The three top stories of the week are the Crowdstrike failure that interrupted internet service to millions; the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump, and the ongoing Democratic coup against President Biden. You may recall that Crowdstrike was the source of the lie that Russians hacked the DNC files, so I have no sympathy for them. Apparently, there is little legal recourse for the victims of this outage, but I can imagine many institutions and businesses will be reconsidering continuing this service.

As for the attempted assassination, it bears a resemblance to the Crowdstrike outage in that it underscores the growing incompetence, lack of resilience, and poor preparation that marks so much of modern life here. Many have linked to a wonderful must-watch video of Ugandan kids reenacting the event. To me, the most amazing thing is that within 24 hours of the event, these kids in apparently a poor neighborhood in Africa, saw what happened, reenacted it with Trump as the hero, and then it was videoed, posted on Tik Tok, and seen around the world without filtering. The ability to instantly see, video, and transmit around the globe is amazing and underscores how rapidly the news business is changing. (It’s another reason why X, the largest free speech platform in the world, is so successful.) 

As for the performance of the Secret Service, the number of shooters and the backstory about the attempted assassin itself, there are many questions that require further investigation and analysis. For one thing, there are reports that the Service was shorthanded because it had to assign its best agents to another event that day by Jill Biden in Pittsburgh. Was this a deliberate attempt to draw off agents? One commentator thinks it was suspiciously so.

Here’s… the White House press release that announced Jill Biden’s trip to Pittsburgh on the evening of Saturday, July 13th, to address the Italian Sons and Daughters of America dinner. Note the date is July 10th, and the time is 11:58 a.m. Pre-credentialed media had but two days to sign up to accompany her. Judging by the lack of pool reports, it appears she traveled without a press contingent. Her speech was brief and personal -- relating more to her Italian heritage than stumping for votes. It was about 10 minutes in duration, and she spoke ever so briefly about Joe and his accomplishments -- only three sentences [snip]

There’s no indication she stayed for the dinner. Probably she took some photos, gave her speech, and then left. Her total time on the ground was maybe an hour and a half. Why? Why such a short, apolitical trip, to that area at that time?

Why indeed.

The earliest public announcement I’ve seen of Former President Trump’s now infamous rally at the Butler Farm Show Grounds, roughly 40 miles from Pittsburgh, was the evening of July 3rd, ten days before the attempted assassination in the evening of July 13th.

Ten days is a reasonable amount of time for a presidential candidate to alert the public of his plans to address them in person. Trump’s campaign clearly was acting reasonably with their preparations for his appearance in Butler. 

The Secret Service contingent that was assigned to the Butler event failed to properly secure the perimeter, allowed the shooter to surveil the area with a drone, approach the grounds with a range finder, rifle, and ladder, and mount the roof of a building which provided the clearest shot of Trump. Kimberly Cheatle, the head of the Secret Service, preposterously defended not covering the roof the shooter used because it was sloped and dangerous, but it was practically flat and the agency’s snipers shot him from a roof with a much greater slope. The administration’s refusal to date to answer legitimate inquiries adds to suspicion.

Conspiracy or Miscommunication and Conflicting Recollections?

And then there’s the question of whether this was a lone shooter or not. As usual the FBI, before a serious investigation, announced it was a lone assassin. (Compare to the JFK assassination where 50 years later 61 percent of Americans discount the single-bullet explanation and believe the killing was part of a conspiracy.) But without more, we have no reason to credit an agency that in recent years does not warrant it. The first account made it seem as though the Secret Service sniper shot Crooks immediately after he shot Trump, but then how to explain the murder of one spectator and the wounding of two others? Apparently, there were more shots than just Crooks and the sniper’s single shots.

Here's a simulation which shows that Trump and David Dutch were hit in Crooks’ first three-shot volley and Corey Comperatore and James Copenhaver were struck by Crooks’ follow-up volley a few seconds later.  

On the other hand, as Stephen Bryen details, the theory of a second shooter is gaining momentum:

Crooks’ home environment is another issue and is mostly being swept under the rug.  Crooks lived at home with his parents, both of whom are licensed social workers.  My eldest daughter also is a licensed and experienced social worker.  Having been an army officer and a specialist in family problems and PTSD, she can spot a person under trauma from ten thousand yards away.  Could the parents not know there was a problem with the younger Crooks?  It isn't possible for at least two reasons.

The first related to the delivery of bomb-making materials to their home, with packages marked Hazardous Materials.  Since Crooks worked during the day, the packages were probably picked up by one of the parents.  Were they curious?  [snip] The second has to do with the alleged call by Crook's father to the police allegedly worrying there was a problem.  This was a kid who apparently went to a gun range fairly regularly, and going on Saturday would not be out of the ordinary.  Maybe they could not reach him by cellphone, although we do not know that.  What problem were they worried about? [snip]

But the argument for a second shooter is based on eyewitness accounts that say that the shots came from two separate directions (and we are not talking about the shot or shots fired by the Secret Service snipers).  Many have attempted to account for the shots, and there is video of at least two bullets striking a railing on the edge of the stands on Mr. Trump's left.  Witnesses say that the angle is wrong for those shots to have come from Crooks' AR-15. A key candidate for an alternative location is the water tower, which is much further away than Crook's rooftop location.

We have no report on how many shell casings were found on the roof or how many rounds Crooks actually fired.  His body was found with three bullet magazines nearby (presumably fully loaded, though we don't know).  These clips are presumed to be 30-round magazines, which are legal and common in Pennsylvania. (A few states limit ammunition magazines to 10 rounds. Crooks reportedly bought 50 rounds of ammunition the morning of the shooting from a gun supply store, but that would not fill up three magazines plus the one already in his weapon.)  We have no information if spent bullets were found and collected by the FBI or law enforcement.  Ballistic information could prove to be important in determining if only one weapon was used.

There is audio of the attempted assassination. Initial analysis says there were eight shots, plus potentially a ninth which could be the round that killed Crooks.  There is less definitive information that up to 15 rounds were involved, but the audio is somewhat inconclusive and cries out for laboratory analysis.

The water tower could have been a firing point for a second shooter.

The FBI has one of the best forensic laboratories in the world in Quantico, Virginia.  It is state of the art, or even beyond.  Has the evidence been taken there?  Has the chain of custody been properly maintained?

Given the utter sloppiness and cumulative incompetence of the Secret Service and local law enforcement assets in Butler, we don't know how the aftermath of the shooting was managed, if it was.  For example, there is no evidence that eyewitnesses were systematically interviewed, or even if any of them were queried.  Likewise, the area was cleared and no effort was made to ask people to remain for questioning.  Nor is there any evidence of systematic evidence gathering.

The "rush to judgement" to borrow Mark Lane's famous book title, is incredibly appalling and indicative of a cover-up.

Worse still, Mr. Trump's life is still in danger and there is no reason to expect that someone won't try to kill him again.

The Democrats’ Attempted Coup against Biden

Having for some time by dirty tricks, lies and lawfare tried to undermine Trump when he was president and tie him up to prevent his run for a second term, the Democrats now have turned their efforts to getting Biden to drop out of the race. No one better explains the Democrats’ Stalinist machinations than Victor Davis Hanson: 

Never in modern presidential history has a political party staged a veritable inside coup to remove their current president from his ongoing candidacy for his party’s nomination and reelection. Stranger still, the very elites and grandees, who now are using every imaginable means of deposing Biden as their nominee, are the very public voices that just weeks ago insisted that candidate Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle.” And they damned any who thought otherwise! They are also the identical operators whose machinations ensured that there would not be an open Democratic primary. They demonized the few on the Left who weakly challenged Biden in the primaries. Yet now they will select a replacement candidate who likely never received a single primary vote. Note further: Biden’s impending forced abdication is not because he is non compos mentis. Rather, the inside move is due to Biden’s disastrous debate exposure that confirmed his dementia could no longer be disguised by a conspiracy of leftist politicos and media. But far more importantly, the impetus for removal is driven by the admission that the cognitively [challenged] Biden is headed for a climactic November defeat. Were Biden now ahead in the polls by five points, these same backroom machinists would be insisting that he was still Pericles. Yet now Biden is being un-personed and Trotskyized, as we prepare the new groupthink narrative of his likely surrogate -- a soon to be praised eloquent, mellifluous, and articulate Cicero-Harris. That Biden will likely remain as president until January 20, 2025, should remind the country the Left is more worried about its own next four-year continuance in power than the fate of the country that now admittedly will be guided in the next six months by a president judged unfit by his own supporters to run for the very office that he will still keep holding. Further irony arises when those who, as supposedly guardians of democratic norms, pontificated to the country the last nine years about the Trump-Hitlerian threat to democracy. Yet now they so cavalierly work overtime on how: a) to pull off the removal of their candidate from the November ballot on grounds of senility, b) but not the removal of the same president from office (their own fate is more precious than our collective fate as a nation), c) while trying to select, rather than elect, a replacement candidate, d) without ever offering any explanation, much less an apology, how a Democrat president from January 20, 2021, was daily declared vibrant, dynamic, and engaged but suddenly one day after June 27, 2024, was remanufactured as not? [snip] So, to make sense of what these self-appointed and sanctimonious protectors of democracy are trying to pull off demands an Orwellian vocabulary -- memory hole, newspeak, unperson, and groupthink. Yet there is one more irony. Very soon, those who welcomed the protests of summer 2020 radicals, and exempted the rioting and violence, and then again did nothing in 2024 as mobs tore apart campuses and shut down public facilities, will host a Chicago convention -- where those very same liberated forces may wreak havoc on the outside, while their backroom progenitors, with threats, money, and the media, will wreak havoc on democracy on the inside.

Watching all this, I keep thinking of Yiddish expressions “Gornish Helfin (Nothing will help) and Az der soyne falt, tor men zich nit freyen, ober me heybt  im nit oyf! (When your enemy falls, you shouldn’t gloat, but you don’t have to pick him up either!) Or maybe, since both Trump and Vance have Scottish ancestry I should look to Robert Burns: “The best laid schemes o’Mice an’Men Gang aft agley.” Agley their schemes seem to be going.