Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:49 - The Trump Assassination Plots, with Ken Silva

Episode Date: June 7, 2026

Ken Silva joins Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton to discuss his new book on the Trump assassination plots, especially the Butler, Pennsylvania attempt and the later Palm Beach attempt. Discussion focuses on security failures at Butler, including equipment problems, communication gaps, missed warnings about Thomas Crooks, and questions about an unidentified ATF agent and the timing of the shooting. Silva also discussed Crooks’ background, the limited release of FBI and congressional records, and his view that the official account does not fully match the available notes and testimony. The second half of the conversation covers Ryan Routh’s attempt on Trump in Florida, and the interview closes with Silva saying the alleged Iranian plots involving Asif Merchant and Farhad Shakeri do not appear to be direct, operational government attacks. Chapters: 0:36 Welcome & Intro to the Trump Assassination Plots 3:36 Butler Security Failures 6:01 The Mystery ATF Agent 8:40 Crooks’ Timeline at Butler 14:22 Sniper Delay Under Fire 20:43 The Ear Shot Debate 27:00 Autopsy and Toxicology Doubts 30:30 Who Was Thomas Crooks? 38:59 Silence from Trump 42:54 Ryan Ruth’s Radical Path 48:35 A Tip-Off in Florida 56:34 Online Grooming and Plotters 1:00:11 Iran Plot Claims Examined 1:02:28 Mershant’s Set-Up Sting 1:08:54 A Fake Plot Unfolds 1:12:54 Stephen Friend on Entrapment 1:16:31 The Shaqiri Affair (Cleaned up w/ the Podsworth app. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podsworth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) Provoked show site: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://provoked.show⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Darryl's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@martyrmade⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://subscribe.martyrmade.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Scott's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@scotthortonshow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthortonacademy.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://libertarianinstitute.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://antiwar.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org/books⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.scotthortonshow.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Oh my God, it's Friday night. It's time for another show. I am Scott Horton. He is of course, the great Daryl Cooper, Marder Made, the most honest and accomplished historian in American history are the greatest ever. And my great co-host here on the show. And tonight, I've been

bragging about this for a few weeks now. It is the Libertarian Institute's latest publication, our 20th book, including yes, five of mine, 15 more that I'd only published but didn't write. This one is, if I can get the glare off the cover for you here, it is

the Trump assassination plots, only without the burp in the title. The Trump assassination plots by the great Ken Silva, who is, I guess, a something or other fellow at the Libertarian Institute, and welcome to the show, Ken.

Great to have you on tonight. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm not a fellow just a contributor, but you published my book, so I'm very grateful for that. Good. Well, we'll have to think of a title for you or something. I did, and you're welcome.

And thank you. was a mutually beneficial exchange, this publication of your great book. And I'm very happy that it's our 20th book at the Institute. And so we're going to interview you tonight. I done already read the thing. I kind of sprung the news on Mr. Cooper late here. But he's an intelligent man. And I think he's going to probably think of some interesting questions to ask you, regardless of whether he's had a chance to look at the book very thoroughly or not. But I wanted to start with, I think we might have talked about this a little bit on the phone. There's a guy that I follow on the YouTubes, who goes by the name of Hoover, who does the pilot debrief where he goes through

NTSB investigations and tells the stories of how planes crashed. And he likes to use this analogy of the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up. So this guy, he was tired, his instruments failed, and there was a low cloud ceiling, and it was the air traffic controller's first day on the job, and these are the holes in the Swiss cheese that lined up to lead the plane to crash in the side of the amount, right? And so, and he's got a hundred of them or whatever. And in almost every case, there's like five or six or seven things that go wrong that lead to the deaths of the four people on the plane, right? Kind of thing. So it occurs to me, or it did occur to me as I was reading your book. I thought of Hoover and his Swiss cheese holes often that that's at least at first glance,

a lot of what it looks like happened at Butler, Pennsylvania, where you just had a lot of essentially boneheaded cops doing bonehead cop stuff and not providing good enough security while the proverbial

lone cook was able to slip through the cracks. Tell us your basic assessment here. Yeah, well, if you want to frame it in the Swiss cheese example that you just gave, I guess the first instance of this would have happened around, like, all early afternoon, there was a guy whose job was specifically to have equipment to see if there were drones in the sky, and he couldn't get

it to work. At one point, he's on like a 1-800 hotline trying to get this thing up and running. Finally, he, like, switches out the Ethernet cable at 4 p.m. And the thing gets running at 4.15 p.m., Well, the alleged would-be assassin Thomas Crooks just flew his drone over the site at 4 p.m. So it was like a couple minutes after Crooks flew his drone, you get this thing running. And yeah, I don't know if you want to go through all the examples of this, but there were just many things where if a couple of different decisions were made or if it was decisions were made a few minutes early, I think things would have been a lot different. So a few of these were just, you know, from my notes here,

the guys stayed up late drinking the night before, which was to be a story of secret service failures oftentimes. The Ethernet cable thing that you mentioned. I mean, as victim, a completely unfair victim of technical problems myself, that is the least thing in the world for the universe to do to somebody, is your damn gadget won't work. And it's a bad Ethernet cable of all damn things. thing. I can see why, you know, he found it in the last place he checked after working all

morning trying to figure out what was wrong with the dang thing. It shouldn't have been the cable, for God's sake. There's that one. And then there's the cops not respecting each other or liking each other, the feds versus the locals and also the lady versus the guy who doesn't like her and thinks she doesn't do a good job and that kind of thing. So you have those kind of intracop personalities that they're not really working together as a team the way that they kind of ought to be. And then I have one of the first thing in my notes here is, well, I'll skip that for one second. These guys essentially, even when they're giving each other good information, they're not then broadcasting it out and passing it, making sure that everybody else knows. So you have like some

avenues of communication are open, but it ain't enough, where if it had just been a little bit broader, that might have made the difference. But then also, I guess, the first real mystery of the book is the ATF agent. The government department itself or DHS says that they didn't have anyone there officially. But this guy was right there on scene and messing around. Can you tell us, what do you know about that? And is it a very suspicious kind of thing, like the mystery secret service agents in Dallas in 63? I certainly have my suspicions about the ATF agent.

Yeah, what you're referencing is there's the Secret Service lady. who's, I guess, doing crowd control and she bumps into a guy and she doesn't know him. She's like, who are you anyways? And he says he's with the ATF. And then after, you know, everything hits the wall a couple days later,

people are asking like, well, who is this ATF guy? You know, why was he there? Because the ATF wasn't part of the security plan at all. And the ATF is totally stonewall in Congress and all the, you know, investigators. They said he was, quote, there in his personal capacity.

It is very strange. I found local text messages where there's a Robert McGlenin with the ATF who's referenced. I looked him up on LinkedIn and he's a former Department of Energy security guy who worked in nuclear security. I haven't heard of many people who jump from the DOE to the ATF to work in Pittsburgh and make gun cases.

So it's very strange. You probably had a top secret security clearance and if we're just speculating here, I'm wondering if they were actually expecting, like if they had crooks on their radar, because of course he had bombs found in his trunk and maybe the ATF guy was there for that. But that's total speculation. Okay, so I guess at this point,

can you go ahead and kind of take us through the morning as far as, I mean, you don't have to give us every little time stamp, but can you sort of walk us through what Thomas Crooks was doing. And at what point different cops started noticing him and doing anything about it and essentially help us understand how they were too late to stop this kid

and he was able to take all these shots at the once and future president of the United States of America like this. It just seemed so crazy. And never even might, we'll talk more about the perpetrator in a minute and the craziness of his whole character and all that.

In the situation there that, that morning. At the very best, we have some real Keystone Coptitude going on, but still, like, help us understand how it happened. Yeah, I think the locals really did their best under the circumstances where they were kind of totally cut off by the Secret Service and they didn't know what they were dealing with. And they notified the Secret Service about this guy multiple times. But, you know, the short and quick of it is he shows up that morning. He probably case the place out. He goes home back to the Pittsburgh area, which is like, 45 minutes away.

He gets his rifle, and then he comes back, immediately flies his drone, you know, right before the equipment gets up running to detect drones. The first reported sighting of Crooks came at 4.30 p.m., but the people who saw him, these snipers up in the AGR building that he used as a rooftop perch, say they saw Crooks at that time, but Crooks was actually on the other side of the site, which is a big mystery, like who did they actually see? Why did they find him suspicious? The first confirmed law enforcement

citing of Crooks was shortly after 5 p.m. This time he's seen with a range finder. And this message does get passed to the Secret Service Command Center from the locals. But the Secret Service Command Center leader, Jeffrey Burr, he never, as he said, he never put that over the radios. Instead, he tells another guy in the Command Center

to call somebody and have, the counter-sniper response agent go search for him. The response agent is like the eyes and ears on the ground for the actual snipers on the barn. Crooks is seen a couple more times in the 5 o'clock hour. The shooting's at 6.11 p.m., by the way. Right after 6 p.m., when Trump goes on the stage, the snipers inside the AGR building see him again.

And this time, I guess he knows he was spotted and he takes off running. And this is like a crucial mistake by the last. locals, but again, I can't really hang him for this, is that they thought he was running all the way around the building when in fact he went in between in a little alcove and climbed up. So while all the cops are searching for him on the north side of the building, he's actually on top of the roof. He's seen on top of the roof by the locals around like 606. And this is another mistake by the locals. But again, I think it's a little bit understandable where the local command center leader, when he hears that,

that they have a guy on the roof, he radios that on Channel 3, which is like all, it was like the traffic cops, some sheriff's deputies on the ground, but Channel 4 was his own snipers and like the actual SWAT team that would have responded.

So those snipers in the building did not know at this point that there's somebody if they just look outside, they might be able to see crooks. But that's not just because the command center leader was like sitting on his thumbs, Instead, he picks up his cell phone and again calls the Secret Service Command Center and tells them again. Now, he tells them there's somebody on the roof.

And this is like the first real dispute is that the Command Center leader, Jeffrey Burr with the Secret Service, says nobody ever told him there was somebody on the roof. Whereas the local Command Center leader and his counterpart inside the Secret Service Command Center both say that, yes, we did tell Jeffrey Burr this information. At this point, we're like three minutes before the shooting. While all this is transpiring, there's a local cop at a nearby police station. And he's here in the chatter, I guess he's like a relatively younger, fitter guy. He decides to go get the kid himself. He drives all the way to the AGR building, has a partner boost him up. This is on body cam.

He looks up. Crooks points the weapon at him. He drops down. And then the shooting's like 20 seconds late. later. Okay, so, well, you did answer one thing that I did have as a follow-up, which was about the guys who were inside the building that was even above, because he's on the roof of a one-story building, and they are in a second story on the building right next door, and they could have just looked out the window and to the left and seen him, but didn't. And then, but it was because

they were on the wrong radio channel. I guess that explains that. Yeah. Even, I still think 20 seconds a long time. After seeing him up there, even if the guy sprained his ankle, draw your weapon and then, hey, boost me back up. I'm going to take my shot, right? But then he didn't do that. Yeah, his body cam shows that he falls down and he had a gun pointed at him.

So he sprints to his car to go get his rifle, I guess. Well, fair enough to. You know what? Okay. And at that point, the local command center does switch it over to Channel 4 like 15 seconds before the shooting. It says, okay, the guy on the roof has a long gun.

One of those snipers up in the second story had gone to the bottom because he's the one that saw crooks running off. And so he went to the bottom, I guess, to talk to the local cops. I don't know. It's weird that he left his post. But then the other sniper was looking out the north window, and he actually saw bicycle in a backpack that were just left unattended. It turned out they didn't belong to Crooks,

but he was just watching that because I think they thought it was connected. And then he hears it. He goes to the other room. He sticks out his window just in time to see Crooks get shot. So he's distracted by the bicycle there. Yeah. All right.

No. And this is the real scandal starts now if you want to get into that. Okay, well, go ahead. Yeah. Sure. So there's like a lot of anomalies. A lot of things we just discussed are really weird that, you know,

why didn't the Secret Service Command Center ever say anything on the radios? I do think that's suspicious. But this next part is a scandal. Any way you slice it is that the Secret Service snipers actually waited over 15 seconds to respond. And it was a local cop from the ground who shot Crooks first. Crooks got off eight shots in five seconds. And then the ninth shot in like the sixth second came from a local cop on the, the ground and then there were

10 whole seconds that passed again until the Secret Service sniper finally put that final bulleting to Crooks. And like I've been thinking about this a lot. Like I could have given the Secret Service sniper the benefit of the doubt saying

maybe it was hard to get him into scope. He had to calibrate things and then the local cop hits Crooks. Crooks staggers back. He has to re-ame. But the real scandal here outside of the 15 seconds is that he was already looking in his scope. We've got footage of him looking in his scope seven seconds before shots were fired.

And then he was asked about this in front of the House committee that investigated this. And he insisted that he didn't see crooks until the shots were finished. Like he didn't see crooks until crooks had stopped firing. A couple days later, he goes in front of the Senate and he gives the same story. but some heroic Senate staffer, I don't know who this is, but this is like a Perry Mason moment where he pulls out the sniper's own notes and says, well, Mr. King, his name's David King,

your own notes that we got from the Secret Service that you wrote right after the incident say that you saw him crawling into place and you saw him firing. So your testimony doesn't match the notes. So maybe he's just trying to, cover his own ass because Trump has actually called this guy a hero, but either it's really,

he's covering his ass, that's bad enough, or it's something even more nefarious. Well, I mean, is it possible that he missed his first couple of shots or something like that? Or we know exactly any case and, etc. Yeah, there were 10 shots. First shot, but he didn't take the first shot until 15 seconds after he had already been killed by the local cop on the ground.

23 seconds in total from the time he stopped looking through the scope, 15 seconds after shooting had started, and then 10 seconds after shooting had stopped. After the local cop hits him, there's 10 seconds of silence, and then one final bullet. So, I mean, if he was just a regular guy, I would say, well, maybe he just froze up and was like, holy crap, what do I do or something?

But this is a guy who presumably is very well trained for precisely this, or was he the wrong guy for that job? I mean... Well, that's... It's hard to know because these secrets, he's been with the Secret Service for over 20 years. These guys are marksmen, but a lot of the Secret Service people aren't actually combat vets or anything like that. Unlike this heroic local cop, Aaron Zalaponi, he had a couple tours in Iraq, and he actually saw combat. And he's down on the ground and the bullets are flying right over his head and he hits the guy on the roof from the ground.

So it's really inexcusable to me, but I guess maybe you could chalk it off to incompetence. He had been drinking the night before. But again, I returned to the contradictory testimony, which just looks really, really bad. And another weird thing is that Trump, after the White House Correspondents dinner attack, a couple weeks ago, he again called this guy a hero, and he said, oh, David, he responded within 4.2 seconds, which just isn't right at all. So it's, yeah, Trump, he's like, oh, I see David. I say, I love you, David.

But Trump's just misinformed about the attempt on his own life. All right. Well, I better let Mr. Cooper get in here. You got anything for us? So I guess I'm still a little bit. I don't know all the details of this. Scott did me the honor of telling me that you were going to be on today about, well, I think he told me this morning,

but I didn't see the text message until a couple hours ago. So forgive me on that. I haven't had a chance to look at the book yet. Maybe you answered that too. I didn't decide to move him to me. Oh, okay. Scott does that. So, you know, I was trying to get the thing done.

All of the extenuating circumstances, like leading up to this that you've mentioned, like I get it. Things happen. Sometimes a bunch of things happen. Seems really unlikely, but they happen anyway. How did a guy who was already on the radar of at least local law enforcement end up on a roof 130 yards from the president with a clear line of sight. Like, just that seems impossible to me.

I mean, obviously it happened. But what would you say was like the primary failure that allowed him to even be in that position? Well, the AGR building that he used as a rooftop perch was put outside of the Secret Service perimeter, which again made absolutely no sense. It's like, it's outside of the perimeter, but it's within 150 yards of Trump. It had a clear line of sight. And their excuse, I guess, is they were supposed to put a bunch of like Penske trucks and farm equipment that would have blocked the line of sight from the rooftop.

They show up on Saturday morning and that equipment's not there. And I guess nobody took initiative. There was no leadership or anything. But, you know, that's a poor excuse, but that's the story they're giving. And then of course, you know, you got the Secret Service director saying the roof was too slope to actually post somebody on top. Like that's probably the thing that everybody remembers from this event is the slope roof fallacy.

But again, just a piss poor excuse. All right. So look, I mean, I got a couple of pages worth the notes here. And luckily, we have lots of time. So hopefully we'll be able to get through a lot of this. But I think we need to stop for a moment and remark on the either miraculous or just absolute luckiest thing in the whole world or the absolute inexplicable, unexplainable, and motive for a great many conspiracies is the fact that this 556 round,

or was it 2, 2, 2, 3, but whatever, this thing, it hit probably the part of the body, like just the skin, I mean, pinch the top of your ear, the tiny little bit of skin just above the cartilage. It did not destroy the cartilage. Just the skin, a bit of, the cartilage got the slightest nick and caused, you know, some pretty bad bleeding for a second, and then that was it. And like other than getting shot, like through a long thumbnail or something, like this is the least, this is the most you can get shot with the least amount of damage that you could possibly think of, right? And so some people just don't believe it. It's got to be a fake blood pack. It has to be a put-on of some kind. Either Trump did it or.

or the Israelis or someone came in and staged this thing somehow. I saw someone who, you know, in the last, you know, month or so on Twitter, who is much more of like a libertarian movement type person than a conspiracist who just says, this has to be fake. And even if you say people in the audience were killed, well, that's got to be fake too because it's just what, you know, so people based on what does seem quite impossible, unless you really have religious faith and you really believe, you know, that it's possible for an angel to intervene in a circumstance like this or something.

And if that's par for the course for you, then fine. But for everybody else, like, wow, that's pretty miraculous anyway or maybe even completely unbelievable. So can you just talk a little bit about your perspective on the nearness of the miss here? Yeah, and I've really yet to encounter a coherent theory for how he actually could have staged. this. So it's hard to really know what I'm grappling with. But most people bring up the ear saying, oh, where's the scar? I think there's a little bit of discoloration. But yeah, there's no scar. But if a bullet grazes the skin without actually cutting it through the cartilage, there's going to be a lot of blood with, and it's not going to leave a scar. So it is plausible. I grant you, he is just like the luckiest guy in the world, I guess. But, you know, the bullets were real. The blood was real. The blood was

real, the bodies were real. The Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, Doug Mills, took a photo of the second shot going right over Trump's shoulder, and it shows the bullet. And perhaps just as importantly, it shows his hand starting to go up to his ear, and there's no squib or anything in his hand. There's a bunch of, like, close-up, high-definition photos of him before the shooting. There's no blood packet in his hat or behind. If it's behind his ear, how does the blood go in front of his face? You know, keep in mind, this is Biden's FBI, Biden's Secret Service, all the stuff I explained to you

about the locals chasing the kid that, you know, that shows to me that there was a real threat and the response was genuine. And perhaps my favorite piece of evidence that I found reading through the investigation transcripts is the fact that in the chaos, when he got shuttled off to the hospital, his personal doctor was actually left behind.

And so he goes to Butler Hospital, and they actually have a Butler doctor examine his ear, and then they're going to fly straight to, I think it's New Jersey right afterwards, and they tell the Butler doctor, you have to come with us. And so I would have think that if this was some kind of staged thing, he would have been keeping his doctor close at hand.

They would have showed up to the hospital and said, you know, the locals aren't allowed to see the ear. This is national security. But that's not the case. It was actually a local doctor that saw it. So, you know, I'm sure, I think this show takes questions at the end. If anybody has a better theory or has specific questions about it, you know, happy to get into it. But I would hope that I would convince, you know, most rational people.

Yeah. Hold on, Scott. Yeah. So people who think that it's staged, they always share. this one video where, like, after it happens, a guy who looks like he's security, I guess, goes and gets that photography you were talking about and brings him over and puts them in position as that flag is being lowered down behind. What is going on with that? Do we know what's that? That's a great question. So, yeah, people say the flag gets lowered down. But if you look at it

from a million other camera angles, the flag's just fluttering and it just happens. The wind stops and the flag. It's not lowered down. It just flutters in the place. Again, you know, Trump's the luckiest guy, right, for the photo of him pumping his fist. And actually, that pro-Trump guy brick suit, he's the one that took that footage that shows the guy that at first, yeah, it does seem like he's kind of escorting the photographers. But one of the photographers is wearing meta-glasses and they were running at the time. And there's other angles that show that that, quote-unquote, escorting.

is actually keeping the photographers like telling them like stay back, don't get too close. The photographers are just doing their job. They know where to go right when the action is happening. Now, you talk a bit, a couple of different points in the book about the kind of mysterious autopsy

and coroner report and all of that. And essentially, I think what you're getting at with all of that is they're covering up the fact of the local cops, bullets effect on the guy before the Secret Service got around to killing him. That was the point of destroying the body, was to pretend that it was the Secret Service that got all the relevant shots. Yes.

Yeah, so I was the reporter that actually published the autopsy and the toxicology reports in late 2024. I felt at the beginning here that, you know, probably what, 60% of this is your original reporting on this stuff, you know, quite unlike the books that I, right, which are like 10%. Yeah, those exclusively obtained documents, so thank you for plugging that.

So the autopsy says that Crooked was shot in through the left side of his neck, out the right side, and then the bullet went back into a shoulder, fragmented and created two re-exit wounds, which is, that's probably what

happened. It was a 300 windbag. It was a giant round. But then, of course, the medical examiner released the body for cremation before Congress or anybody else could examine it and the x-ray shows that there's still fragments inside the shoulder which probably tells you that the local cops 2-2-3 did hit something.

We think it might have even hit the buttstock of Crooks' gun. But either way, the local cop had to have done something because Crooks stopped firing after the local cop shot. So despite that evidence and all the reason that would dictate that the local cops bullet obviously saved the day, the medical examiner and the FBI both insist that, no, it's just the secret service that hit crooks, you know, against all reason. That's, yeah, one mistake that the medical examiner made in his examining. The other one is the toxicology. report, which I got the report and then I published it and I didn't notice this for another

couple months until a Twitter sleuth came to me and said, it looks like this report is incomplete. The examiner collected like nine specimens from Crooks, like four vials of blood, some urine, bile, eye fluid, and an envelope of hair. And it's numbered one through nine. But when you look at the results, it only lists the results for like six of the specimens. So there was like a tube of blood, some bile, and an envelope of hair, and those results aren't included in the report. So he either collected them and didn't test them, or he just admitted the results from the report. But either way, that's like another big question I have, because they say the kid wasn't on drugs at all, but they've only said drugs of abuse, like meth, cocaine, heroin. We haven't.

gotten anything about you know, psychotropics or other types of drugs. Which have been tied to all kinds of, you know, mass shootings and other, you know, crazy crime. So, yeah. All right. Now look, I don't want

to skip to Ryan Ruth or the Iranians yet. We still do have some time. So I do want to focus still on crooks here a little bit. You know, we basically covered all the Keystone cop stuff and most of the red herring. you know and all of that kind of deal but so and and and and to darrell's question about like how

was he able to to do all of this and I think you know the divided responsibility on the scene as you described you know has a lot to do with that but I guess you know the real question here then is on the background of this guy you know what if you want to address the black rock commercial it's in there I know people are very interested in that so maybe that's worth addressing but then what all do we know about this guy, whether he was just what some kind of fame-seeking kook or like what his motive was, or whether anyone else helped him to encourage him to do this

or even helped him to accomplish this task. I mean, you know, the hugely important person murdered or almost murdered by a lone nut is a cliche of bullseyshire. shit, right? That's the thing that they all say that we don't believe it, right? So like, now maybe it's possible because rifles are good for that. Anyone can reach out and touch someone. I mean, that's how it works. But, you know, why should I believe that this is even the guy? Or what do we know about him that could help us to understand why this kid basically would dare to attend such a

Well, you asked a really interesting question is why we should even believe it's him. And a lot of people don't believe it's him. We haven't gotten any facial recognition or DNA evidence from law enforcement. So a lot of people don't even think it's crooks. I do think it's him because they did give the body to the funeral home. Maybe the parents didn't even look at the face. But I think it's reasonable to think it was crooks. They traced the gun to his father.

his car was there but you know again due to the lack of the transparency from the feds you know i don't blame people that aren't just just aren't going to believe anything until they actually see solid evidence the best evidence that we have it that it's him is there's a picture of him dead on the rooftop and the ear his ear actually had unique bumps on the helix that match his school pictures so i i think it's pretty solid. The Black Rock commercial, I wouldn't read too much into that. They were doing a commercial on managing

teachers' pensions, and I guess they just filmed at Bethel Park High School. Crooks happened to be in it. It is weird. I think it's far weirder. Ryan Ruth being in an Azoff Battalion commercial is probably more interesting. As long as you bring that up, and we'll get back to

that in a minute, but that was what was so weird about the Black Rock commercial supposedly, was that people mistook that Azov Battalion video of Ryan Ruth as also being a black rock video. And I've seen people numerous times say, oh my

God, explain that, that both of these guys were in black rock videos when no, only one of them was. The other guy was in a neo-Nazi video. It's just different. So with the coincidence, it's an interesting coincidence. Without the coincidence, it's totally meaningless. Exactly.

And as far as who Crooks was and what his motivations might have been. I mean, those are the million-dollar questions. Like the Congress did a giant investigation, did a pretty decent accounting of the security failures, interviewed over 40 local, state, federal law enforcement that were there. So that part of the events covered, but the FBI totally stonewalled them. There were over a thousand interviews conducted in the FBI's investigation. Each one, they produced something called a 302, which is an interview report. So we've got over a thousand of those. And they only gave like 30 to Congress. And I think those

30 are probably the interviews of like the actual cops that were there. And it was just a really piss poor job by Congress because they had the special committee form. They had subpoena power. And they just took no for an answer. They just didn't pressure the FBI. at all. Same goes for the Senate Homeland Security Committee. They got a tour at Quantico where they were shown Crooks' rifle and shown a few heavily redacted documents, but they didn't get anything from the FBI either. And, you know, I know, Ron Paul is a pretty popular guy among libertarians, but he actually shut down the investigation into the assassination attempts last July. I guess he wanted to focus on COVID,

but it upset a lot of the other members like Ron Johnson, like, why are we shutting this down prematurely when we haven't gotten anything on Crooks? So the only information on Crooks is just public accounts of the people who knew him. By all accounts, he was like a really smart, respectable, respectful young man. 4.0 in high school, goes to community college,

does really well there too. is set to go to Robert Morris University in the fall. I guess the weirdest anomaly I found is that on July 14th, 2024, he's writing the community college. He had just graduated, and he's asking for his diploma. I guess he needed proof of graduation in order to go to Robert Morris University that fall. So less than a month of him ending up dead on a rooftop, he's still making plans to go to university, which doesn't make any sense.

but then the public side of crook is all straight a student blah blah blah blah but tucker carlson did obtain some social media activity from him a couple months ago that kind of show a whole other side to him and this is from like 2019 2020 so it's hard to know how much to read into it he was only 16 at the time but he's on youtube openly talking about assassinating politicians do bombing federal buildings. He's looking for information on school shootings. And then he just went dark. He started using like VPNs and encryption.

So that's all we got. But I think that little bit from Tucker is significant for two reasons. A, he had to have been flagged, at least by Google, probably got tips sent to law enforcement. He was on the Fed's radar in some capacity. He had to have been openly advocating for violence on YouTube. And B, I think it does, it might show you the kind of kid he was where these kids who are like into school shootings, mass shootings, they find their way to these obscure chat rooms where a lot of these school shooters and mass shooters are manipulated. Again, that's total speculation. But he does seem to fit a profile based on that limited amount of evidence so we have. All right. So hold that thought, Cooper. I'm going to turn it over to you in just one second. But first, I got to tell the people about

Matt Sersely and his great tax advice. It's agorist at tax advice.com. And I probably should have done a better job in the past, specifying that this is really for small businessmen or people who make pretty significant salaries who need to find ways to protect their money from the taxman. This is none of that gimmicky loophole stuff where you don't have to pay taxes.

You do too. But Matt Sersely will just make sure that you pay the absolute minimum of what you have to pay. That is agoristtaxadvice.com. and that helps make this show possible. So, Cooper, you got anything on Pennsylvania before we switch to Ryan Ruth down at the golf course? Yeah, so Tucker's also said that,

and I don't think he's speculating about this. I mean, he obviously has a lot of connections in D.C. and in the White House. He said that Trump specifically shut this investigation down before it was finished. And then you have Joe Kent mentioning that, You know, there were some leads to follow, at least, that, you know, may have pointed to some sort of, I don't know, I think he said foreign involvement. I assume that meant like maybe correspondence with crooks at some point or something, but that they weren't allowed to run those down. Is there anything too, like, that you've seen about why that would be or if that's the case?

Yeah, Trump's silence on this has been the most puzzling thing of all, arguably. When he took office, he said he wanted a briefing from the, the Secret Service and the FBI. He got the briefing, and initially he expressed dissatisfaction, saying, like, well, I trust my guys, but they didn't really explain this to me well. And then, like a week later, he was asked about it again, and he flips and says, actually, yeah, I guess, you know,

Ryan Ruth, Thomas Crooks, just crazy guys. And he's been pretty much radio silent on it ever since. And, yeah, I've also heard that he was the one that shut down the investigation himself. Again, it's just absolutely baffling, and that's probably why so many people think he staged it, because why would he be so quiet? He'd think this would be something he'd be harping on 24-7. Yeah, that's just something I don't really have a good answer for.

Yeah, the Joe Kent thing, he said he wasn't allowed to investigate connections, which I guess that could be the answer that a lot of the pro-FBI people have given. and it's like, well, who the hell is Joe Kent? Like this, it's like a bureaucratic turf war where they just don't want him budding in on an active criminal investigation. And I guess that's the same reason they gave for why he wasn't allowed to see any of the Charlie Kirk evidence either because, you know, there's a open criminal case. So what is the open criminal case in this instance?

Well, there was actually a grand jury convened, and at first I thought they had to have been investigating the parents. You know, he's making anfo bombs in his bedroom. There's a large jug of racing fuel that they found. I'm like, okay, maybe they suspect that, you know, the racing feel like you had to have smelled it. There's no way that they just didn't know about what their son was doing. But it turns out that the grand jury, they didn't actually call any witnesses, which I've never heard before. They were just issuing subpoenas to tech companies overseas to collect internet data to see,

A, what his motive was, and B, if he was working with anybody else. And that grand jury, we also haven't gotten any information on. The DOJ earlier this year in January, they touted the fact that they filed a motion that would allow them to take the grand jury evidence and give it to Congress, even though a lot of it's still sealed. And so I think they did give it to Congress, but now somebody in Congress is sitting on it. So, again, it's just the lack of transparency

is pretty pitiful. But yeah, I hope that answers your question. That's pretty much it. Well, and yeah, and you make this clear in the book that there is an ongoing cover up here. I mean, the guy is dead, so he can't go on trial. So a lot of this stuff should have already been turned over to the public. And they have, was it, four,

Peribytes, four and a half terabytes. Yeah. The data on this guy and all these other things. 75,000 pages on crooks. When it became apparent that the new regime, Cash Patel wasn't going to release all this information. Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit. And we got a status report a couple months ago saying they have 75,000 responsive records.

So far, we've gotten about 200. They've been trickling them out at like 50 a month. So at this pace, you know, we'll all be dead. before all 75,000 are released. Yeah. If you're just joining us, we're talking with Ken Silva and the Libertarian Institute.

That's me and my guys. We just published this book, our 20th book, The Trump Assassination Plots. And so we're about done with Pennsylvania, I think, for now. So let me ask you about Ryan Ruth and the politics of Ryan Ruth,

first of all. So this is the guy who attempted to, he never even did. did get a shot off. He was confronted by the Secret Service, but had set himself up a little sniper nest to try to kill Trump at his golf course in Mara Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. So the guy's doing life now. He was convicted. And you cover the trial and everything in the book, too. But so this is also a lone nut caricature if you want, although this one has a backstory. So I guess can you just tell us a little bit about who this guy was and what seems have motivated him to try to kill

Donald Trump? Yeah, unlike crooks, we've got pretty much Rousse's whole life story and almost all of it is just incredibly bizarre, starting from the early 2000s when he got busted. He got into, he's a construction worker. He, and he was employing a bunch of illegal immigrants. They got into a violent dispute. The police show up and find a bunch of dynamite that he was illegally possessing. He gets felony charges for that. A couple months later, cops pull him over while he's out on Bond. And they find a machine gun in his passenger seat. He runs to his house.

He has a standoff. After all that, he only gets probation. A couple years later, he gets more felony charges for buying stolen goods from like crackheads who would have raid construction sites. steal equipment and bring it to him. Like tens of thousands of dollars of equipment gets another round of probation. So multiple times fell in.

Now we're in the 2010s. He seems, you know, just like kind of a dirtbag criminal guy. But eventually somehow he becomes politically radicalized. We're not sure how. He was a Trump guy in 2016, briefly supported Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. And it was 2022 when Putin, invaded. He just decided, I guess, he had to protect global democracy or, you know, join the

good cause. So he goes to Poland, goes to cross the border and volunteer for like the International Legion or something. They say, you know, you're a 58-year-old construction worker, no combat experience, no thanks. So he starts recruiting foreign fighters instead, including veterans of Afghanistan and Syria. He says in his self-published book that his, quote, best partner in this endeavor was an Israeli, who I wasn't able to figure out who this mystery Israeli partner is.

But this activity gets him flagged on, at one point I counted at least seven federal or international agencies, a travel nurse who said he was spouting dangerous rhetoric, reported him to the FBI, DHS, Interpol. He was flagged to customs. A former CIA officer named Sarah Adams flagged him to the CIA. He was arrested in Ukraine at one point during a protest.

We don't know how successful he was in recruiting. These people are actually getting them to Ukraine, but we know he was texting Afghan veterans in Syria. the State Department even opened up an investigation into him for violating arms trafficking regulations. Not that he was trafficking in arms, but that also covers, I guess, smuggling fighters. And the State Department had an open investigation into him as of the assassination attempt. So he does all this in Ukraine. He comes back, admits this while being interviewed by customs to get back into the country. They just let them right through.

I guess it was fine. He turns to human trafficking in early 2024. He's actually texting a human smuggler in Mexico named Romero about trying to get some Afghans into the U.S. It seems like he made his assassination plans

concrete once crooks failed his attempt. We've got text messages of him trying to buy a sniper rifle and a rocket line. from somebody in Ukraine saying, you think Trump's going to be good for you? Like, we got to finish this guy off. And that, yeah, so that's pretty much the background of him.

He's texting Afghans up to September 15th when the assassination attempt took place. He's camping out at the Gallup course about 11 hours before Trump shows up. Trump's golfing on the fifth hole. The Secret Service is doing in advance. and agent spots him hiding in the bushes. The agent shoots five times from about five to ten feet away, but misses all five times, crooks runs away, gets into a Nissan Xera and drives away,

but a witness who heard the firing, took the plates, and then he's pulled over on the I-95, about 45 minutes later. So another instance where the Secret Service didn't even catch the guy, It was thanks to this witness, they got him a little bit later, but he could have been at large for God knows how long. Man. That's a lot, I know.

Yeah. So in fairness to the Ukrainian Nazis in the aforementioned video, they disavowed this kook and said, hey, we didn't send him. And I guess, but I got to ask, right, is there any indication that anyone in Ukraine had essentially hired him for this task? in order to prevent Donald Trump from presumably screwing up their plans? I mean, it's an obvious question, although I'm not saying I believe that or have any indication

or have seen any indication of that myself, but I wonder if you have. No, I haven't seen any evidence. And in fact, somebody in Ukraine gave me the text messages of Ruth and this guy he tried to buy the rocket launcher from. And this Ukrainian guy is telling this late, She's like a documentarian in Ukraine who gave me to this stuff. And he's saying, oh, I thought he was joking.

And even he says, though, that, oh, maybe somebody leaked Trump's plans to him. So he's expressing surprise. Ruth did have a trial. He represented himself. He fired his public defenders. It was a total disaster. But I would imagine that if he was actually hired or explicitly told to do this, he could have blurted it out any time.

they would have probably like Epstein him in prison to avoid even having that risk. So I don't think he was explicitly instructed to do something. I think it was a little more subtle than that. I talked to a lot of people who knew him in Ukraine

and I think he was very easily to be influenced and he's hanging around with a lot of like virulent anti-Trumpers. Like one guy I talked to who knew him thinks the pee tapes are real. At one point, he goes on a tangent to me

about how he wants to punch J.D. Vance in the face. And so, like, Ruth is hanging out with this kind of crowd. And this isn't like, you know, your aunt that drinks wine and talk shit about Trump. These are, like, high status people, people that come from money that all live in the Beltway that have connections to the State Department. I think they all influenced Ruth.

And he probably thought he would be a real hero. if he did something. All that said, the biggest anomaly that I found or suspicious thing is the fact that he shows up at like 2.30 a.m. and is camping there

for about 11 hours before the incident. And Trump's golf plans were last minute. That's what I was a mask, yeah. Yeah, the final report of the House Task Force that investigated this says that the Secret Service was informed about Trump's

golf plans at 2 a.m. So that happens at 2 a.m. And then Ruth shows up around that exact same time. He had been camping at a nearby truck stop for a couple weeks beforehand. But the timing of when Trump makes his plans, the Secret Service finds out about it. And then Ruth just happens to show up is a crazy coincidence. And also just the fact that Ruth knew exactly where to be, that area that he used as a sniper hideout was well known to the paparazzi that would hide there and take pictures of Trump. But, you know, that's still, like, it's an open secret among people in the trade, but I don't think that's something that like everybody in Palm Beach knew. So I want to know how he, like, why did he choose that specific spot and why did he show up at that specific time?

I mean, those are major questions. Then quick aside, I, you know, this could be nothing, but it is funny to mention that Lindsay Graham, huge Ukraine sponsor, was set to golf with Trump that day, Trump and Steve Whitkoff, and at the last minute, he canceled. He told Sean Hannity that live on TV the next day, like, oh, I had something else to do, so I had to beg off at the last minute. That's not going to win since. I know. It's not bad.

He had to go. All right. Well, yeah, no. The how Ruth could have. been tipped off, that now's the time to go and stake out your spot. I mean, there's really only a couple of possibilities there, right? Like, he was either at the Waffle House and overheard the Secret Service guys get their phone call, which is like a one in a billion, right? Or he was friends with a journalist who somehow found out and tipped him off, or he was friends with somebody,

it doesn't sound like it'd be somebody inside Trump's inner circle, but inside somebody's inner circle who could have known that? That's a pretty small loop of information. Darrell Cooper? Yeah, I mean, I guess I already got lucky, but that seems very, that seems like the least likely explanation. It's hard to say, you know,

I, it sounds like with Crooks and Ruth, we don't have a lot of their, like, electronic correspondence, whether social media, email, things like that. And, I mean, that part of it is really interesting to me just because, you know, we have, spotty evidence at times, but we have enough to put a picture together of a lot of what that, you know, the CIA was up to with MK Ultra. We know that like Ronan Bergman, the Israeli

journalist, wrote about how the Israelis, you know, they had a program like that where they actually took one of their Palestinian prisoners and for three months turned him over to this psychologist who had him full control of him for those months and trying to get him to the point where he would be a, you know, Manchurian candidate, go kill Yasser Arafat, which they say failed, and all the MK Ultra experiments failed, which is exactly what I would say if they worked, and I didn't want people to ask any more questions.

But, you know, when I think about that, like all of those things, that's really tough. You've got to, like, get this guy, put him in a building with this psychologist for three months and then hope it all works out at the end. And maybe it doesn't work at all. Maybe something like that doesn't work at all. Like, it's not possible.

But what is very possible, And I would think that, forget intelligence agencies, even much less sophisticated actors and intelligence agencies know how to do pretty well, is go fishing online for somebody who might be vulnerable to manipulation and then work them over over the course of a couple months or however long. And if it doesn't work, that's fine. You don't have this guy running out saying, hey, they took me into a building for three months and brainwashed me.

You just have this guy who, you know, somebody was talking to him online about doing this, and then he blocked them and whatever, move on. But that seems to me like a much more effective and efficient, you know, sort of Manchurian candidate thing that, you know, that very much would be possible. And again, would be available even to like relatively unsophisticated non-state actors. So it's really interesting to me that we don't really seem to have. I mean, with both of them, or well, Ruth's still in prisons.

He's alive. But with Crooks, I mean, he's dead. Like, what's their excuse for continuing to stonewall? I mean, the investigation is basically, over now, but even they were stonewalling Congress, you said. What is their excuse for that? I mean, ongoing investigation? Yeah. So last year, Cash Patel said, oh, the investigations closed. Crooks acted alone, nothing to see here. The very next day, I file a FOIA, like, oh, if the investigation's closed, can we have the records? And I get a response after a couple months saying, we can't have the

records because the investigation is still open. And now they've switched it. I'm pretty sure. in direct response to my FOIA and me talking about this on all the shows, they say the investigation is open but inactive. So, like, we'll still take tips and look into stuff, but, you know, we're not actively digging through information. And I just take that as, like, a FOIA avoidance tactic. To your point about the manipulation, there's actually an example of this in my book about a kid, Nikita Kasup,

who was arrested over a year ago. He actually killed his parents in a purported plot to assassinate Trump. And it turns out that there were two guys in Ukraine who manipulated him, say, like, we need, he's into, he was like an accelerationist. It's one of these chat rooms who are into, like, Satanism and, like, extreme neo-Nazism. And it was like, like, the idea is to collapse society so we could, have the Ubermen rise again or something like that. I don't really know the culture.

But these Ukrainians manipulated this kid to kill his parents, steal all their money and guns. And they gave him coordinates in like Eureka, California. And they said, we have a safe house for you. Go to the safe house. We'll give you drones and the equipment to kill Trump. So he kills his parents. And then he's caught a couple weeks later in Kansas.

And apparently these Ukrainian guys just, scammed him and got him to do this heinous thing and also send them some like cryptocurrency. And this all came out in court a couple months ago. Actually, some of it didn't even, the part about the scam didn't make my book, unfortunately. But that's just to go to what you say, Darrell. It's like, these things do happen and it's not, it doesn't take sophisticated MK Ultra doctors. The way I describe it is there's like 0.001 of the population. a percent of the population is interested in mass shootings or school shootings or committing these types of acts of terrorism.

But in the age of the internet, they're all congregating together in the same chat rooms. And A, that normalizes the behavior where now you're hanging out with 20 other people, just like you, you think it's totally normal to want to kill your parents to try to start a civil war or something. But B, it's putting all these guys together. It's like almost a watering hole for predators, for informant provocateurs or foreign state actors or other bad actors to manipulate them to do all kinds of heinous things.

Yeah, so now is the Mundo's artisan coffee debunking lies about Iranian assassination plots part of the show here. First of all, what you do if you want coffee to drink in the morning, It's really good, and it helps this show be a show. You just go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatran blend, and I drink it in the morning, and then again in the afternoon, and it tastes just like me, and you'll like it a lot.

Scott Horton.org slash coffee. So now for the Moondos Artisan Coffee debunking propaganda against Iran part of the show, what a bunch of crap, a whole new pile of crap to sift through on plots by the Ayatollah, not the oldest dead Ayatollah, but the second to oldest dead Ayatola, Kameney, the father here,

to kill Donald Trump. And of course, Benjamin Netanyahu famously claimed on TV that they had tried to kill Donald Trump. And there are stories, I guess two major ones, about Iranian plots to kill Trump. But really, the prequel is an Iranian plot to kill John Bolton. I should be so lucky.

What's the story here? Yeah, this is probably the part that your viewers are most interested in, so it's very smart of you to make them wait till the end to get the good stuff. It was all a diabolical plot by me and Iran to make them make them listen to my moon-dose artisan coffee commercial. Also, by my books, provoked, enough already, fools errand,

they're really good. Okay, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, we heard when the war started earlier, this year. One of the reasons that they kind of threw against the wall to see if it would stick is that, oh, well, Iran tried to kill Trump, but we got the Ayatollah first. Trump had the last laugh. And a lot of... I wrote it down here somewhere, if I can find it, where Trump said, I got him first. He got, oh, I got him before he got me. So, boy, there's your... Darrow, we've been sitting there going, is it the money? Is it the blackmail? No, it's he believed this, crap, dude, oh man.

He actually might believe it. That's certainly the case. But when he said this, it kind of sparked off a huge debate where a lot of people were like, oh, there's no evidence Iran tried to kill him. And then people started citing these cases where DOJ has arrested a couple people who were supposedly plotting on behalf of Iran to kill Trump.

But first of all, a lot of Israeli and pro-Israeli people have suggested that Iran was connected to Butler. I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed last year on Fox News. And the reporter, he mentions like, oh, Iran tried to kill Trump. And I think it was Brett Baer response. Like, really? Like, they were behind the assassination attempts.

The reporter was clearly referring to Butler and Palm Beach. And then Yahoo goes, yeah, like, through their proxies. They tried to kill me too. And clearly the reporter was asking about Butler and Paul Beach. So it's pretty disingenuous by Beebe, you know, surprise, surprise. But even if we go into these cases that the DOJ has made, they're all, at the very least, highly controlled sting operations that never pose any kind of danger to Trump.

The most well-known of these cases is the guy, a Pakistani man, who was arrested on July 12th, 2024. Oddly enough, the day before Butler, the case gets announced about a month later, and a lot of people to this day think there has to be some kind of link between this Seafershot guy and what happened in Butler. And I haven't found any link, but either way, the case itself shows that it was really like a Whitmer-type Fednapping plot, where it's him and a couple undercover informants and agents. In fact, they were putting him under surveillance

before he even got into the country. He was overseas in early 2024, and apparently Israel passed some intelligence to the U.S. And then he comes in April 2024, and they let him in on purpose under something called the significant public benefit parole program, which if you look it up is like specifically, for national security reasons

or to, I guess, recruit somebody to be an informant. And a reporter named John Solomon actually had a source that told them specifically that this was kind of like a fast and furious type operation where, of course, with Fast and Furious, you had the ATF

allowing illegal gun purchases under the auspices of tracking these guns to see where they went, maybe build giant complex cakes, with here in 2024, the Biden administration was apparently letting in people on the terrorist watch lists on purpose to monitor them, see where they go, and, you know, I guess make cases like this Mershant one. So Mershant gets into the country. A friend at a local mosque has somebody

pick him up and drive him around everywhere he went because he didn't speak English, didn't have any money really didn't have any means. So he has a buddy drive him around. And this guy turns out to be an FBI informant. And this is before Mershont has even proposed to do anything illegal. They do have a meeting in a hotel where Mershant is talking about assassinating politicians. And this is, you might have seen it's circulating online. He's, the hotel room is wired for surveillance and he's talking, drying on a napkin, and he says, this is the target, how will he die? He uses like a purple vape as the target,

so it's like clearly not a very sophisticated plan. It seems like they were kind of just bullshitting about a potential plan. But the informant, by the way, the informant was Afghan who worked for the army as a translator. And initially they said he became an informant because he heard Mershant talking about this assassination plot. But then it later turned out that that story was totally bogus.

In court, he testified that he was driving around Mershant, and he thought he saw people tailing him, I guess unmarked vehicles. He calls up the FBI and they say, oh, we're putting Mershant under surveillance and we've been following him. Will you work for us and just play along and see what he does? and going to be our eyes and ears. And I guess he agreed. That's the official story.

So that's how he became an informant. He eventually introduces Mershant to two undercover FBI agents. They have a meeting at a strip club where Mershon allegedly proposes either assassinating U.S. officials, stealing government documents, or staging protests. And he tells them to come to Pakistan in September and we'll give you a specific plan, a specific target. And after that, it was as he was leaving the country on July 12th, that he was arrested. I think you're muted, Scott.

I always do that. I think that probably is just to coincidence. And before we go on here, I'll ask both of you, because I'm not sure which it is, but one of you has your speakers up too loud, and we're getting a little bit of an echo. I only heard it a little bit, but then some people in the chat room confirmed that it's kind of been here all along. So make sure that your, you're, you're, speakers are not up too loud in the room there,

at least for the last little while of the show here. So if I read you right, what you just said there, this guy, it's inexplicable that they would have let him into the country. And it ain't like he just kind of snuck in or whatever. He was deliberately

allowed in by federal police intervention with the State Department or the state or the Customs and Border or whatever, DHS, to get him into the country. And then, now the informant that was driving them around, I think this is something I got lost in the story.

Why were we supposed to believe or how were we to understand that this guy thought that the informant knew where to find some hitmen to hire? Did they explain that? Like the informant just said, like, hey, you know, I know a bunch of hitmen in case you need some or what? You know what I mean? Yeah, that's... It's a usual, like sometimes a hard one to broach, you know?

That's a good question. That has not been publicly reported. I would imagine it's because he might portray himself as ex-military and extremists and just, hey, I know some guys. I'm in here deep in New York City. The undercover FBI agents were also posing not only as him... like under, they were posing as like mafia type hitmen, not like somebody with the IRGC. So I guess it was like an organized crime type thing.

Okay. Well, Cooper, go ahead and get in here if you want, man, while I think of things. Think quickly, because honestly, I don't really know much about this case. I'm learning more about it from you two talking right now than I probably have up there. So, all right, well, I got my reading glasses on, so that definitely helps. So now part of this is just like the Maybe it's incomprehensible, but that's like part of the story too

is that there is no real plot here because this thing, you mentioned that he says that he has been assigned by his masters back in Iran to some kind of low level theft to wage some kind of protest as a distraction, I guess a diversion during the theft. He's supposed to have a protest outside.

and assassinate somebody, but he's got no money. And so, in other words, the implication in the chapter, right, is that he's working for the cops all along, and this is all just garbage in, garbage out. You got an FBI informant being reported on by another FBI informant. Well, he thinks that he was working for Iran, which is probably one of the most puzzling aspects of the case,

So it's a little bit different from the Whitmer plot where these militia guys were just kind of set up by the FBI talking crazy outside the campfire, but they never actually wanted to kidnap the governor of Michigan. This guy did seem to have intent. He gets arrested on July 12th, and the next day he has like a proffer session where he admits that he thinks he has a handler in Iran

who told him to, take certain steps and make connections. Again, keep in mind, he didn't speak English, didn't have any money, obviously didn't have any connections. It was him, an undercover informant, and two FBI agents. So I think there's several possible scenarios here.

I guess the most conspiratorial one was that the person he was talking to in Iran was like a Mossad agent, and this was all really, an entrapment plot. He definitely wasn't all there in the head. I have text messages from his cousins

over in Pakistan. He was trying to borrow $5,000 and they're like texting with each other like, dude, we're not giving this guy money. He's like a joke. So yeah, he definitely didn't seem like a serious person. Didn't have a target specified, didn't have any venue, a date,

There was no real plot. Another option is, you know, I guess the Iranian deep states probably sprawling too. Maybe there was a faction that thought Khomeini was too moderate. And so they really did want to assassinate Trump. And I say that because I don't think the main Iran government wanted to do this because, as you guys know better than I do, they've acted with restraint. They'll do things like call Trump before they lob a couple of missiles. at U.S. bases. So clearly that's not the behavior of a government

that would assassinate Trump knowing that they would then be wiped off the map. I don't think they're suicidal. Or if we just want to take the case for granted and, oh yeah, the Iranian government really did want to kill Trump, you know, all the things I just said still apply. There might have been intent,

but there was absolutely no means. And so the threat was really negligible and I could argue that while they're fomenting this plot, they let crooks and Ruth slip right under their noses. So that's the point that Trevor Aronson makes all the time in his book The Terror Factory. It's like while they're setting up this guy who doesn't have any ability, they're letting the real threats get unnoticed.

That's exactly what happened with the Boston Marathon bombing. They were entrapping a guy into a fake remote control plane plot against the Pentagon while the Zarniaz, who the older brother wasn't informant, was getting away with this right under their nose. You know the plot right under their nose. And now, you have a quote here from a Stephen Friend who compares this to one of those terror factory FBI entreatment cases.

And just says, this is just BS. So can you tell us a little bit about Friend and what's his deal? Yeah, Steve Friend was an FBI agent who turned whistleblower after January 6th. and his main disclosure was that instead of treating January 6 as one domestic extremism incident, they treated every single arrest separately. That way they could inflate the threat of right-wing extremism and say, look, there's like 300 or 3,000 incidents when it all stems from 6.

So that was his disclosure. And then, yeah, he just gave me that. quote for the book because he's read my public reporting on this case. And, you know, I didn't want the readers just to take it from me and my reporting. I wanted some kind of, you know, authoritative source to back me up because a lot of people do say, well, this, Iran really did want to kill Trump. So why shouldn't we make this case? And, you know, again, there was absolutely no threat there. Yeah. All right. And I guess bottom line, though, is whoever it was that was supposedly putting them up to this.

We don't really know who that was or that they were Iranian at all or what. And it seems quite that this guy that they worked so hard to get into the country would then be taking orders from this mysterious Iranian who then... Well, explain because they had a trial, right? Yeah. They went to court and so, but in discovery, we didn't get to find out anything about the secret Iranian boss back home? Well, the odd thing is that he was actually allowed to testify.

His own lawyers put him on the stand on the last day. And I think he said the guy's name is Marad Yusuf. And he says that he followed these instructions because he has family in Iran. Even though he's a Pakistani guy, he said he was acting under distress. And that's why he went to the U.S. and did these things. Really seemed like, frankly, legal malpractice to have him testify to that effect. because basically he was admitting his guilt. So it's very odd.

And again, I don't think this guy is all there in the head based off of his actions and the fact that he got his cousins making fun of him. When you talk about more evidence, we should have brought this up in the Ruth case. The Ruth case and this Mershant case, there's millions of items of classified evidence, which the government is allowed to hide in discovery

if it could implicate national security. There's something called the Classified Information Procedures Act where you as a defendant can't even get this evidence in your own case if it's classified and could implicate national security. So who knows what's in that evidence, but it raises questions, especially with the Ruth case. Like, why the hell is there classified information there? Right, yeah, exactly.

All right, so some horrible bar, was posing a threat to martyrmaid's chickens. And he was not about to let them be martyred. So he went to go and save those chickens. So now it's just you and me, Ken Silva here, unprovoked. And so for our last section, we'll let everybody have a good night. It's Friday night, man. Y'all go and spend some time with your lady right after this.

Farhad Shakiri, he was also an Iranian come to kill the president, eh? Well, he is another Afghan living. in Iran. And this case is even more dubious because this case was announced a couple days after Trump won the 2024 election. And they put out a press release saying that they foiled a plot against Trump. Frankly, I almost look at it as like a last-ditch effort by former FBI director Ray to like save his job. Because if you look at the charging documents, the whole case is around this Shakuri guy who's in Iran communicating with two street thugs

in New York City having them conduct surveillance on this Iranian dissident journalist, Mase Alenejad, I think her name is. Like one of these Iranians that's against the government and gets a lot of spots is like sponsored on

State Department funded media and things like that. She's frizzy hair, Max Blumenthal kind of makes fun of her on Twitter all the time. One that you're talking, yeah. Yeah. So the Shakiri guy is over in Iran and he's actually participated in like 10 phone calls with the FBI, basically ratting out these New York street thugs saying that, yeah, we were conducting surveillance on this journalist. And also, by the way, the Iranian government wants to kill Trump.

And they just included that in the criminal charging papers in like the FBI. agents affidavit, but we're relying on the word of some guy who's just talking to the FBI. And then they turn around and charge him and make him a defendant. They arrest these two New York guys. They say they didn't even know who they were conducting surveillance on. They thought it was like a common thief that they were helping somebody get revenge for. But those guys were convicted. But the whole case was about this journalist.

There's absolutely no evidence that Trump was involved at all. but they spun this one thing that the defendant said into all these headlines about there being like another plot. And I think you say that there's an informant, do I have this right? The FBI has a guy on the line in Iran, and he keeps feeding them more and more stuff because he's got a friend in the United States

and he's trying to get some years taken off his friends sentence. Is that right? And that is Shakiri. That's the guy. Okay. So, yeah, he's voluntarily telling the FBI all this information about the New Yorkers who were arrested and this purported plot against Trump. And then they turn around and make this guy a defendant. They charge him.

Of course, he's in Iran, so they don't have to make any kind of case. But, yeah, it's almost like they burn their own informant who's giving him all this information. And then they make him a defendant. but the charging paper show that he was ratting on his own government. So I really, I kind of wonder what happened to him. Like, if I'm the Iranian government and this guy is talking about us trying to kill Trump, like, I wonder if they arrested him. Yeah.

Well, and what happened to his friend? Did he get time off his sentence? I doubt it, but no, we don't. That's a good question. We don't even know who this friend was. That's just kind of ref in the charging papers. Another thing we should probably add is there is an unindicted co-conspirator named in the criminal complaint who was with these two New Yorkers also surveilling the journalist. That person was never charged and I assume that person's an FBI informant and an unindicted co-conspirator.

Again, to reference the Whitmer plot, one of the informants in that indictment was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator. so I would assume a similar thing happened here. Yeah, sure sounds like it. All right, so, and there's more, but I pretty much spoil the whole damn book for you people. I hope you'll go out and buy it. It's so good. You don't even have to go anywhere.

You just go to the Amazon and click Ken Silva. It's his first book. It's our 20th at the Libertarian Institute, the Trump assassination plots. Of course, you can find Ken and all of his great original investigative journalism at headline USA.com. And occasionally he's

still writes for us at the Libertarian Institute. Again, here is the book on sale now. Please run out and get it. And that's it. The end of Provoked. See you all next week. This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm.

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