FBI’s Speedy Solution: Trump Shooting? Just Another Lone Gunman!

by Jeff Childers

Say what you want about the FBI, but they work fast. The Trump Assassination investigation is almost done! Bloomberg ran a story late yesterday headlined, “FBI Says Trump Rally Shooter Appears to Have Acted Alone.” So there you go. Quit whining, it was just another lone gunman scenario. America apparently has lone gunmen like coyotes have fleas.

Here’s what the FBI has come up with so far: nothing. Remember Die Hard?

HANS GRUBER: You asked for miracles, Theo? I give you the F-B-I.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been unable to penetrate the wily defenses on Thomas Matthew Crooks’s cell phone. It keeps asking for a passcode! The feds have no idea how Thomas, 20, got hold of his father’s gun. They don’t even know who to ask. Baffled agents are scratching their heads over what motive could possibly have led Thomas to create an elaborate and successful plan to penetrate the Secret Service’s defenses at Saturday’s rally.

FBI investigators also remain clueless as to why Thomas had a rudimentary bomb in his car trunk, or what it was intended for, if Thomas knew he was taking a one-way trip to the terminated assassins’ club? Why bring the bomb? No reason!

For additional reassurance, the article quoted FBI Director Chris Wray and DOJ chief Merrick “Grandma” Garland, neither of whom said anything useful. This take may be a little hard on the FBI, since they’ve only had one day —Sunday!— to work on the case, except for the fact that they  already concluded Thomas worked alone, which makes them fair game for merciless mocking.

 
Anyway. The FBI may be satisfied, but Coffee and Covid still has questions.

The first unanswered question, and the weirdest news so far coming out of the Trump Shooting, was this New York Times headline, which I screenshot so you wouldn’t think I was joking:

 
That’s right. The same Orwellian corporation that is trying to buy up everything in America that the government doesn’t already own —are you using that extra chair? We’ll take that, too. Well, that mega-corporation is bizarrely and unexpectedly linked to the same man who just tried to murder President Trump. The Times’ story explained that the shooter, while still an 18-year-old high school student, appeared briefly as an extra in a Blackrock commercial.

The Times reported that Blackrock pulled the ad, promised to cooperate with law enforcement, and said it will turn over any unpublished video that might still be available, just as you’d hope a responsible corporation would do. So that’s good, nothing to see here.

Now, I’m only asking. But what kind of connections does someone need to score a fun, easy, lucrative temporary job working as an extra in a Blackrock commercial? How did it all come together? How much did the shooter get paid? Was there a contract? Who signed it? The article didn’t say, and the New York Times doesn’t care.

It’s probably nothing. But it’s also sort of like finding out fifty years later that the JFK shooter was on the CIA’s payroll three weeks before the assassination. It’s one of those things that makes you go huh?

The second unanswered question arose from a passel of articles ironically intended to resolve a different question. The Hill ran the story headlined, “Local police officer reportedly encountered alleged Trump shooter seconds before shots fired.” They want us to know that law enforcement did notice the shooter. But wait. There’s more.

 
Neither this article, nor any others about the same story, identified the anonymous “local police officer” who, investigating bystander reports, climbed up the ladder to see for himself. According to reports, Thomas the Shooter pointed his gun at the officer, who apparently then experienced a rapid unscheduled dismount. Or maybe he just climbed back down, which makes much less sense, given that was the end of the officer’s involvement, as far as they tell us.

Either way, quickly, so fast it all happened before the officer could do anything, the story says after threatening the laddered officer, in the span of a few seconds, Thomas the Shooter returned to his ‘post,’ coolly aimed his rifle (not sniper gear), calculated the wind speed factors, and immediately took his shots, showing the kind of clear thinking under pressure normally attributed to combat veterans and not unemployed drifters. Then Secret Service agents blew Thomas’ brains out, and that was that.

But wait. How did that giant ladder get there? The article was 100% silent on that score. Are they telling us this unemployed 20-year-old brought a long gun and a giant ladder in his small car and then carried them from the parking lot to the building without anyone noticing? Or did Thomas perhaps set up his ladder ahead of time, like the day before the event? If so, how did security miss a stray ladder leaning against a building that also happened to be the closest elevated vantage to the rally?

If the young, unemployed drifter’s planning was sufficiently sophisticated that he placed the ladder ahead of time, how did he know security would miss the ladder, on which the entire plan depended? And how did he know the roof would remain unguarded? These seem like critical unanswered questions contradicting the FBI’s conclusion that Thomas “appears to have acted alone.”

But what do I know? I’m just a lawyer, not an FBI assassination investigator. But as a lawyer, it’s way too early to say he acted alone.

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