Public discussion of the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt on President Trump seems to be going nowhere, with the press asking all the wrong questions and taking the existing media narrative for granted despite having no evidence to corroborate it, even after repeated corrections and enough false statements from official sources that they should have no credibility left.
But they do.
Accused would-be assassin Thomas Crooks came in a van, Crooks came in a car, Crooks came on a bike with a giant ladder. Wait, the giant ladder was Secret Service's and he had a smaller one. Wait, Secret Service climbed up on a pallet and Crooks on an A/C box, and he pulled himself up with the plumbing. Wait, the plumbing was electrical conduit, made of PVC, which cannot support a man's weight.
But he climbed it anyway, because “Spa Guy” flew a drone overhead and saw fingerprints, days later, still visible after FBI scrubbed the crime scene. So the prints were there before the FBI “cleaned up” but definitely not before Crooks, and we know this because Spa Guy filmed it after the FBI left. Got it. Apparently his fingertips scraped down the wall in such a way that they drew the shapes of fingers and nearly a hand, as he desperately clutched at the PVC pipe and pulled his entire body onto the roof without breaking it.
They might as well tell us he grabbed the wall itself, like Spiderman.
The FBI reported that a nearby business caught him climbing the building on their security cam and Jeff Ostroff narrowed it down to an ice cream shop on the opposite side, which must've filmed his profile rise over the roof. Crooks climbed the building at 6:05 p.m. and made a beeline to his shooting position as if he'd been there before, clearing multiple roofs in under a minute.
But the problem arises, when you go back to Spa Guy's footage, that there are trees on the other side of that building and unlike in Ostroff's Google Maps pictures, the Butler rally was in July when the trees are full of leaves. Further, a cursory search shows it's highly unusual for a security camera to range beyond 150 feet, and the King Cone cameras are around 580 feet from Crooks' fingerprints.
Why would an ice cream shop use such a long-range camera that can see through trees? Perhaps if a thief in the night ran out into the AGR with an ice cream, they could help police track him down (if the Secret Service don't get involved).
The point is, we can't believe the FBI that Crooks crossed where they said he crossed, since what they're saying is impossible.
Let's see the footage, FBI. And let's see some pictures of Crooks that aren't years old. Until we do, we should stop letting the government tell us any ugly kid in a gray shirt is him: with no current picture of the supposed shooter, they can pick anyone and say that's what Crooks looks like now, and that appears to be what's happening.
The newest tape of Crooks at the fair shows him with a beard, unlike the photo taken by Greg Nicol from the snipers' nest or Crooks' post-mortem mugshot on the roof --none of which look like the others, either. Did Crooks shave at the fair? Did he also have facial surgery there? Did he also take weight loss pills?
It would make sense that bearded “Crooks” is a different man than beardless Crooks, rather than a fast shaver, because they were seen in two different places at the same time.
But ignoring these discrepancies, the only way we know that it's Crooks is by his clothes, and there were multiple law enforcement personnel in the same outfit.
So not only did Crooks know the AGR like the back of his hand, he knew exactly how plain clothes police would dress and made them think he was one of them. Then he ran directly to the perfect location, with the line of sight to Hercules 2 (snipers on the north barn) obstructed by trees and to Hercules 1 (south barn) by the roof crown, and rattled off eight shots faster than Jerry Miculek (with accuracy).
Why would someone who could do that be kicked off the shooting team?
Alternately, and easier to believe, the two young men caught on film in demolition ranch t-shirts (one skinny with an underbite and no beard, the other the reverse) were law enforcement like the others who wore that uniform. Maybe one of them was Crooks, who knows? But there's no evidence of that. There's a figure on the roof we're told is him, who was filmed during the first shot in the TMZ footage and his rifle showed no recoil, nor did his body move. He doesn't have the gun when he's running on the roof, just a backpack they say it was in. I did the math as a rifle would be a tight fit. It sounds impractical.
We don't know if that running man fired a shot or if he's the same man lying down. If he was an officer in the “uniform of the day,” which sounds less unlikely than this “Crooks” story, it would be easy to duck in or out of the open windows on the second floor of the sniper's nest, and be right on location to shoot.
Assuming the shots came from there.