Transcription
The official story of the shooter at the White House Correspondents' Dinner seems to have just completely collapsed with the revelation that the shooter may not have been a shooter at all. I will explain. I want to be clear about what we know, what's still investigated. We need to separate fact from fiction.
Now, let's start with the primary uh uh sort of bullet point, which is the shooter ran past security and fired a bunch of rounds before being stopped alive by Secret Service and police. That's the official story we started with.
Over the last couple of days, a very different possibility has emerged. And I have to tell you from the beginning, I found it sort of strange that if the shooter really fired five or six rounds, that he would be caught alive, that he wouldn't be killed, especially when by the standards that our law enforcement is expected to abide by, it would be completely legitimate in the eyes of the law to shoot dead a suspect that has gotten five or six rounds off, especially in that chaotic situation. I found it weird.
It now appears as though the shooter may have fired one round or maybe even zero rounds and would have been a potential shooter had he gotten close to Donald Trump, but not an actual shooter as was described. Todd Blanch was asked about this, the Attorney General, and he was asked, um, "Have you been able to determine whether the gunman fired any shots?" And Blanch says, "Well, that is something we are still looking at." He is unable to say definitively that the shooter shot at all.
>> Have you been able to determine whether the gunman fired shots? If so, how many shots he fired? And who exactly whose bullet hit the agent?
>> We're still, we want to get that right. So, we're still looking at that. We It appears, and I I don't want to to overstate because we are still looking at this, that there were five five shots that that law enforcement fired.
>> We are.
>> Law enforcement fired.
>> We we have the all the evidence is being examined very carefully and expeditiously, and we'll know more soon. We do believe that as as the complaint lays out that the suspect, that the defendant fired it um out of his shotgun, and and we know that that happened. But as far as getting into exacting ballistics um, I'm not going to do that today because it's still being um being looked at and finalized.
Now, one of the fascinating things is that while he kind of throws in there, oh yeah, um, we do know that the gunman did fire a shot, I guess, we are also hearing that they haven't found the bullet casings for any rounds fired by the shooter. And it was brushed off as it's crazy, you don't always find that. Kind of a key piece of forensic evidence.
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Now, back to the video. Here is one more clip of Todd Blanch talking about this.
>> I don't have anything further to talk about with the ballistics that are still being analyzed. And I I said it yesterday, and I every law enforcement member who is speaking on this issue is saying the same thing, as they should, which is that this is an ongoing investigation with really really smart experts trying to understand what happened in that shooting and and where the bullets went and ended up and where the bullets came from. And and once that is at a place where we can definitively say, to the extent we can definitively say, we will we will let you know.
It is possible, ladies and gentlemen, that the shooter fired no shots, that law enforcement fired five or six shots, and that the Secret Service officer that was struck by a bullet might have been struck by friendly fire.
Now, I'm going to tell you something else. When I heard that the shooter had fired rounds in a lobby on a different floor than Trump was at that moment, that also didn't make a lot of sense to me. Now, I said to myself, what is the possible explanation? Why would the shooter discharge five rounds when he's on a different floor from Trump in the lobby? And the only explanation I could come up with at the time was, listen, maybe the shooter realized he wasn't going to get anywhere near Donald Trump and decided in desperation, I'm not going to allow this to be for nothing. I'm going to start firing indiscriminately in the lobby. But it was weird. I had to sort of come up with an explanation for that.
We are now learning the shooter may not have fired any rounds at all, which actually makes a lot more sense because he got nowhere near his target, Donald Trump. He wasn't in the room. He wasn't even on the same floor. Now, prosecutors again, that they're still sticking on this. We believe the shooter fired at least one round instead of five or six. Um, it is now a completely different situation, at least potentially, completely different. And it may have been friendly fire. Specifically, a Secret Service officer shot who then drew his weapon and fired multiple times may have been shot by another officer. And this goes back to this entire, the best defense is good guys with guns. And it's all better, and it's all clearer, and it's all more organized, and everybody is safer, and it appears as though the injury that took place may have been may have been the result of friendly fire from good guys with guns.
Now, everybody is saying we don't yet totally know, but it is a dramatic change from the original story. And to be frank, this explains a lot more than the original story. Given the growing perception of incompetence and these breakdowns within the Secret Service, it almost makes more sense that there could have been confusion and officer officers firing at each other, police and Secret Service misidentifying one another. That makes more sense in a way than the shooter decid deciding to randomly fire in a lobby nowhere near the President of the United States. If the real story here is confusion and friendly fire, that is a different kind of failure than the one we were first told about. There were failures here regardless. And this leads us now to a broader conversation about the Secret Service.