible body of reliable information to say whether they're reasonable or not. The crisis is more than just the administration, it's going to metastisize into the deep state, and the only way to control it, which is the only way to control any crisis, is to have a strong honest-broker spokesman to provide credible information as soon as it's available. That's the one thing the deep state can't do.

Why Did Crooks's Parents Report Him Missing Before The Rally?

Fox News: Thomas Crooks’ parents were looking for him on Saturday in the hours leading up to the rally...Called law enforcement to indicate that he was missing...call happened on Saturday before Crooks later opened fire... pic.twitter.com/EblJ9am07L

— Rantingly.com (@rantinglydotcom) July 17, 2024

Almost anything we might surmise, at least so far, about the Trump assassination attempt last Saturday has to be heavily hedged. The organs of state security are saying very little, and what they say is contradictory and often retracted days after it's said. But subject to that caveat, one data point stands out for me via the tweet above, the report that Crooks's parents were looking for him and had gone so far as to report him missing before the Butler rally Saturday afternoon.

A few people responded in the thread below the post that this seems pretty unusual -- Thomas Matthew Crooks was 20 years old, and although he was a little strange, he wasn't the sort of at-risk person you'd report missing as soon as you lost track of him, as you might with a toddler or an elderly person with dementia. This can only suggest to me that his parents had serious reason to wonder what he was up to. Per the timeline of events at ABC News,

On the day of the assassination attempt, he asked if he could borrow his father's AR-15-style rifle, saying he planned to go to a shooting range, sources said. Because Crooks' father had previously let him use the gun for target shooting, he was not suspicious that his son was planning anything of concern.

Really? If this was totally routine, how come they got antsy when he wasn't back by mid-afternoon? Normally if a 20-year-old is a couple hours late getting home on a Saturday, that's not a biggie. He had a phone, after all, and his parents could simply have called him for an update. Something's hinky here, as though his parents had reason to be more worried than they've let on. One of Crooks's schoolmates, Vincent Taormina, offers potential insight:

According to him, Crooks belonged to a group of friends who were known for their reclusive behavior and irregular attendance at school. The group allegedly made threats to carry out a school shooting during their freshman year.

“Everybody was saying it was Thomas who made a threat, and it was that friend group,” Taormina recalled. “Everyone was mainly blaming the friend group, but a name that kept coming up was Thomas.”

Despite these allegations and his absence from school for a few days following the incident, no severe disciplinary action was taken against Crooks. Taormina stressed that Crooks wasn’t a victim of severe bullying and questioned how the signs of his erratic behavior were overlooked by those around him, including his parents, who were both counselors.

“The signs were there, and somebody definitely had to look out,” Taormina said. “Somebody, whether he was talking to somebody, or somebody either just didn’t realize and just overlooked it, somebody should have known because he was not a loner.”

It sounds like somebody needs to take a closer look at that incident. This may also provide context for the earlier report that he was asked not to join his high school rifle team:

“Our old coach was a stickler, he trained Navy marksmen, so he knew people. He knew when someone’s not the greatest person,” the ex-classmate explained.

“We noticed a few things Thomas said and how he interacted with other people … He said some things that were kind of concerning,” the classmate said.

“You know, obviously, we’re using guns in a school setting, so you need to be very careful in that regard.”

“He made some crass jokes that weren’t appropriate when there are firearms in the school setting,” they said, without elaborating on what exactly Crooks said.

It sounds like somebody needs to follow up here, too, because it sounds like there were real warning signs about this guy. But adding to that question is the fact that both Crooks's parents were mental health counselors:

Among the swirling unanswered questions about what drove a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man to very nearly kill the former and potentially future president last weekend, focus has turned to the parents of the would-be assassin — both of whom are licensed professional counselors, according to the Pennsylvania Social Work Board.

Matthew Brian Crooks and Mary Elizabeth Crooks, residents of Bethel Park, Penn., hold active licenses as professional social workers. Records from the Pennsylvania Licensing Verification Service indicate that both have been licensed since 2002, with Mary obtaining her license in February and Matthew in March of that year. Their licenses remain valid until February 2025.

It's hard to avoid thinking that they knew enough about Crooks suddenly to become very worried when he didn't come home from the rifle range. It also raises questions about what the school knew and why, according to reports, there were no disciplinary records of the freshman-year threats to shoot up the school

But this in turn provides little conclusive information on Crooks's precise motive or whether he acted alone. According to the most recent reports,

Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks had two cell phones and used three encrypted accounts overseas to communicate.

The FBI found Crooks’ second cell phone at his home with only 27 contacts, The Daily Mail reported.

Congressman Mike Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters that according to an FBI briefing, Crooks had multiple encrypted accounts and said more will come out Monday.

The caveat at the top of this post applies.

Tucker: "It's Not Crazy To Think That. . . It Wasn't Just A Lone Gunman"

Tucker says this at about 8:00 in the video above, but he simply isn't the only one. To think this might even be an inside job is, frankly, against ordinary charity, against ordinary decorum in publc discourse, and against ordinary restraint -- but people are starting to come out and say it. The FBI investigation, which Joe says will be "thorough and swift", so far has been neither. But every day the loose ends go untied leads to more speculation, and the deep state is simply digging a hole for itself when it allows people like Secret Service Director Cheatle to set the tone:

As the head of the agency, Cheatle said it's her responsibility to investigate what went wrong and make sure nothing like it can happen again.

"The buck stops with me," she said. "I am the director of the Secret Service, and I need to make sure that we are performing a review and that we are giving resources to our personnel as necessary."

Cheatle responded to reports that the suspect was seen and identified as potentially suspicious before he opened fire, saying that "a very short period of time" passed between then and the shooting.

Except that in his remarks Sunday afternoon, Joe strongly inplied that the FBI would be the lead agency investigating what happened: "Let the FBI do their job and their partner agencies do their job." Yet Director Cheatle seems to think her job is to investigate her own agency.

What's puzzling is that so many people with experience both in the Secret Service and working as snipers have been claiming something's hinky. For instance:

Dallas Alexander, who spent 14 years in a sniper team for the Canadian military doing close protection for major world leaders including the Canadian prime minister, suggested in a video Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who opened fire at the former president's rally Saturday night, may have had help from the inside.

'I'm very familiar with the layout of these types of things and what the job should be, and yesterday what happened,' he said.

'I have no doubts in my mind that the shooter had help from somewhere within an agency, an organization or the government.'

. . . 'So something happened, and I'm not pointing fingers at anyone. It's just too obvious that this guy had help getting there.

'So whether it's someone turned a blind eye or it was strategically planned, it had to be planned to a certain level, because events like that, security like that, it's not a small thing - and that is an obvious place to be.'

But although Director Cheatle claims "a very short period of time" passed between the time Crooks was spotted and the shooting began, that time span keeps expanding:

Channel 11′s Nicole Ford confirmed that Beaver County’s ESU team had eight members at the rally, including snipers and spotters. According to Ford’s sources, one of them noticed a suspicious man on a roof near the rally at 5:45 p.m., called it in and took a picture of the person. We have learned from our sources the person in that picture is Thomas Crooks. We’re told it’s not clear if Crooks had a gun with him at that point.

ccording to multiple sources, a law enforcement officer had also previously seen Crooks on the ground and called him in as a suspicious person with a picture prior to 5:45 p.m. Our sources tell us an officer checked the grounds for Crooks at that point, but did not see him where the first picture was taken.

It shouldn't be that difficult to get hold of the tapes from the command center that received the call and determine who said what to whom, or didn't. So far, we've heard nothing further. But beyond that is the problem that the Secret Service snipers on the roof above the Trump rally stage appear to have been aware of Crooks on the building roof before he shot:

Televised pictures of snipers behind the stage where Trump had begun to speak appeared to be looking in the direction of the sloped-roof building just as Trump began to speak.

Why they didn't fire before Crooks ever had a chance to aim at Trump let alone open fire also baffles [retired police niper Jim] Scanlon.

"You wonder if they saw the threat and hesitated," Scanlon said. "But the real failure comes with not having someone on that roof. From 130 yards away, you have to own that roof.

"I have never been on a detail where that possibly could have happened."

The report that Crooks was lurking around the site with a range finder adds yet another question to my own list. On one hand, the report that he had a gun club membership with a firing range for AR type rifles is one explanation for how he improved his marksmanship from the time he was a "comically" bad shot in high school -- but at a firing range, you don't need a range finder. This is the sort of stuff you learn at sniper school, not at the gun club.

Although the FBI was finally able to crack the advanced security on Crooks's phone, this story says it revealed nothing:

The Bethel Park High School graduate’s phone yielded little evidence, and even his laptop showed typical online activities, including an interest in gaming and coding, CNN said.

Matthew Crooks — who called the police sometime Saturday to report his son and his gun missing — and the shooter’s mother have cooperated with law enforcement, sources said.

How could Crooks's parents have been so clueless about his activities? On one hand, OK, he and his dad liked to shoot at the gun club, but you use range finders to hunt big game in the wilderness, or, of course, as a sniper. Did dad know anything about the range finder? Where did Crooks learn to use it, and from whom? How was he so well informed about where to scout a sniper's perch?

So far, these questions aren't being dealt with. Again, as someone who's worked in the crisis management and contingency planning field, I know that it's important to have a single, credible, and knowlegeable spokesman to serve as a point of media contact to provide just such answers. One of the best examples is James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI investigation into the explosion of TWA Flight 800 and also served as its chief spokesman.

Although the investigation was surrounded by controversy, and there are other continuing theories concerning the flight, Kallstrom is a good example of how any such event should be handled, and in his role, Kallstrom gained a reputation as a man of openness and integrity. The impression of integirty he projected at the time probably increased public confidence in the investigation's conclusion that the accident was neither a terrorist attack nor an errant missile.

So far, no figure equivalent to Kallstrom has emerged in the Butler investigation, which is yet another failure among the responding agencies. In fact, nobody at the FBI or the Secret Service seems yet to have recognized they have a crisis on their hands that is, if anything, more serious than TWA 800, and nobody has yet recognized that a Kallstrom (who passed away in 2021) is what they need. On the other hand, I get the feelinmg that a James Kallstrom would not be welcome in today's FBI.

“I’m Not Supposed To Be Here, I’m Supposed To Be Dead”

I said on Sunday that I've been thinking about the Jason Bourne series of neo-noir movie thrillers since I started this blog. Some recent comments from Trump about his assassination strike me as pertinent:

“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump told reporters from the New York Post and Washington Examiner aboard his plane to Wisconsin, where the Republican National Convention will kick off Monday.

Then regarding the Iwo Jima-style photo of him pumping his fist beneath the flag, he said,

“A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump said in the new interview. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”

I'm not sure if I like the word "iconic" -- it's overused, and it seems to mean more than it really means; I prefer "paradigmatic". But insofar as it refers to a kind of subliminal appeal to the psyche, I'm on board with it. As soon as I saw the quotes from the interview, I went back again to the Bourne thrillers. Why are they so appealing, and why do I find them so pertinent to the Trump story arc?

Let's go back to the fear that commentators have been expressing since well before the assassination attempt, like Frank Luntz, by no means the sharpest tool in the shed, last June 20:

Yes, Trump dropped a few points after being found guilty on 34 felony accounts, but remember this, that would have destroyed any candidate as recently as 10 years ago. And the fact that Donald Trump is still even with or in some cases leading Joe Biden after being found guilty of 34 felonies? Oh, my God, that is so significant.

And one more point, I'm watching the independent vote. I don't believe that they're swaying back and forth between Trump and Biden. I think that they decided that they hate both candidates. They hate both parties. And they're voting out of anger, out of desperation, out of resentment, that this is what our political system has gotten.

So, be very careful on how you analyze what goes on from now to the debates, to the election, because I think there could be a hidden anger vote that surprises everyone on Election Day.

He said the electorate is angry, and watch out. And he said it a week before the fateful Atlanta debate. Indeed, elite opinion has been voicing fear of MAGA retribution for months, per Reuters:

May 31 - Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.

After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president's own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.

This from NBC News on June 10:

Donald Trump wants to talk about revenge, and neither Sean Hannity nor Dr. Phil can stop him.

Both have tried.

. . . But for Trump, it’s all politics, and revenge may need to be meted out.

“Well, revenge does take time, I will say that,” Trump said during a Thursday interview with Dr. Phil. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”

This takes me back to a paradigmatic literary form, the early modern revenge play:

The revenge tragedy, or revenge play, is a dramatic genre in which the protagonist seeks revenge for an imagined or actual injury.[1] The term revenge tragedy was first introduced in 1900 by A. H. Thorndike to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras (circa 1580s to 1620s).

. . . While taken from Greek and Roman source material, many early Elizabethan plays with revenge themes had those themes exacerbated by the English translators. That is to say, the original stories were vengeance focused, but when rewritten and staged in England, they had an even greater focus on gruesome revenge.

In other words, they were popular because tastes demanded them:

Elizabethan audiences loved revenge tragedies, probably because they were used to watching horrifying scenes for entertainment, and popularity for this genre can be traced back to the 1580s. Although the earliest revenge tragedy we have access to The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd (c.1587), the Ur-Hamlet (also attributed to Kyd) was probably written about the same time and this play influenced Shakespeare’s Hamlet which, as we all know, is one of the most famous plays that has ever been written.

Revenge plays continued to be popular in the 1590s and early 1600s with some of the bloodiest revenge tragedies being produced between 1585 and 1595, including The Jew of Malta (c.1590) and Titus Andronicus (c.1592). They were written sporadically until the 1640s but they tapered off in the Caroline era as tastes changed.

So, what are current tastes as of the early 21st century? Let's look at one of the most popular film franchises of the past decade, John Wick:

The films have received critical acclaim, and have been considered one of the greatest action film series of all time. Many critics and publications consider the first film, as well as Chapter 4, as two of the greatest action films ever made. The films have earned a collective gross of more than $1 billion worldwide.

What's behind this?

John Wick embraces a quiet, sly silliness that borders on parody. It's a movie that knows what it is: bloody, visceral, and self-aware enough to wink at the audience from time to time with an expertly placed one-liner.

. . . Wick's prowess as a dealer of death is actually the best example of the franchise's tonal balance. He's legendary throughout the assassin community, an unstoppable Terminator-style figure that inspires awe as much as terrified resignation. The audience sees none of Wick's murderous history, however; it's all conveyed through dialogue that reads like a modern fairy tale or a superhero origin story. Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), Iosef's father, flat-out abandons Iosef to his fate because that boy's in deep sh*t. But he still seethes over Wick's mythos, especially how Wick once killed three men with a pencil. "Who the f*ck does that?" he demands.

The Bourne film franchise, a decade older although sequels extend into the John Wick period, has the same winking irony, but it adds a specific theme of death, resurrection, and revenge that isn't as prominent in the Wick series. The Treadstone agents who are dispatched to kill Bourne always believe they've succeeded until the controllers at Langley find they've been outsmarted again. This is something the audience loves -- the sort of deep-state elitists you can see every night on The PBS News Hour being skewered and advised to hire good criminal lawyers.

So in many ways, it seems like the Trump story arc -- at least the part covered by his political career -- may as well have been written by a team of Bourne screenwriters, Trump in many ways battles the same villains who run Treadstone and their political patrons. Cheated at the ballot box, slandered in the media, sued by neurotic old women, indicted by comically corrupt DAs and slimy special counsel, reported dead time after time, still returns like Jason Bourse to make monkeys of every one of them.

Trump gives them the same Jason Bourne thrill, winks at the public, and the public loves every minute of it. Why? The public, as even Frank Luntz has begun tardily to discern, is angry. They're angry at the 2020 election. They're angry they were cozened iinto voting for Joe. They're angry at the polite verities. He understands the public mood better than anyone -- there's even a bit of old-time Hollywood there, but not the Holywood we ave now, except maybe for Bourne and John Wick.

Crooks Was A Quiet, Nice Kid And A Bad Shot. What Happened?

Here's what we know so far about thomas Matthew Crooks, Trump's attempted assassin, via the BBC:

Thomas Crooks had not been carrying ID, so investigators used DNA and facial recognition technology to identify him, the FBI said.

. . . Crooks worked in a local nursing home kitchen just a short drive away from his home, the BBC understands.

Right away, this is a big difference from pretty much every successful or unsuccessful attempted assassin from John Wilkes Booth onward. They didn't want to hide their identities; they wanted their names out there. Most lived flamboyant and unstable lives without steady employment. Booth was a famous actor well known for his Confederate sympathies, and he made no attempt to conceal his identity or motives -- he leapt onto the stage at the Ford Theater after shooting Lincoln, after all.

Charles J Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield, had a disorganized career as a failed writer and political advocate, but his identity as a notorious fabulist and deadbeat was well known. He had a pattern throughout his life of feeling underappreciated for his contributions, and his assassination of Garfield was tied to this. On shooting Garfield, he immediately identified himself.

According to Wikipedia, President William McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz's identity as an anarchist agitator in the Cleveland, OH area was well known, to the point that other anarchists warned that he must be a provocateur. He was immediately restrained and identified after he shot McKinley with a revolver at close range, and he attempted to plead guilty at his subsequent trial.

Like both Guiteau and Czolgosz, Lee Harvey Oswald had a disorganized career in which he failed at numerous jobs, first as a US Marine, then as an emigrant to Russia, and again on returning to the US. Oswald had come to the CIA's attention prior to the Kennedy assassination when he contacted the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, and he was known to the FBI when he wrote a threatening note to their Dallas office. He was also well known to the Russian emigre community in Dallas.

John Hinckley Jr is best known for wanting to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in order to impress actress Jodie Foster, whom he'd previously stalked in an effort to establish a romantic relationship. He'd previously trailed President Jimmy Carter in an effort to assassinate him for the same reason. Clearly his intent was to gain fame, and he had no reason to conceal his identity. But even more than Guiteau, Czolgosz, and Oswald, he was unemployable, and at his trial, he was acquitted for insanity.

In contrast to all the others, Crooks had a steady employment history, kept a very low profile, and gave no prior indication that he was any sort of misfit. According to Newsweek:

Marcie Grimm, an administrator at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center where Crooks was a dietary aide, said in a statement obtained by Fox News politics reporter Aishah Hasnie on Sunday afternoon that the center became aware that Crooks was the gunman this morning.

"We are shocked and saddened to learn of his involvement as Thomas Matthew Crook performed his job without concern and his background check was clean," Grimm said.

Interviews with his schoolmates don't generally bear out any characterization as "bullied" or a "loner" -- but they do say he was a remarkably bad shot. According to the UK Telegraph:

Jameson Myers, who attended both elementary and high school with the suspect, said Crooks had attended trials for their school’s rifle team but had been asked not to return after “preseason”.

“He didn’t just not make the team, he was asked not to come back because how bad of a shot he was, it was considered like, dangerous,” Mr Myers told ABC News.

An anonymous member of the team, cited in the report by ABC, said Crooks “wasn’t really fit for the rifle team”.

They added: “He also shot terribly.”

Mr Myers said he was a “nice kid who never talked poorly of anyone”, adding: “I never have thought him capable of anything I’ve seen him do in the last few days.

This was the question I had in Sunday's post. While some experienced snipers have discounted the expertise needed to shoot somoeone in the head at 150 yards, it's plain from former sniper Rep Cory Mills's remarks to Jesse Watters that some level of serious training is required for that level of accuracy:

JESSE WATTERS, FOX NEWS: Let's bring in Florida Congressman and former U.S. Army sniper, Cory Mills. What kind of shot was this, Cory, from 130 yards?

REP. CORY MILLS (R-FL): Look, at the end of the day, this is a shot that your basic training boot camp soldier is requested to make within their nine-week period.

This is one of the easiest shots, and they train all the way out till 300 or 500.

Easy shot or no, this is something that takes up to nine weeks of serious training by a fairly well-qualified candidate to accomplish. Yet just a few years earlier in high school, he was considered such a comically bad shot that he was actually dangerous. The BBC link above says,

He had a membership at a local shooting club, the Clairton Sportsmen's Club, for at least a year.

According to its website, the club is based south of Pittsburgh and is “one of the premier shooting facilities in the tri-state area” of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. It has more than 2,000 members.

It has multiple gun ranges, including a high-power rifle facility with targets up to 171 metres away.

I had a membership like that when I was a kid. Yes, regular classes familiarized me with a rifle and ammunition, taught me the basics, and made me a slightly better shooter than my untrained peers in the ROTC, but it certainly didn't put me at a level that would be expected from military basic training, which is what experienced sniper Cory Mills acknowledges is the level Crooks needed almost to kill Trump. So precisely what did Crooks do to move from a "comically bad" shot to at least journeyman proficiency -- and why did he choose to do this?

It's hard to imagine that he didn't talk about this with anyone at the club, or indeed, that he didn't seek out someone to mentor him in this effort. So far, it doesn't look like the media has contacted anyone at the Clairton Sportsmen's Club, which is a puzzle.

But here's another question: what about his family? According to USA Today,

An FBI official said Sunday that the bureau believes the rifle, using 5.56 ammunition, was purchased legally by Crooks' father, Matthew Crooks. The official, on a call with reporters, said he did not know whether Crooks had permission to use the weapon.

The Crooks family’s digital footprint is small, but some of their few online tracks tie them to internet marketplaces that buy or sell guns.

. . . Matthew Crooks could not be reached in repeated phone calls Saturday and Sunday.

As I noted yesterday,

When reached by CNN late Saturday night, Crooks’ father, Matthew Crooks, said he was trying to figure out “what the hell is going on” but would “wait until I talk to law enforcement” before speaking about his son.

Nevertheless,

The FBI said it believes Crooks, who had bomb-making materials in the car he drove to the rally, acted alone. Investigators have found no threatening comments on social media accounts or ideological positions that could help explain what led him to target Trump[.]

So Crooks's dad seems to buy high powered rifles on line, makes one available to his son, and he's trying to figure out what the hell is going on? And according to ABC News,

FBI investigators, led by the Pittsburgh Field Office, have searched Crook's [sic] home in Bethel Park, a suburb of Pittsburgh. They've also searched his vehicle, which was at the scene of the shooting in Butler, the FBI said.

"Suspicious devices found at both locations have been rendered safe by bomb technicians and are being evaluated at the FBI Laboratory," the FBI said.

I don't understand. There were bomb making materials around the family home -- so Crooks hid them in his sock drawer, or what? How on earth, if dad bought the gun and the bomb materials were around the house, could the family not be involved? And how, unlike any other assassin in US history, could Crooks have maintained such a low profile, especially in an era when a high social profile is both desirable and so easy to achieve?

Guys there’s nothing strange going on here. The 20 year old shooter had never used social media or posted a single thing on the internet, ever, and his phone cannot be accessed because it has a password which our government’s best hackers cannot bypass. That’s all. Normal stuff.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 15, 2024

Garland and the FBI have to be taken off the investigation, although I'm sure this will happen soon enough, after the election if not before it.

Joe Sure Is Nervous

🚨 Joe Biden has once again REFUSED to take a single question from the media, and announces he’ll be having yet ANOTHER address to the nation tonight

This time, it’ll be from the Oval Office

Biden is DESPERATELY trying to score points here. pic.twitter.com/xyXnMJjpAp

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 14, 2024

I double checked the president's schedule, just to be sure I didn't get anything wrong: he addressed the nation from Rehoboth at 8:00 PM Saturday night, then again at 1:30 yesterday afternoon, and he spoke yet again at 8:00 PM last evening. At the afternoon remarks,

"We don't yet have any information about the motive of the shooter, we know who he is," the president said Sunday, without naming the suspect, who was identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper after opening fire.

"I urge everyone, everyone please, don't make assumptions about his motives or his affiliations," the president said. "Let the FBI do their job and their partner agencies do their job. I've instructed that this investigation be thorough and swift, and the investigators will have every resource they need to get this done."

The president said the independent security review of Saturday's rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, will assess "exactly what happened," and the results of that review will be made public.

The problem is, of course, that the suspicion that the shooter somehow intended to support the Biden campaign by taking out Trump is unavoidable. Attorney General Garland's extremely uncertain glance back at Joe at 0:14 as they exit the room is an indication that he's sweating as well -- Joe and Garland are acutely aware that Trump is going to win in November, and Garland's role will be scrutinized then, but meanwhile, nobody trusts either Garland or the FBI to conduct an impartial investigation.

To state the obvious, Garland and Wray must recuse themselves from the investigation into the attempted assassination of President Trump. There should be ZERO — ZERO — DC or FBI HQ involvement. It is patently absurd to think these people could be entrusted with this probe.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 14, 2024

Another problem has been reports that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service had consistently turned down requests from the Trump campaign for increased security, repeated after the Butler event by former agent Dan Bongino:

While the Secret Service has emphatically denied reports that Trump’s security detail asked for, and were denied, reinforcements, Bongino says he can prove otherwise. “I can tell you actual quotes,” he said on Sunday.

“I can tell you, and absolutely confirm, from the horse's mouth, from multiple people ... there have been repeated requests to increase the security footprint, around not just the residences of Donald Trump, but the body itself,” the former Secret Service agent said. “And they have been rebuffed.”

Rep Michael Walz, a member of the House Oversight Committee, made the same point and has indicated there will be briefings and hearings on the matter:

Unacceptable. We are determined get to the bottom of WHY former Trump officials denied security in the face of foreign threats. @HouseOversight https://t.co/3a8je2LDvC

— Rep. Mike Waltz (@michaelgwaltz) July 14, 2024

Apparently in response, Joe said this:

First, Mr. Trump, as a former president and nominee of the Republican Party already receives a heightened level of security, and I have been consistent in my direction to the Secret Service to provide him with every resource, capability, and protective measure necessary to ensure his continued safety.

Second, I’ve directed the head of the Secret Service to review all security measures for the — all security measures for the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to start tomorrow.

But these are just brave words, and there's nothing specific about any increase in Trump's protection going forward. According to a piece by Susan Crabtree at Real Clear Politics,

The Secret Service briefed reporters Sunday afternoon in Milwaukee about the status of security at the convention but declined to discuss any possible lapses before and during Trump’s Saturday rally. The spokeswoman expressed confidence in the agency’s security plan for the Republican convention, which begins today in Milwaukee.

Despite reports that the agency was strengthening some aspects of security after the attempted assassination against Trump, the spokeswoman said there are no changes to the original plan and noted that the agency believes it has the resources it needs to execute it.

Joe's third appearance over the weekend was Sunday evening's seven-minute national address from the Oval Office that said nothing new but was almost a self-parody of gaffes and malapropisms:

“In America, we resolve our differences at the Battle Box,” Biden could be heard saying at one point. “Now, that’s how we do it, at the Battle Box. Not with bullets.”

. . . “Tonight, I’m asking every American to recommit to make America so….make America….well, think about it, what’s made America so special,” Biden continued, appearing to stumble on trying to find a way to say, “make America Great Again” without using those words.

In fact, Joe, at a loss for words, is nevertheless talking up a storm -- three special appearances in front of the cameras in three days. Clearly something has made him deeply worried. Part of it must certainly be that even on the left, it's being acknowledged that the assassination attempt has put the election out of reach for Joe's campaign. According to The Guardian, for instance,

All of this could not come at a worse time for Biden. His campaign, I don’t need to tell you, is in complete disarray. Day after day there has been headline after headline about the president being too frail and feeble for office. . . . Now that contrast has been extraordinarily heightened. Trump is the guy who jumps straight up after being fired at by an assassin; Biden is the guy who stumbles up the stairs. If you’re an undecided voter swayed by which candidate looks more presidential, your mind just got made up.

But that can't be the whole explanation. Biden, as well as Garland at this point, must be lookng at what's going to come out of the investigations, and as Rep Cory Mills put it to Fox News yesterday, "Bottom line is that this is massive negligence to the point of me speculating on what was intentional and what wasn't".

They aren't nervous about the election. They're resigned to that by this point. They're nervous about what's going to come afterward. Just as one example, Garland has been refusing to provide the House Republicans with the tapes of Hur's interview with Joe, presumably on the basis that they would feed speculation about Joe's cognitive state and affect the election. But the election at this point is as good as over, and come January, Garland's Republican successor is going to have those tapes and a whole lot more, whatever Garland refuses to give up now.

They're really, really nervous, not because of the election, but because of what they know will come after it.

Thanks Be To God

One story that's been at the back of my mind since I started this blog is the Jason Bourne series of neo-noir movie thrillers, and as the details about Trump's attempted assassination have trickled out, I keep wondering how I might try to fit them into a Robert Ludlum style plot. Let me say from the start that this is pure speculation driven by an overactive literary imagination.

We have Joe, an elderly, shallow, and self-absorbed president who's been propped up by the organs of state security since his time as vice president -- and as best we can determine, his son, a dissipated drug addict, has been one of his closest advisors since that time as well.

Even while Trump was in office, the organs of state security coordinated an effort to impeach Trump on Joe's behalf; since Joe came into office, the same organs assisted the January 6 "insurrection" investigation and either conducted or assisted a series of criminal indictments and civil actions designed to thwart a Trump effort at reelection.

If I were a Robert Ludlum wannabe, I'd at least insert a strong implication that Joe's dissipated drug addict son was one of the inner circle who advised him to use this strategy -- and because it was a product of the son's mind, it backfired spectacularly, with each successive indictment and civil judgment driving Trump's polls higher in the year before the election.

Joe's inner circle, increasingly worried at this trend, devised a strategy in the spring to stop Trump's advance by taking advantage of European trips to commemorate D-Day and meet with the G7 to look presidential on the world stage. They would then capitalize on this by challenging Trump to a take-it-or-leave-it early debate on their rules with friendly moderators, which would have the effect of popping the Trump balloon and returning Joe to presidential status.

But even before the European trips, Trump's standing in the polls continued to be worrisome, and even before the debate, Joe's bizarre episodes on his European trips began seriously to undermine confidence in his cognitive abilities. The debate, instead of rescuing Joe, made Trump look all the more statesmanlike, and polls began to suggest new states were in play on the electoral map.

This prompted new efforts by Joe's advisors, among whom continued to be his dissipated drug addict son, to restore Joe's presidential prestige, which continued to backfire, leading to efforts by his former mentor, Barack Obama, to replace him on the ticket or as president with an unspecified substitute.

At this point we've reached real Robert Ludlum territory. The Hitchcock MacGuffin of the Bourne series is a CIA black operation called Treadstone, which uses brainwashed deep operatives to conduct strategic assassinations. One of these is Jason Bourne, and the action of the series involves Bourne's gradual recognition of his role in Treadstone and his attempt to recover his identity.

If I were a Robert Ludlum wannabe, I'd develop a plot whereby Joe's inner circle, influenced by his dissipated drug addict son, faced with a coup led by Obama and Pelosi, aims to reverse Joe's dilemma by assassinating Trump. At this point, Joe's strong, experienced, steady-handed leadership comes to the fore, and he calms and unifies a stunned nation, winning reelection by a landslide.

Now, to bring this off, the assassin must be someone at Treadstone level. He definitely has to be a good shot. He should have no paper trail -- he should be completely anonymous. Any possible connection to the organs of state security and Joe's dissipated drug addict son must be not just deniable but unthinkable.

This is where I can't help but have questions. We know far less at this stage about Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, the alleged assassin who shot at Trump but killed one other in Pennsylvania yesterday evening, than we learned at the time about Lee Harvey Oswald, Sara Jane Moore, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, or John Hinckley Jr in equivalent circumstances. It took hours for the FBI to identify Crooks at all, and only a few outlets are willing to report even the little we know:

Crooks' father, Matthew Crooks, 53, told CNN that he was trying to figure out what happened and would wait until he spoke to law enforcement before speaking about his son. Thomas Crooks graduated in 2022 from Bethel Park High School, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He received a $500 "star award" from the National Math and Science Initiative, according to the newspaper.

The problem here is that in the wake of the event, eyewitnesses were claiming that they saw Crooks climbing onto the roof with a gun, tried to notify law enforcement, but law enforcement paid no attention. So naturally, Crooks's father's first instinct is to talk everything over with law enforcement.

Now, I've worked in the crisis management-contingency planning field, and at least I know that under such circumstances, a family needs to designate a spokesperson, possibly a trusted relative or an attorney. I'm puzzled that Crooks's father seems to be so clueless -- someone instead should basically be saying as little as possible to anyone, and that definitely includes law enforcement.

The next question I have is how Crooks got to be such a good shot. He wasn't a perfect shot -- he only grazed Trump's ear -- but he was awfully good, close to Lee Harvey Oswald level. While in the US Marines,

. . . Oswald was tested for marksmanship with his rifle on five different exercises—from 200, 300 and 500 yards firing slowly and from 200 and 300 yards firing rapidly. Based on these results a Marine would be rated by a defined scoring system. . . . in both tests that most closely matched the conditions in the Kennedy assassination for rapid fire shooting Oswald scored above an expert level. Additionally on his third test from 500 yards firing slowly, Oswald scored 46 out of a possible 50: again shooting above an expert level.

Crooks's rooftop was 148 yards from Trump. In contrast, Sara Jane Moore and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme were unable to handle a firearm competently; their attempts to shoot Gerald Ford both failed. John Hinckley Jr shot Reagan with a handgun at close range. Crooks was far more capable with a firearm than any of the other failed assassins.

Although Crooks appears to have been a reclusive who lived with his mother, he had to have received fairly advanced firearms training somewhere. In addition, he lived some 40 miles away from the rally site -- he must have done some detailed planning, or have had planning done for him, to identify the layout of the scene and find an advantageous rooftop. What we know about Crooks doesn't fit with what he appears to have been able almost to bring off.

And then we have the problem of the Secret Service:

Steve Nottingham, a former SWAT commander in Long Beach, California, called Saturday’s shooting “a fundamental security failure.”

He has worked security details for visiting world leaders, including presidents, and now trains officers on how to respond to critical incidents. He pointed at likely breakdowns in the pre-event scouting and real-time monitoring of places a gunman could shoot from.

But one thing definitely worked -- at least, if I were a Robert Ludlum wannabe. Just an instant after Crooks got off his rounds, the Secret Service snipers knew exactly where to shoot, and they blew his head off. Crooks had no ID and had to be identified with DNA. Gee, if they'd caught him climbing onto the roof before he shot, they'd have been able to interrogate him, huh? Well, the crack Secret Service snipers neutralized him instead, just seconds after he shot.

They were all high fivin' each other, from what I read. I think we have a lot to learn. But I'm just a Robert Ludlum wannabe.