The Trump Assasanation Plots (Ken Silva - Author and Journalist)

Welcome back to another World Ablaze. Today, I have investigative reporter, headline USA editor and author Ken Silva on the show. Ken's been deep into finding out the truth behind the assassination attempts on president Donald J. Trump and has written what has been called the most comprehensive collection of available information to date with the book titled The Trump Assassination Plots, What the Investigations Missed and Why It Matters. And with that being said, I'm gonna bring Ken into the room here.

Welcome, Ken. Thank you for making the time to be here.

Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Thanks for having me.

So you've been on quite the tour lately. You've been Tucker Carlson, you've been on provoked with Daryl Cooper and forgot his name, but anyway, it doesn't matter, know, pretty well recognized shows. But regardless, thank you for being here. And I want to dive deep into this with you because this is the assassination attempts on Trump seem to be a never ending thing. We just had another one this year in February 2026 at Mar A Lago.

And a lot of this got kicked off, at least it seems like your interest got kicked off of this like all of ours did with the Butler, Pennsylvania Assassination Attempt. And so with that, I want to start out with a few things before we dive into whatever is new information, for example. So I want to start with the obvious. Now you're probably tired of talking about it, I'm sure, but who the hell is Thomas Crooks? Because this was a really strange one.

And this this is, of course, everybody we're referring to the Butler Pennsylvania assassination attempt, where Trump's ear was pretty much shot off. And so Thomas Crooks was an anomaly in where it seems like he came out of nowhere. The history of of who he is is still up in the air. He allegedly had no digital footprint, yet the FBI has 75,000 pages on him. And then there's other things that happened there.

And and we'll get into that. But if you can help us understand through your findings, who is Thomas Crook?

Sure. Well, you know, the book pretty much gets to the bottom of what exactly happened on July 13 in Butler in terms of, you know, a blow... Chapter one is pretty much an action scene from 6AM that morning through the night, and it outlines all the security failures. Like, I've got that covered very well. Who is Thomas Crooks?

That's still kind of the $64,000 question. I mean, I've got a biography on him. Think I it's chapter seven of the book, but we still don't know because by all accounts, his life, his family life, his life as a student, people who knew him in real life, all viewed him as a well behaved kind of likable, if introverted young man, very smart, went to a community college for engineering, really excelled, graduated at the top of his class, was planning to go to a four year university that fall. In fact, according to community college emails I obtained, he was still making those plans as late as June. On June 14, he's emailing faculty about the status of his diploma because he needed that for proof of graduation.

And then less than a month, ends up dead on a roof. So it's really quite the mystery. It does seem like he was living almost a double life, a secret life online, where he was into much more radical topics. We know this because there's been a limited data leak, guess. An investigator obtained YouTube comments from 2020 where he's openly talking about things like assassinating US politicians, which would portend what he would try to do four years later.

So there is that, and I do think that tells you something. But there's still a lot of unanswered questions as far as crooks goes.

No, there is. And what's weird is, you know, as even you have said in previous interviews where you have even said it was strange that there's 75,000 pages of information the FBI has, but yet he somehow didn't exist. And I remember when this happened because I did a show on this too because you know, everybody was talking about it. Mean, they tried to kill the president Donald Trump, right? But I remember seeing his social media feeds and posts online, and everybody was trying to save them, screenshot them, whatever they could because everyone was trying to talk about what was going on and then the next day everything was gone.

And it's so strange that they're saying he wasn't he wasn't on line. He was... He didn't exist, but yet we all know he did, and the FBI doesn't want to admit what they have on him. And I guess it's because it's still a pending investigation, even though it has been said that there is no investigation. So it's kind of a...

It's it's like, where the hell are we at? Right? Like, it doesn't make any sense.

Well, they're playing legal games because, you know, Cash Patel, the FBI director, gave an interview over a year ago to I think Maria Bartiromo where he said, well, the case is closed, Thomas Crooks acted alone, and there's nothing really here to see. When I heard that, I'm like, oh, case is closed. Know, now they could disclose the records. So I filed a FOIA and I get a response back saying, no, we can't give you these records because there's still pending law enforcement actions. In other words, the case is still open.

Directly contradicting what Patel said. But yeah, like I said, this seems like they're just playing legal games in order to withhold these records. The the thing about him not having an Internet presence of the FBI, that's a little bit of a misconception that everybody says that, but the FBI did say in the weeks after the assassination attempt that, you know, he had Discord account, other accounts. What the FBI did say though is that he wasn't communicating with anyone, which, the recent records have proven that to be false too. He was communicating with people, including a, neo Nazi on the state department watch list from Norway, which is just tells you that he had to have been on law enforcement's radar in some capacity, in my opinion.

Right. And so that leads to things as we're talking, I'm just thinking because, know, obviously that stands out here is Thomas Crook came out of nowhere out of the shadows. We still don't know what his real motivations were. Not really. They say he act alone, but it doesn't seem like someone like this with everything that happened and how it played out.

It really doesn't seem like he was. And this is just conjecture and opinion, and I'll say it is, but it seems like there was someone definitely helping him or had a hand in guiding him. Because, I mean, when we're talking about what happened, like the security failures, which I know you're covering your book, but still, how does he get past security to the point that he could walk in with a rangefinder, able to get a weapon inside, able to scale the building on the air conditioning unit? How does all this happen if it seems like people aren't looking the other way? And then the response by Secret Service, which is slow and lacking, for example, the miscommunications.

There's just so much here that doesn't line up to where crooks would be a lone gunman, as many would say. Do Do you have any other info on that, or am I off base on on this?

No. I I think you're on the right track. I mean, he was building bombs. That's... He's like a really smart kid, but that's usually not something that you just do on your own.

Usually somebody is providing some sort of guidance, with complicated things like ammonium nitrate bombs, which is what Timothy McVeigh and others involved using the Oklahoma City bombing. So I think... And, you know, like I said, he's talking to this neo Nazi in 2020 about assassinating politicians on YouTube. That gets you flagged to law enforcement definitely for sure. Whether that was an email that just sat in the FBI's computer or the agents actually knocked on his door, you know, it seems like he was in contact and he was on law enforcement's radar.

There's one thing you said I do wanna clear up. How did he get the gun so close to Trump? And that was just egregious security failure. Whether it's unintentional, I don't know. But they set up the site so that the Butler Farm show where Trump was speaking was the only site where you'd have to pass through metal detectors to get into the crowd.

The problem with that is that the AGR Building that crooks shot from the rooftop from... That's outside of the site, even though it's like a 150 yard clear line of sight to Trump. And what happened there is the campaign was supposedly supposed to have parked giant trucks and farm equipment on that fence line that would have blocked a line of sight so nobody could have, you know, gotten a view of Trump from that rooftop. But then, you know, the Secret Service shows up that morning and the equipment's not there and they let the event go on anyways, which is totally inexcusable. Yeah.

No. I I I get that, but it's it's still a huge failure in security.

And especially with such a high pro... And we're talking about former president president running to be reelected, and it's it's like, how do you... How was that looked over? Like, that's not just an oversight in my opinion. It's it's either Out oversight.

Training inept people that should not have been in the position they were for sure, Or it was somehow intentional, and maybe not intentional to where we can see it right out the gate, but someone made a call, it could have been as simple as going, Oh, don't worry about it, we'll do that tomorrow. And I've seen that at events. So that could be also possible. And I'm not trying to be conspiratorial here, Ken, but there's so much about this that doesn't make any sense to anybody, especially the fumbling of how the FBI has handled this with Kash Patel and under Dan Bondino at the time. Like it just doesn't add up.

All the way to crooks training, as you said, he was talking to Nazis from overseas on how to make bombs. I mean, there's so many things that just like a kid like this that had a history of being a good kid, a good student, everything lines up for him to be a model citizen, and all of a sudden, he's on a rooftop trying to kill President Donald J. Trump. Just doesn't add up. So aside from that, there's also...

We need to clear up who actually stopped Thomas Crooks because a lot of credit is given to the shooter, right? Of the SWAT team. Was it the sniper team of the Secret Service?

Secret Service. Yeah. And that's... You know, you talk about security failures. This to me is the biggest of them all and the biggest scandal of them all.

You know, the clear line of sight is obviously a huge deal. I think most people remember the ridiculous excuse from the former Secret Service director for why they didn't have snipers on top of that AGR Building. She said, oh, well, the roof was too sloped, which, you know, she got laughed out of the room. She resigned in disgrace. Right.

But that led to people saying, the roof wasn't covered at all. When in fact, there were two teams of secret service snipers on Barnes behind Trump. One over his right shoulder, one over his left shoulder. And the one... Those snipers had coverage of the roof.

But so when the shooting happens, Crooks gets off eight shots in the first five seconds. The first one wings Trump's ear. You know, he grabs his ear, falls to the ground, secret service piles onto him, and then he starts spraying randomly. And immediately after the eighth shot from Crooks is a ninth shot that in fact came from a local cop on the ground. And that this is all in the first five seconds.

And then that's that there's, you know, Crooks doesn't shoot again. Ten whole seconds passes by and then the secret service sniper finally puts that final bullet through Crooks. You go back and listen to it. That's pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and then ten seconds and then a final shot. That's the secret service sniper.

So if you count it, it took them over fifteen seconds in total to return fire and ten seconds after the situation had already been effectively nullified. So, you know, fifteen seconds is a really long time. If I stopped talking and we just let fifteen seconds of dead air, people would think, you know, their devices are malfunctioning or something. It would get awkward. You could chalk it up again to incompetence.

There's rumors that some of these guys were out late drinking at a bar called Tequila Cowboy in Pittsburgh, you know, kinda like they were the night before the JFK assassination. However, his congressional testimony is contradictory. He initially said, this guy's name is David King, Trump's sniper. He says that he took so long because he didn't see Thomas Crooks until Crooks had stopped firing. But then the senate Homeland Security Committee obtained his own notes where he writes down immediately after the incident.

You know, law enforcement always writes their reports as soon as possible. And his own report says that he saw crooks crawling into place with a rifle before the shooting started. Meaning he had an eye on the guy with a rifle and it still took him fifteen seconds to return fire. You know, was he told to stand down and let crooks get off a shot? I wouldn't go that far, but it's still a scandal because, you know, the FBI, the secret service, they say this is the guy that saved the day.

Even Trump thinks that. He said a couple of months ago, you know, David King, he's my hero. I see him every day. I tell him, David, I love you. And that means this guy is still on Trump's security detail despite really, I think, failing that day.

Yeah, I don't I don't know if the tinfoil hat people need to go so far as to assuming the Secret Service themselves are in on this. But I think there are procedural failures that can't be accounted for or really explained. So the fifteen second gap in reaction, for example, if he actually saw him crawling into position, why did it take so long to react and or get the communications off? I recall, I think you mentioned in another show previously that there was communications, but they weren't going through the channels directly. It was like a roundabout way of getting something like something said to the right person before they can actually make a decision.

Is that correct? What was their communication issues in terms of chain of command and whatnot?

The local radio center and the Secret Service radio centers were segregated, where the local cops have this like trailer that they're operating out of. And the secret service guys are in this room, like hundreds of yards away. And so, you know, the locals first spot crooks with a rangefinder lingering outside of the perimeter that, you know, ticks off their spidey senses. They put that out over the local radios. And then, you know, the local...

The guy operating the local radios has to pick up his cell phone, call a Pennsylvania state police trooper who's in the Secret Service Command Center, and tell him, hey, guy out here with the rangefinder. And then that PSP trooper passes along the message to the guy running the Secret Service radios. But the thing is the secret service radio operator never put that information out over the radios. They sent like one or two agents supposedly to go help with the search, but they never put... Even when they got information that he was on the rooftop, they never put that out over the radios.

And that's significant because when they got the info on crooks being on the rooftop, Trump was speaking at this time. If they put that out over the radios, the agents by the stage would have gotten the message, and perhaps they could have taken Trump off stage.

Yeah. That that is what the expectation would have been. The only thing I could think of is maybe they wanted to make sure there was imminent danger or threat. Maybe they thought they had it in control long enough for Trump to get airtime. Who knows?

Who knows? But it is very strange how that was handled. I mean, these are supposed to be some of the best people we have to protect a president-elect, former president. Like I said, a lot of it to me doesn't add up, a lot of it to most Americans. It just doesn't make sense whatsoever.

And again, look, I'm not going to keep harping on how the Secret Service handled things, because we know they made a mistake. It was obvious, they can't hide it. But the enigma here, as you said earlier, the biggest question is still Thomas Crooks. Like, where did he come from? How did he come to think this way?

What were his actual motivations? Did someone get to him? There's just so much that is unanswered. And I don't know if through your investigations, if you have any more new information or possible evidence that you can tell us that that that can basically help us understand Crooks a bit more, or you have anything else to add on him?

Well, we've gotten new... The FBI has been trickling out records. We've gotten new information and we could certainly get into all that. But I would I guess my best answer for you would be to say that Crooks again with these comments talking to a neo Nazi about assassinating politicians in 2020, that tells me that he fit a certain profile of these kids we're seeing increasingly online and fringe Discord chat rooms or telegram chat rooms that glorify school shooters that talk about terrorism, mass shootings. We're seeing more and more of these shooters coming out of these fringe chat rooms.

The way I put it, there's like point 1% of the population who might be into these subjects, but they're all getting in the same chat rooms. And a, that normalizes the behavior with each other where they're like, oh, there's up 20 other people just like me. And b, it's like a watering hole. They're all together and they can be manipulated by predators, whether that's foreign state actors, FBI informants, or things like that. And there's numerous historical examples of this, like the twenty fifteen Garland shooting where there was a fair in Garland, Texas that had draw the prophet Muhammad contest and some radical Muslims tried to shoot it up.

Well, it turned out that, like, there was an FBI informant in a chat room with them that told him, quote, tear up Garland. There was an undercover agent with them. This all got exposed because an undercover agent with them was arrested by the local cops after the shooting. They initially thought he was one of the shooters, and then it turned out the FBI had this infiltrator. They were provoking these guys.

There's, like, the twenty twenty two Buffalo shooting where a white supremacist shot up a top supermarket. Turns out that he was in a chat room with a, quote, retired federal agent who was in the chat room, like, thirty minutes before the shooting. And then there's even a Trump assassination plot where last year, this kid named Nikita Kassup in Wisconsin, he killed his parents because two Ukrainians convinced him to do that, steal their money, and then wire the Ukrainians a bunch of money. The Ukrainians supposedly were gonna send him coordinates to a safe house where he could go get equipment like drones to kill Trump, and they were gonna blame it on Russia and start World War three. And this is all in court.

The kid was sentenced earlier this year to life in prison, and it was like a half baked plan. But I think that is kind of what we're looking at when it comes to crooks. It's speculation, but I think it's informed speculation.

Well, okay, so let's keep talking about that. Yes, it's speculation, right? And we can, as you said earlier, we can go down the rabbit hole of who Crooks is, but this still lends back to what most people think. There was someone behind it because these chat rooms, I mean, who is in these chat rooms, as you said, foreign agents? Somebody who really is going out of the way to influence people to act and meld and control and manipulate people.

So it's not... I mean, I'm not going to buy into this just a bunch of kids, know, goading each other on. Okay. The examples you gave when you were talking about the person that was manipulated by these Ukrainians, for example. I mean, there is an intentional, seems like a mission here to try to destroy America from within.

And if we're talking about Thomas Crooks, and he's in these chat rooms, somebody knew what they were doing. Someone was intentionally like he fit a profile for someone to be able to manipulate and guide and point in the right direction, and then he just took off from there. So we got to find out who that... I'm not saying you do know this, I'm just saying in general, we need to find out who this person is or who the organisation is. And there's been talks that, you know, foreign countries were involved.

I mean, I don't even know if any of that is true. There were other assassination attempts on Trump, and they're trying to say Iran was tied to it. Again, I still don't know if those things are true, but there are foreign actors or somebody that is pulling the strings and trying to manipulate people to pull these heinous acts off. So regardless, I mean, it's gonna be hard not to take the tinfoil hat off because there's too much here that kind of still supports that, as you said, an informed opinion maybe, but regardless informed speculation, but still, still begs the question for sure. Like, how did he come to this?

How did he come to the conclusion that he needed to go out and kill Donald Trump? None of it makes, like I said, none of it really lines up. So with that, how do we... How was it looked at when Crooks was training for all this and taking training courses on guns and marksmanship and etc? Like, was any of that a concern to the FBI or anybody else that was investigating this?

Well, they certainly interviewed people at the gun range. They got the footage. The FBI did find out that Crooks interacted with somebody at the gun range on July 12, the day before the shooting. He went there and practiced with his rifle. The name is redacted, of course.

And the guy told the FBI that, well, me and crooks just made small talk. He asked, you know, is the range clear? Can I go set up my targets? And that's pretty much that. And I guess the FBI took his word.

It took him at, you know, face value. Yet he was a gun enthusiast. The FBI asked his father about it. And it's kind of a sad story because the father's like, well, I thought this could be, you know, I didn't really know my son very well, but I thought this could be something we could bond over. But it turns out maybe he was just using me to become a proficient marksman so he could carry out a plan.

You know, other than that, there's a couple of times where it looks like he was there with a mystery other person, maybe it was the father. There was a time I found, he was a model student, he only missed class a couple of times. But one time I got his community college emails and he tells his teachers, you know, I gotta miss class today, I'm gonna be late. And he went to the gun range that same day. It's like, why did he feel the need to skip class to go to the gun range?

So, you know, all this raises, again, just more questions, but that's really the best public information that we have.

Yeah, and that's what's hard about this is like, we're trying to use public information and they're only letting us know so much, right? Because it's a continuing investigation. So it's really difficult. So let's talk about what we do. Let's get back to what we do know, because we were speculating a bit, I'll admit it, but still, you know, it's kind of hard not given everything that's going on.

Let's go back to the operational deficiencies in the investigation, for example. It's not normal to leave the body out for twelve days. Right? Like... And then after it was examined or whatever, it was quickly cremated.

Do you have any more information that that you're able to find in regards to why this was, why the body was left for twelve days before they were able to to get to it and perform an autopsy?

Well, was left other twelve hours, not twelve days.

Oh, I'm sorry. I fumbled my.

Yeah. That would have been really bad if they just let it Yeah. Rot in

is intriguing

and I haven't gotten a good explanation for it because they did leave Crooks's body on that rooftop until 6AM the next morning, then took him to another county for cremation. And the firefighter who died from Crooks' shooting, they took him a couple hours afterwards. So maybe you could argue they left the body up there because it was still a crime scene and they're still examining everything from every single angle. But the cremation is issue, I think is more significant. You know, within days, congress is writing to the FBI, preserve all evidence, do not dispose of anything.

Remember, this is the height of Republicans' mistrust for the FBI. They want to do their own independent investigation. And so congressman Clay Higgins shows up in early August to look at Crooks's body and the... I don't know if he went to the funeral home or the medical examiner, but they say, oh, we already released it for cremation. So the FBI just blatantly flipped Congress the bird.

And I found out that Crooks... We got an x-ray that shows the bullet fragments are still in his shoulder when the body was released for cremation, which is another mishandling of evidence. I believe those fragments would prove that it was the local cop who shot him first and really saved the day despite what the FBI continues to insist.

So... Okay. So body left for twelve hours, then autopsy report, then cremated, and it seems like there's still information being withheld intentionally. That's not necessarily normal, right? Unless they're trying to keep it close to the vest here because it's still an ongoing investigation.

But is it true that it's it's been said that that Trump stopped the investigation or or asked to have it ended? Is that correct?

Well, that's a good question because that's what Tucker Carlson told me and also, you know, public... Publicly said that that Trump himself shut down this investigation. And that sparked a pretty fierce rebuttal from former deputy director Dan Bongino, who said, you know, Tucker's full of crap. We briefed Trump on this and Trump was satisfied with our findings. And so while the case is still open, it's pretty much dormant and, you know, unless we get some groundbreaking tip, But Bongino is hanging his hat on, you know, the work that the FBI did.

And so I went back and looked at the timeline and, you know, Trump takes office in January 2025. Kash Patel is approved as director. A month later, Dan Bongino takes office as deputy director in March 2025. And then within a couple weeks, they're telling the world that this is the, you know, crooks acted alone, just a lone wolf nut. And that tells you that they didn't investigate this case at all.

At at most, they looked at the case file from the Biden's FBI and determined that, well, you know, it looks like everything's above board here. But, you know, a real investigation would entail re interviewing all the witnesses, resending subpoenas, doing, you know, actual leg work, and there's no way they could have done that in the span of a few weeks. That goes back to, you know, why did Trump really shut it down? Well, Trump's recently come out with comments, you know, I think a week or two ago where he says, oh, it's a... It was a democrat plot.

And when I got to office, records were destroyed or missing, which again, it's like, that's true, did Dan Bongino not notice that there were destroyed or missing records when he briefed the president, or did he lie about it? Is Trump lying? Like, there's still a lot of weird things going behind the scenes.

Yeah. And that... That's the same thing he said about the Epstein files. Right? Or at least Pongino did.

You know? It was evidence that was destroyed. We don't... We can't get to it all because it's it's just not there. There's nothing there.

Well, Bongino insisted that Epstein killed himself, and they're gonna release surveillance footage that prove that. I look at... There's an inspector general's report with the diagram of all the cameras that were working and weren't working. Right. I'm just some guy and I was able to like, wait, that...

What Bongino says is impossible because the cameras by his cell block weren't working and of course, yeah, so it's like people... The agents were just feeding Bongino bullshit, but he was regurgitating it without, you know, really critically thinking.

Yeah. And so, you know, getting back to this Thomas Crooks, the attempt on Donald Trump, the only thing I could think is maybe he wanted to just brush this on the rug because he survived and he became president. Maybe at that point, he's like, you know, let's just let's just get past this. It's the only thing I could think. I don't wanna think that maybe he was behind as many people have said, at least his opponents say that he staged this whole thing.

But is there anything out there to actually, like, confirm or even lead anyone to actually believe that that is plausible that he actually staged this for for him to, like, just push himself further into the spotlight and and gain more support?

I don't think there's any way he could have done that. Yet to encounter anybody with a coherent theory for how he could have done that. You know, again, chapter one of my book details the action scene from that morning to the night, including the local cops legitimately chasing this guy. If a couple different decisions were made, the local cops would have caught him and it would have been a nonevent despite the lack of help from the Secret Service. And that tells me it's authentic.

It's Biden's FBI, Biden's Secret Service, they're all spying on Trump investigating him. There would have had been... Had to have been complicity from them for Trump to have staged it. Trump was on the campaign trail every day doing different events. Like, there's no way he's had the time to choreograph this or practice this.

You know, foreign governments are spying on him. They could have found out that he's trying to stage something and leak it. The bullets were real. People really died. The best, you know, people say, oh, well, there's not scarring on his ear.

You know, if you cut yourself shaving, it's gonna be bloody and it'll heal with those scar. And a bullet is a little different, but if it doesn't actually go through the cartilage, if it just grazes the skin, it could heal without a scar within two weeks. So it's totally plausible. And yeah, I could go on and on, but yeah, I'll just plug the book, I guess, if you really want to check on it. It was an authentic event.

Yeah, your book has all the info, but at the same time, I mean, let's just get down to it. All the work you've done and everything that you've seen so far from trying to find the evidence and get down to the bottom of this, I mean, what do you actually think happened here? What's your opinion? I'm not I'm not gonna say you're just... It's fact, but do...

What is your current opinion, informed opinion?

I believe that it could have been some sort of failed sting operation. Maybe not an operation, but I think they might have been monitoring Thomas Crooks. Because keep in mind, he was building bombs in his bedroom, and I think they might have been monitoring and expecting him to do something stupid with the bombs, and then maybe somebody else told him like, hey, if you go up on the roof, it'll be open at this time. You get a clean shot, and then he swerves and then the feds, you know, they're... They bungle this and then there's a big cover up because, oh, we can't let the world know that we are monitoring this kid.

And I say that because if you look at some of the reporting, there weren't any bomb sniffing dogs at like the security checkpoints, which is odd. They found a detonator in his pocket when they searched his body. And that was actually one of the weirdest things of all this whole event is there was an ATF agent there doing security, which ATF wasn't part of the security. The secret service agent said this guy looked like he was in the bomb squad, and then congress tries to find out, well, what the hell is this ATF agent doing there? The ATF says he was there in his personal capacity, but he wasn't in the crowd.

He was in security. The secret service agent who saw him said he looked like he was on the bomb squad. And, you know, I thought... Crooks had bought a ticket. I think maybe they thought he was gonna try to go in the crowd with his detonator and set something off in the crowd.

That's that's what I'm looking at.

So this this all seems... There are two things here, in my opinion. One, which really seems to be the case more than the other, possibly, is it was just a lack of proper management by the security staff, by the Secret Service, and seems like maybe even training or this particular team is not used to working with each other. And the biggest failure, I think, in all this was actually the communications, those lines should have been open and available. They should have had to talk to one person to translate the information to the other and then that person...

You know, it's like if you see something and there's a shooter, and there's a president-elect on stage and you see a shooter, there shouldn't be like a fifteen second, twenty five second, like whatever it was, there shouldn't have been that much time to react to nullify the situation. And that is the biggest problem we had in this whole thing. It's hard to say who Crooks really was. Like you said, there's just not enough out there, not enough available information. But and the other thing is, man, maybe he was one of those MK Ultra type candidates, who knows?

You know, possibly. So that's crazy. So let's go ahead and just get past this unless there's any new information. But as of now, it doesn't seem like there really isn't. It doesn't seem like we're ever going to know what really happened.

It seems like the FBI is trying to bury it for whatever reason, and we just don't know enough about Thomas Crooks to make any real informed decisions on what really did happen that day.

Right? Yeah. Well, the fact that the FBI lied about him not being in communications with somebody and then it comes out, oh, he's actually talking to somebody who's a neo Nazi on the State Department watch list. Yeah. I think that can help you from being really suspicious about what's really going on.

And I will say your MK Ultra comment, you know, I have no evidence of that, but we do have an interesting FBI record where in May 2024, what, two months before the shooting, he went to the hospital. A neighbor told the FBI that he... She sees Crooks leaving his house following paramedics, gets in the ambulance and then goes to the hospital. And then his bedroom light is off for the next two weeks, which the neighbor took that to mean that he was hospitalized for two weeks. The next time the neighbor sees him, she asked what happened and he said, I went to the hospital for dehydration, which doesn't make a whole lot of Like he was walking out of the house with his own power into the ambulance.

He's gone possibly for two weeks. Again, this is really speculative, but that's what the neighbor told the FBI according to the documents we have, and it is intriguing.

Yeah. I mean, I laughed only because it's like, the reality is we want to focus on the facts and what we know, but then these things come up, right? Like these examples come up to where you're like, Gosh, well, I don't know, maybe there's some weird nefarious force behind it all. Who knows? And they're obviously...

I mean, it seems like there is because there were two more assassination attempts on Trump. I don't know if there's more than that, but to my knowledge, right? And then so we can go to the golf course, the Trump International Golf Club, right? And you covered a little bit of that as well. Did you not?

Did you did you look into that as well?

Yeah. Big time. Got a whole chapter on it. Pretty comprehensive. And we know a lot more about that would be assassin, Ryan Ruth, than we do about Thomas Crooks.

And everything is highly suspicious about Ryan Ruth. Yes. I mean, this guy is a multiple time felon, was over in Ukraine helping recruit foreign fighters from Syria and Afghanistan to fight against Russia. This activity gets him put on at least seven different federal or international agencies' radars, including, you know, FBI, CIA, customs, DHS, Interpol. The State Department even opened investigation into him that was still open as of the time of the assassination attempt.

And it just raises real questions about how he was able to operate with impunity while he was being investigated. And then there's the event itself, which is, you know, almost as egregious as Butler. Yeah. Ryan Ryan's interesting because you've seen... Pictures of

what I came up later of him with with other people in different protest events around the world. And it's like, who is this guy? He seemed to have some access for sure that they're not letting everybody know about. He seemed like he was more connected than they're saying. So can you go a little deeper into Ryan Ruth and his connections or possible connections that that have come to light?

Yeah. So I mentioned the felons and I guess we could start with that. You know, this guy in 2002, he got into... He ran ran a construction business in Greensboro, North Carolina, just a little thing, but he was hiring illegal immigrants and he wasn't paying them. So he gets into a fight with them, pulls a four ten shotgun on one of them, tries to run over somebody else.

Please respond. He's got dynamite. He gets charged with felonies for all this, gets released on bail, gets into another dispute with the cops, even has a standoff where he gets pulled over, he runs away, and then he hides in his house for a couple hours. After all this, he just gets probation. Gets released a couple years later, another major felony where he's paying crackheads to steal stuff from construction sites and bring it to him so he could fence it.

More felonies, more probation, never goes to prison, politically radicalized in the late two thousand tens. He was initially a Trump guy, turned to Tulsi Gabbard in 2019, and then Putin invades. According to his self published book, which is still available on Amazon, I guess he just says, you know, in the name of human rights and democracy, I gotta help out. So he winds up his business. He goes to Poland, tries to cross the border to volunteer to fight.

You know, this gives a 58 year old construction worker with no combat experience. So they turn him down, but then he turns to recruiting these volunteers that I mentioned. That's what gets him on law enforcement's radar. You know, as far as them being connected, I think it's pretty easy when you go over there. The way it's been described is, you you get to Kiev, you're staying at a hotel or whatever, you're in the same square block as pretty much everybody internationally.

So you could go downstairs and see like Anderson Cooper having coffee and all, know, CIA agents, other volunteers. And he was like a super extroverted guy. So I think he just made a lot of connections because he was friendly and outgoing. I don't think it's something as explicit as them telling him to do something, but I do think he was influenced because all these people in Ukraine are virulently anti Trump and they're not just like your local, you know, your wine drinking aunt who's talking crap about the president. These are very high status people, people with connections to the state department, people from money, people that live in the Beltway.

And I think Ruth almost looked up to these people and said, well, I'll be a hero to them if I do something. I do think there was some subtle manipulation there too though, which we can get into.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, they see an American, right, who doesn't doesn't align with Trump that wants to go help in the war, and you're... It's very plausible they took advantage of the situation. They had, I hate to say it, but a useful idiot, right, that they can manipulate and used to do whatever it is that they want. And maybe that was the case.

And maybe he was looking for approval and he wanted to be famous for something like he felt he wanted to make a difference and this would have been it possibly. Could have been. So yeah, that's very plausible. That's very plausible. Very strange too, though.

You know, it really is.

Yeah. I guess the event itself raises the biggest questions. Like this guy is already like a really fascinating and bizarre character with multi... Like intelligence connections, connections to Ukraine. And then the event itself, you know, September 15, he's hiding in the bushes.

Trump is golfing on the fifth hole. Secret Service agent spots him on the sixth hole. The agent fires five times from less than 10 feet away, misses all five times. He runs off and thanks to a local witness who got his license plates, the cops caught him on the I-ninety 5 about forty five minutes later. So it's another case where the Secret Service actually didn't catch the guy at all or do anything.

But the bizarre thing is that he had been camping out in those bushes for ten hours before the shooting.

Yes.

And the thing about that is Trump's golf plans were last minute. He... The Secret Service actually found out around 2AM that Trump wanted to go golf later that day. And around that same time, Ruth, who had been camping at a local truck stop, shows up to the golf course. And that's a hell of a coincidence.

That makes me wonder, was there some sort of security leak? You know, was he at a waffle house and somebody, you know, not explicitly told him, but somebody said, hey, I hear Trump's gonna be at the golf course later that day, you know, put the kind of worm in his brain and he goes there. Moreover, the spot he was at is used by paparazzi photographers to take photos of Trump, which might be something well known in the journalism industry in Palm Beach, but this is a guy from North Carolina. He'd been living in Hawaii. How did he know that that was like the perfect spot to get a line of sight on Trump?

These things are my biggest questions about the event itself.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, the biggest the biggest tell in all of this is of everything you said. It could have been a popular spot. It could have hurt at a Waffle House, whatever, but why would he be in the area expecting that he might be there within that time frame? He was already there.

So how did he get that information? Where did the inclination come from for him to decide I should be there to pull this off? Yep. This is gonna happen.

Yeah. Because he had been in the Palm Beach area for a couple weeks. Basically, you know, he's becoming increasingly unhinged and radicalized. After Thomas Crooks fails at Butler, he decides that he's gonna try to finish the job. And we know this because he even text messaged some guy in Ukraine trying to buy a rocket launcher.

The Ukrainians thought he was just joking. This all came out in court, but then, know, he's driving. He goes to Palm Beach. He conducts surveillance at the airport. We know he is in the parking garage and where he parked had a clear line of sight to the hangar where Trump's plane was parked.

We know he tried to buy a sniper rifle at some point, so I think the thought is that he might have thought to do the hit at the airport. And then he was tracking Trump's airplane on a flight tracker app. So he knew that Trump was coming back to Palm Beach that day. But again, the golf plans weren't public and they were actually at the last minute. So, yeah, how did he know?

Like, why would he just take a chance on the small chance that Trump was gonna be there and to camp in the bushes for ten hours?

Makes no sense. Up. Yeah. That doesn't add up. Now the other parts do.

I mean, obviously, he wanted to pull this off. That's why he was in the air tracking, but he still wouldn't have been able to get information that, hey, two in the morning, he's gonna be playing golf tomorrow. Yep. That that that doesn't make any sense. So there must have been been a leak somewhere or he had some inside information somehow, but from somewhere.

Who knows? I don't know. You don't know. I wish we did, you know, but we don't.

And the thing is he had a trial, and what's really interesting is judge Eileen Cannon, who presided over the Mar A Lago classified documents case, was the judge in this case, and it it was revealed in court that there was classified information in the Ruth case, and she allowed the government to keep that sealed where they don't even provide it to Ruth as part of discovery. And her order says this information, you know, made public could harm national security. I'm like, well, that's very... Like, this is a criminal case. What is...

What about it as classified? Like, What's

what's in there that would harm national security?

Yeah. Usually, classified information cases are like, the FBI has a source in Iraq, and it's a terrorism case, so they don't wanna blow the source so they keep it classified or they're spying on somebody with Pfizer and they don't want to reveal that. They keep it classified. So that's... Like, it's very intriguing.

I'm sure Ruth was being under surveillance while he's in Ukraine, but that information ostensibly wouldn't be part of his criminal case. Like, if the FBI was spying on a Ukrainian who was talking to Rus and they scooped up his communications in 2022, that has nothing to do with the discovery of his attempted assassination case. So what is the classified information? That's like, to me, if I could have anything unsealed, that would be that classified information.

Yeah. But isn't that coincidental that, you know, previous assassination attempt in Butler, there's information that suddenly is not available because now it's under investigation again, even though it wasn't. And then with what happened here at the golf course, same thing, all of a sudden, oh wait, we can't let any information out because it could compromise national security. It seems too coincidental. Two attempts, two times the government shuts down information or lets anybody know what's...

The general public anyway know what's really going on, because it could compromise national security. It's very strange. So let's move into the next one, though. Just February of this year, there was another attempt, right? A Mar A Lago, I believe it was.

Do you have any information on that one?

Nothing beyond what's been publicly reported. The book was already kinda being finalized. I think you're referring to... Trump wasn't even there. I wouldn't consider that like a serious attempt.

It's some nut job who apparently was radicalized by the Epstein files, shows up with a shotgun and a can of gas, tries to get into the property, gets blown away. There was another one, what, a month or two later, the White House Correspondents'

Dinner Act. Too. Yeah.

Where... And that was a more legitimate attempt. Trump was there, and the guy's name's Cole Allen. He just sprinted through the security checkpoint, armed to the teeth. And another, you know, highlight for Secret Service history is they only caught him because he tripped and fell down.

He was almost to the... He was on one floor. Trump was a floor down. If he could have gotten down to the ballroom, maybe he doesn't kill Trump, but he could have wreaked havoc certainly. And then it turns out that he had rented the hotel room there days before and gotten the weapons in beforehand, so the Secret Service dropped the ball on that too.

So it just shows you that, again, even if we're not being conspiratorial, the Secret Service still has major, major issues.

They do. But I mean, for as many attempts as been made on trial, even if he wasn't in Mar A Lago, there was still somebody who assumed he would be there or was acting out regardless. So it's... We consider it as a combination of just crazy people, you know, that are brainwashed by social media and, you know, curated narratives, which very well could be the case. Or there really could be some nefarious organisation trying to push for assassinating Trump.

I mean, there's been multiple attempts already, which is, you know, in and of itself very telling. So maybe we're never gonna know. I find it interesting, as you said earlier, that the FBI or the government is refusing to really let general public know what happened in any of these case. Well, I wouldn't say any of them, at least the two that we discussed earlier, you know, the Butler and the international golf course incident. But it's very strange that like people are targeting Trump.

People are definitely going after him. Do you have anything else that you can probably bring to light as as far as the Butler or the the International Golf Club incident?

Well, with the Butler, there's an interesting angle of, like, a supposed Iranian connection because the guy was arrested on 07/12/2024, the day before Butler, this Pakistani guy who was supposedly working for the Iranian government to try to assassinate US politicians, including possibly Trump. The case gets unsealed a month later. Everybody freaks out. Says, oh, it has to be linked. And there...

Is a hell of a coincidence that this guy who is plotting to kill Trump was arrested the day before Trump was shot. If you look at the details though, this is a guy who was on The US's radar in early twenty twenty four. They let him into the country on purpose in April 2024. They run an FBI informant at him. The informant's driving him around, introduces him to two FBI agents posing as hitmen, undercover agents posing as hitmen.

They take him to a strip club. He says, okay, I'll give you the final target in Pakistan in September. And then they arrest him on his way out of the country. So it wasn't anything that was posed a real threat to the Trump. It was more like a manufactured FBI sting operation.

But the significance there is the FBI did tell the secret service that we have intelligence of an Iranian threat. And first of all, the officials in DC got this intelligence and they never passed that to the Pittsburgh field office. So arguably, if the Pittsburgh field office was told about an Iranian threat, however dubious it is, they would have been on their toes. They would have been a... Done a better job planning for Butler.

But b, because of this Iranian threat, that's the reason why secret service snipers were sent to Butler in the first place. It was the first time a former president has ever gotten secret service sniper protection. Usually, they just have local snipers, and those are the same snipers that waited fifteen seconds to return fire. So if if not for this intelligence and the snipers being sent there, he would have been protected by locals who would have done a better job, and we know this because they would have had the local radios and the snipers would have known what's going on.

This is crazy. It's the breakdown and lack of procedures and communication consistently with the Secret Service and law enforcement, not local law enforcement, but security in general. It's just nuts. And it... And we're just showing the rest of the world how vulnerable, you know, we really are or how easy it could be to get to the president.

It's just it's just ridiculous. It's... I mean, who would... Who is responsible? I I don't know.

I hope it... I hope that they... I hope they fix this. I hope they fix the situation because it doesn't seem like they're they're gonna stop trying to kill him.

Well, that's that's the thing that's really troubling is that a lot of people involved in Butler are... They're all still with the Secret Service. Nobody got fired. Only the former director resigned in disgrace. But the guy who is in charge of Trump's details named Sean Curran, He's now the director of the entire agency, so he got a promotion.

The Secret Service got a bigger budget. They're hiring more agents. It's like built in incentives for failure here where the agency that failed the most gets the biggest reward. Failing And until people are held accountable, people are fired or even worse, you're not going to solve these issues in my opinion.

Sad man, very sad. Ken, do you have anything else you want to add here before we talk about your book here?

No, I think we covered a lot to hopefully peak people's interest.

Oh, I think we did. And this is ongoing, so I'm hoping you're gonna do a follow-up or, you know, bring more stuff to light as it comes out. But I have your book pulled up here, looks like can get it on Amazon. This is it here, right?

Yeah.

Do you have any other places where people can find you?

I run a news site called headlineusa.com where we cover just national news from a conservativelibertarian point of view. Okay. And then I'm on Twitter. My handle is at JD underscore cashless, and that's pretty much it.

And is this your sub stack too?

Yes. At Ken Silva. And the book... The title is the Trump assassination plots. Oh, I think you said that at the outset, but What the investigation's missed and why it matters.

Awesome. Well, sir, appreciate you being here. I look forward to whatever you do in the future regarding these assassinations. I hope that we find out. I hope this doesn't turn into another JFK situation where we're just never gonna know, or it'll just be a big black page of a, you know, huge square black marker, you know, that they put on the page, all redacted.

But, anyway, appreciate your time, and let's stay in touch and I'd like to follow-up with you down the road as things come to light.

Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks again for the opportunity to be on your show. Thank you. Thanks for being here.