The Attempts on Trump’s Life, Why He Shut Down the Investigations & How It Altered History Forever

Ken Silva, thank you very much for doing this.

You've written a book on the Trump assassination plots, the two from the summer of 2024, about which there are more unanswered questions than answered questions, and they're so transparently ridiculous, the stories that we have been told.

My first question is, where are all the other books on this topic? Why did this fall to you?

That was my question, too. And you're actually probably one of the only major media figures that's still keeping the story alive. So it's a pleasure to talk to you.

But yeah, there were a couple of books published in the wake. Like Selena Zito is a Washington Examiner reporter who wrote a book called Butler, but it goes more into the cultural aspects of the Butler community and the political effects, the political fallout of the event. It's not really like a forensic investigation. This is the first of that kind.

Does Zito's book have a conclusion? Does it reach a conclusion about what that was, or does she affirm the official story, which is this was a crazed left-wing lone gunman?

Yeah, it's more or less an affirmation of the official story, and again, just like the political fallout. That's more of the book. She was there that day, so there is like an autobiographical account of what happened from when she got there. But it doesn't go into like the details about what happened over on the AGR building or the security failures or who Thomas Crooks was.

So I'm going to state what I think is the official account of what happened in Butler that day, and then I would like you to just take us through what you know about what happened in Butler.

So the official account is there's this weird kid, local kid who really hates Trump and he's been radicalized probably online. We don't really know because he has no meaningful online profile. He's like the only young man in America who's not online. And he's somehow a very good shot and he somehow gets into the one vulnerable place at the event site in Butler Township that gives him a sight line to Trump, and nobody notices this because there are just these unaccountable holes in security, but it's just amazing. It's just a failure of security. And he takes the shot, he misses, he kills someone in the stands, a fireman, and then he's killed by a U.S. government sniper. And he had no accomplices, he's just a crazy person, one of many, and that's all we know, case closed. And that's bad enough.

But is that a fair representation, to this day, of the story of what happened in Butler?

The biggest issue I would take with the official story about just what happened that day is that a lot of people think the Secret Service sniper actually saved the day. You know, everybody knows about the sloped roof excuse for why they didn't have somebody posted there in the first place, the fact that that building was outside of the ostensible perimeter, even though it was, you know, again, like 150 yards clear line of sight to Trump. But a lot of people say, well, at least the Secret Service sniper stopped it from being a lot worse.

In fact, Donald Trump said that a couple of weeks ago after this most recent White House Correspondents' Dinner attack. He's talking about, well, they did a lot better at that event than they did at Butler, although my buddy David saved my life at Butler. He was the sniper, his name's David King. And Trump says he responded in 4.2 seconds from 400 yards away.

Neither one of those assertions by Trump are true, which is very bizarre that he doesn't know the details about the attempt on his own life. In fact, it was a local cop who saved the day.

The alleged would-be assassin Crooks fired three well-measured, discreet shots. Then there's a short pause. Then he starts rapid firing five shots, and then the ninth shot comes immediately after that eighth shot, all in the span of five seconds. From the local cop on the ground, his name is Aaron Zalopone. He was a Butler ESU member. And then there's ten whole seconds that pass by before David King finally puts the final bullet through.

Thomas Crooks fired nine shots?

He fired eight shots, and then the ninth shot came from the ground from Salopone.

I heard eight shots.

So let's just start at the beginning. Who was Crooks? That's still an unanswered question.

My book does have the most complete biographical account of Crooks, but he's still an aberration. He almost seemed like he was kind of leading a double life. All the public information I found out about him paints him as just a really respectable young man. Almost, you know, I hate to say it, but like the kind of guy you'd want your son to turn out to be like.

He was a straight-A student in high school, well-liked by his classmates and teachers. Graduates with a 4.0, goes to a community college for engineering. While there, one of his projects was actually 3D printing a chessboard and a Rubik's cube that were inscribed with Braille. His mother is legally blind, so it seemed like a pretty sweet thing to do for his mother.

I got community college speeches where he says one of my favorite things to do is like cook with my family. Loved his sister Katie Crooks. And he was planning on going to Robert Morris University that fall to get his four-year degree. That's the public record.

As of when was he planning on going to college?

Oh, that's a great question, because it was actually, uh, I obtained his college emails and I got one from June 14th, 2024, where he's emailing the community college about the status of his diploma because he had just graduated, but apparently he didn't get actual proof. And he needed that to go to Robert Morris that fall.

So less than a month before he winds up dead on a rooftop, he's asking about the status of his diploma and still making plans to go to university that fall, which is very strange. I just don't know what to make of it.

Now it doesn't sound like a man planning to die, you know?

It certainly doesn't sound like a man planning to die. It's like the death row inmate asking if he can, you know, save some for later in his final meal.

Does anybody around him later say, yes, he was radical and crazy and violent?

Nobody that knew him. His father, the night of the incident, the ATF responds to the house and they're questioning him. And he said, well, I didn't really know much about Thomas's politics. He liked to play the contrarian. He liked whatever side the father and the mother would take, he would just be devil's advocate and argue the opposite side.

He was a registered Republican, but he made a donation to Act Blue, like the left-wing PAC, on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration. So I guess the theory there would be if he was left-wing, he registered as a Republican to vote in the primaries and try to vote for the weaker candidate, something like that. But yeah, we don't know for sure.

Probably the best evidence of his political leanings comes from the trove of data that you published a couple of months ago in your documentary about the violent comments and kind of showed his political transformation in 2019 and 2020.

But that was when he was like 16, 17. So we don't really know what happened those last three, four years of his life. He started using more encryption, VPNs. There's not much of a data trail there.

I did obtain his community college metadata. I FOIA'd it from the college and they sent me like a big string of jumbled up code, but I had somebody who knew what they were doing kind of decipher it and it showed the actual websites that he was visiting while he was on the community college campus. It doesn't show the contents of any of his messages or anything, but he visited like a Game of Thrones fan site, he seemed to be a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, twitter.com, reddit.com. Nothing! Very unusual. I mean, he went to like ar15.com, but that doesn't really tell you that much.

So yeah, he's a total cipher when it comes to the last few years of his life.

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The FBI has a lot of this information, we should say, and has not released it for reasons maybe we can speculate about in a minute. But it's fair to say the FBI has a lot of information about this guy that's not public.

That's absolutely right. So when it became apparent last July that the FBI wasn't going to voluntarily release information about Thomas Crooks or the event, the transparency organization Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit to force disclosure. And we just got a status report a few months ago saying that they had 45,000 responsive records about Thomas Crooks in response to Judicial Watch's lawsuit. A couple of months later, we get another status report saying we found another 30,000. So now it's up to 75,000 and they started making monthly productions to Judicial Watch, but it's like a couple dozen. It's been four months and it's spent a couple dozen pages a piece. So like 200 in total. Out of 75,000.

Yeah, so at that rate, we'll all be dead before all the records are produced. It's pretty egregious.

Which, and also pretty revealing, like what is that, right? If it's a crime committed by a lone gunman who's deceased, no one else involved in this case at all, then that's the official story, then what would be the motive to hide it?

Yeah. I mean, as controversial as the Epstein files rollout has been, one of the beneficial things that the Justice Department did is just put them all in a word searchable database. And you'd think they'd be able to do something like that with the Crooks files. So people could just type in any word and it'll pull all the records with that word on it.

One of Cash Patel's excuses was that, well, Donald Trump is a victim here and he has rights too, so that's why we're not releasing some of this out of respect for him. But that's not a legal thing. That's not covered in FOIA. Of course, they could redact Donald Trump's name, but they can't just say, oh, because Trump's a victim, we're going to comply with FOIA. It's pretty ridiculous.

And of course, no individual, even president, owns the U.S. Justice system. Justice is effected on behalf of the entire country. It's supposed to be a rule of law and—

Right, that belongs to the American people. These documents belong to the American people. The FBI belongs to American people, so that's a nonsensical argument.

It's a grotesque argument, actually.

So tell us about that day. So this guy about whom we know very little, who seems pretty normal, shows up at this Trump rally and what happens?

Yeah, so I guess the story starts 8 a.m. that morning. There's a Secret Service site counterpart. Her name is Dana Dubre. She shows up and none of her colleagues are there. And apparently, there's rumors that they had been out drinking late the night before at a Pittsburgh bar called Tequila Cowboy. So she's kind of upset that her supposed ostensible partner isn't helping her with the setup. They finally start trickling in around 10 a.m. and they hold a briefing.

And this is the first kind of weird anomaly: a Pennsylvania police trooper tried to participate in the Secret Service briefing and they actually kicked him out. So it seemed pretty insular. We don't know exactly why that is.

So the briefing would be the meeting that law enforcement has at the beginning of the day to talk through what they're going to do and what the potential threats might be.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I guess one of the reforms to come out of this whole fiasco is that now they hold a unified briefing where they let the locals in, but you know, a little too little, a little too late for that.

So how did Crooks get there? How did he get in? How did he get to this spot? Like, what do we know about all that?

He first showed up around 10 a.m. when they're holding this Secret Service briefing where they're keeping out the locals and the state troopers. Crooks shows up and apparently he just drives around and kind of cases out the place. He later goes home to Bethel Park, which is about a 45 minute drive. He lived closer to Pittsburgh, but there's more out in the country. So yeah, Crooks goes home.

And meanwhile, we have the first security failure at the site before anything even happens. The counter drone operator, an agent named Eduardo Castro, just can't get his drone detection equipment working. He's initially by the stage. He tries to move it. He thinks it might be some kind of signal issue. He even calls like a 1-800 number for troubleshooting. And he doesn't get it working until about 4:20 p.m., which is when Crooks finally returned.

Crooks flies a drone over the site for about 11 minutes. And this is like 3:50 to 4:01.

And then he returns with the drone and then the drone detection equipment, it gets up and working, which is an unfortunate coincidence, I guess.

What does Crooks get at his house, do we know?

Well, he got his rifle, which apparently belonged to him, but his father was in possession of it. So he asked his dad for his rifle and he goes to a local shop. He buys some ammunition. He also bought a ladder that morning.

And I think a lot of people think that he got up on the rooftop on a ladder, which isn't the case. He actually scaled some air conditioning unit. And the ladder was found in Bethel Park in the woods later.

So I think what probably happened there is he bought the ladder, he went that morning and cased out the site and realized that he wouldn't need the ladder. He could use the air conditioning and then just abandon it in the woods.

And like I said, supposedly the rifle belonged to him but the father was possessing it, but the ATF would eventually track the rifle to the father. And the father said that he sold it informally to his son a couple of years ago, but there's no paperwork for that. So the paperwork shows that the rifle belonged to the father.

And I guess there's a loophole in Pennsylvania state law where you can transfer long guns. Pennsylvania residents can do that with each other without any kind of paperwork. So we don't know for sure. I mean, that's the story that he transferred it, but there is no paperwork to that effect.

How does Crooks get a rifle onto the grounds of a Trump event?

It was probably broken down in his backpack.

Yeah, that's we don't know that for sure. There is surveillance footage that the FBI is still withholding that would presumably, you know, shed light on some of these details. Like there's an ice cream shop north of the AGR building that apparently has footage of Crooks actually even scaling the building. But that's just one of thousands and thousands of records that the FBI has refused to disclose, including the footage of Crooks training on a local firing range that might give us insight into how this kid was able to get off the shots that he did.

Yeah, Clarion Sports Club, he went there 43 times in the span of maybe 10 months. Uh, I did find with those records that there were four times where he signed in with somebody else at the exact same time and for the exact same range. So you could go to the pistol club, uh pistol range or long rifle range. And every time that somebody else signed in at the exact same time, they would go to the same range.

There was even a day where he went to pistol and rifle and this mystery person—it could have been his dad, but the names are redacted in the records—so the person that signed in at the same time also went to the pistol and the rifle.

Another interesting thing I found as far as that goes is, again, back to the community college emails. November 9th, 2023. He actually emails his teacher saying that he's going to be late to class. And that was the day that he went to the range, presumably with this mystery person, and they trained on pistols and rifles. And you know, you can go to the range any time. Thomas was again a model student—I think he missed class maybe like three or four times his whole career. So I've got questions about why it was so important for him to go to the range that he emailed his teacher and said "I'm going to be late today," because you were going with someone else, obviously.

Sure, yeah. But you know, the deeper question is: why was it so urgent that day? Or why did they need to go at that particular time?

He was at one point in contact with security at the event, correct?

He got a rangefinder through.

Well, he never went through the magnetometers or went through security, which is another weird anomaly. Is that he registered through an encrypted email to get a ticket to the event, but he never went inside. So I don't know what his original plan was. Again, he might've gone there that morning and realized, like, "Well, shoot, this is easy. I don't even have to go through security. There's a clear line of sight there." But yeah, he never went into the perimeter.

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He gets up on the roof. Do we know how long he was there?

He was up on the roof. Yes. Yeah, he was up on the roof since about 6:03 p.m.

And this is actually a pretty bad local security failure. I do believe it was a mistake and not something intentional. And I could actually show you, and I'll try to articulate what's going on here for people just listening.

So this is the AGR building and a local sniper spots him here. And the local sniper, Crooks runs off when he's spotted, and the sniper says he's going all the way around the building when in fact he went into this alcove and climbed up.

So at 6:03, all of local law enforcement is responding here thinking that he ran all the way around when in fact he went in and up on the rooftop. And that was just one of the few mistakes made by the locals. 6:03 is when he was first spotted.

Well, that's an interesting question, because the local snipers in that building—there were three in there and one of them left around 4:20 p.m. And he texts his buddies inside the building and says, "There's this guy sitting out on a parking bench, he's looking up at the building. I think he knows you guys are in there." And just flagging this for your situational awareness.

And it was initially reported in the wake of the shooting that that was like the first sighting of Crooks. But then somebody released cell phone footage showing Crooks walking on the other side of the site, like over a half mile away.

So the question is: like, who did these local snipers really see that they thought was suspicious?

One of them, not one of the snipers, but another one of the local cops on the ground. His name's Chris Copas. He insists that yes, that really was Crooks that we saw at 2:26 PM. "I swear it was him, except he was wearing pants instead of shorts." But obviously, you know, Crooks can't be in two places at one time.

So there was a lot of false sightings. Um, or I don't know if they were false sightings or not, but another, a rally goer said he saw somebody that looked like Crooks carrying a long rifle north of the AGR building. And this would have been captured by that surveillance footage from the ice cream shop.

And the reason I take this sighting seriously is because the rally goer who says he saw this was communicating with a Pennsylvania state police trooper with a body cam. And so he actually sued to get the footage of the body cam that would have shown this young man open carrying a rifle, and he didn't tell anybody about this lawsuit. He like didn't want the attention, but a local newspaper uncovered the lawsuit and found out what he was doing.

And the upshot of the lawsuit is that the state police said, "Well, we don't have any footage for you. Like it doesn't exist."

Um, but again, the reason I think that's a legitimate sighting is because he didn't want attention. He was actually trying to prove his case. He's not just like talking, you know?

So when was the shooting? What time did he pull the trigger?

6:11 p.m.

So, putting aside those possibly false sightings or, you know, God knows what's going on, it's around 5:20 that a local sniper inside the building again sees Crooks. This time Crooks has a rangefinder.

Now, instead of putting this over the radio, he texts some of his local counterparts, including the command center leader Butler ESU commander Edward Lenz. And nothing's really done because I guess they're not checking their phones.

It's not until like 5:40 that people finally see like, "Oh, this is the infamous pictures of Crooks sitting on a concrete wall by the AGR," said he's lurking around, he has a rangefinder. And they identified it correctly as a rangefinder. That's—we've never seen a picture of the rangefinder, but they say they found that in Crooks' pockets after he was killed.

So yeah, I think that's legitimate. So if you're trying to protect the life of the principal, somebody, and someone at the scene has a rangefinder, could there be a clear indication of intent? And the locals did respond to it accordingly.

The local command center leader, Edward Lenz, says that he called the Secret Service Command Center. By the way, they're separate command centers, which is a huge issue. He talks to a Pennsylvania state police trooper inside the Secret Service's Command Center, who then tells the command center leader, Jeffrey Burr.

And instead of putting that out over the radios though, Jeffrey Burr then tells the counter-drone guy, Castro, about it. Castro calls some agents to go search for it, but they never put it out over their radios.

And this by now is like 5:50 PM, about 21 minutes before the shooting.

So we know Crooks is on the roof at 6:03. What happens between then and 6:11?

Okay. So yeah, Crooks gets up on the rooftop. Meanwhile, all the cops are searching north of the building. Like they don't know.

But then a local cop does spot Crooks on the rooftop around 6:06 PM, says somebody's on the roof. He seems to be running around. Again, they still don't know what exactly to make of this. I don't think they even knew it was the guy that had the rangefinder.

Passed on to the local command center, Edward Lenz. And he puts it out over channel three at 6:08 PM that there's a guy on the rooftop, it's not one of ours. But the problem here is it's the local radios, and specifically he was on a channel that was only heard by like the traffic cops and like some of the people on the ground who are pretty much assisting in like crowd control and things like that.

He never switches over to channel four to inform the actual snipers in the building or his QRF team that was like ready to deploy in response to emergencies. Instead, he again calls the Secret Service Command Center, and here's where things get especially controversial because Lenz says that he calls the PSP trooper in the Secret Service center, and then they both inform Jeffrey Burr about somebody's on the rooftop now.

Burr claims that he never heard this.

So I've been kind of calling Jeffrey Burr "Deaf and Dumb Burr" because he never—he says he never heard anything and he never put anything out over the radios, even though now obviously the threat has escalated.

We should point out that Trump's on the stage at this point. He took the stage at 6:02, which is exactly—you know, that sighting of Crooks where they think he's running around, but he goes up top. So things are getting serious.

And at some point, people in the crowd beneath Crooks notice him up there.

Yeah, people notice him up there like around 6:08, and they're watching the locals kind of frantically scramble around seeing how they can get up on the rooftop. And yeah, it's kind of a spectacle, and even some people inside the perimeter start to notice the commotion going on by the AGR.

So then, um, a local cop tries to get on the roof. What happens and when?

Yeah, so while all this is transpiring, Detective Tyler Collins is actually at the Butler police station, maybe a mile away. And he's hearing all this chatter, and he's, I guess, a relatively younger and fitter guy. So he decides to go assist in the chase.

He drives directly to the AGR building. And, you know, this is seen on body cam. He has one of his buddies boost him up to try to get up on the roof. He gets up there, he looks, he says he saw Crooks. Crooks swivels his rifle at Tyler Collins. Collins drops down, and now he says the person on the roof is armed.

Now we're probably talking like 25 to 30 seconds before the shooting.

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So one of the most interesting—I mean, it's minor, but it's interesting—facts of this is that Crooks is on the roof. He's surprised by a local cop, aims his rifle at him, then pivots and starts firing within 30 seconds at over 100 yards and hits Trump's ear, famously.

That's pretty—that's like biathlon level shooting. There's clearly lots of adrenaline.

It's a quick turn and you see all these people on TV saying, "Oh, that's an easy shot."

That's not an easy shot for a man filled with adrenaline. He's just been confronted by a police officer. Like, that's someone who is either remarkably cool under pressure or who's done a lot of training.

Yeah.

Crooks, from what I can tell, was a really good shot. This wasn't just his training at Clairton Sports Club. He also took a pistol course at what I think is called the Keystone Range out in Pennsylvania. And there was one other guy who was in the class with Crooks. He's called by the FBI a couple of days later when the FBI finds that Crooks was training there.

This guy gave an interview and said that Crooks once shot a target in the same spot with a nine-millimeter so many times that he blew a hole out of the target.

So yeah, Crooks was really good. And you know, I've heard you talk on your previous podcast about this with Sean Davis.