Police body cam footage from July 13th was released late last week to little response, and has largely remained under the radar in the days since.

This is not surprising, since the last thing the legacy media wants is for people to focus on this historic instance in which President Trump was confronted face-to-face by death and answered like a roaring lion.

There’s a lot that can be learned from this footage. There has been plenty of speculation since the shooting, some of it sound, some of it absolutely off the wall. Footage of this kind – unavailable in previous such incidents – serves to give us a fly-on-the-wall perspective into events, showing us exactly what went on, what was said, what the mood was like, how people actually behaved, and so on. This is evidence that cannot be ignored when constructing theories and interpretations of what occurred.

Contrast this with the Kennedy assassination, in which events that went unrecorded but which unquestionably occurred are routinely ignored in the plethora of conspiracy theories surrounding the shooting. One example involves Jack Ruby. How many people are aware that Lee Oswald delayed leaving the Dallas Jail in order to spruce up his appearance after learning that the media would be present? If he’d been taken out ten minutes earlier, Ruby would simply not have been around to shoot him. (BTW, a useful rule of thumb when judging accounts of the JFK assassination involves what version of Oswald's name is used. Oswald used “Lee” and nothing else. “Harvey” was considered goofy even in the early 60s, and he never used it. Writers using “Lee Harvey” can safely be dismissed.)

Back to Butler: what does the new footage tell us? Simply put, it tells us that chaos was queen on July 13th. Following the shooting, there is absolutely no sign of planning, procedure, or even simple competence among the law enforcement personnel present. Evidently, fate simply grabbed a bucketful of dull-normals and sprinkled them over the rally site. For the first few minutes, cops from several forces are milling around next to the building used by the shooter asking questions and getting no rational answers. There is some speculation on how to clamber up to the roof with no action taken.

Eventually, somebody shows up with a telescoping ladder, which, it becomes immediately evident, nobody knows how to use. Instead of pulling it out to full length, one of the cops braces it atop a very unstable plastic cabinet against the wall of the building, apparently intending to use it as a stepladder. Needless to say, this doesn’t work out, and the cops abandon the ladder in favor of milling around further. It’s around this point that the cop wearing the camera announces that he’d mentioned this very building to the Secret Service. He repeats this several times.

At 4:55 a Secret Service agent appears, dressed in the traditional dark suit and wraparounds. After a few questions which avail him nothing, he notices the ladder still resting atop the flimsy cabinet. His gaze fixes on that ladder. He studies it closely. He thinks deeply about it. At last, it dawns on him what he is contemplating, and seizing the ladder, he heads for an overhang at the entrance of the building which is several feet lower than the roofline, then extends the ladder and climbs up onto the roof.

You might conclude that the cops would immediately follow him up. You would be mistaken. In fact, some time passes before a couple of SWAT officers make the climb. Almost simultaneously, yet another ladder shows up. Bravo. (This second ladder was taken by many to be the one used by Crooks. Not the case.)

So how long did it take for somebody to get up on that roof? Eighteen minutes, going by the time stamp.

What this footage demonstrates is that nobody knew what the hell was going on and nobody could figure anything out. To quote one cop at 14:50: “This is a f*ckup.” This, to my mind kills any notion of a conspiracy. This crew couldn’t successfully conspire to jaywalk across an empty street. While it’s possible there were ultra intelligent, high-performing individuals actually executing a carefully conceived plan somewhere behind the scenes, it’s unlikely. As the man said, “stupidity is always astonishing, no matter how many times you deal with it.” The thing about halfwits is their incredible ability to come up with novel methods of screwing up. The more of them you have present, the less likely it is that any well-planned conspiracy would ever come off. And there were dozens in Butler that afternoon.

Another point involves a different release of footage, this from a police cruiser’s dashcam.

There was a lot of excited commentary over the fact that it actually showed shooter Thomas Crook atop the roof. But one thing that has been missed is that, while pulling into the parking lot, the cruiser passes the water tower that many speculate was used by another shooter. But… there’s yet another police cruiser parked right beneath that tower. So no second shooter there. Somebody, it seems was thinking that day.

It's likely we’ll see further such releases over the upcoming days. When they come, it would be wise if somebody produced a well-edited overall video so that we can get a panoramic view of what happened at Butler and when.

Image: Public Domain