6/5/26 Ken Silva on the Trump Assassination Plots

Summary

Podcast Summary: Scott Horton Show – Just the Interviews

Episode: 6/5/26 Ken Silva on the Trump Assassination Plots
Date: June 7, 2026
Host: Scott Horton
Guest: Ken Silva (journalist, Libertarian Institute contributor, author of "The Trump Assassination Plots")
Guest co-host: Daryl Cooper

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Episode Overview

This interview dives into the details and controversies surrounding two major assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump – the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania rally shooting and the Palm Beach golf course plot by Ryan Ruth – as well as related government operations and narratives about Iranian involvement. Ken Silva, the author of the new book "The Trump Assassination Plots," shares his original investigative reporting, shedding light on institutional failures, unanswered questions, missteps, possible coverups, and the manipulation of political narratives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Swiss Cheese Security Failures at Butler, PA (04:00–17:50)

• Main Theme: The assassination attempt in Butler was a result of multiple small failures and miscommunications—a “Swiss cheese” effect where the holes lined up for disaster.
• Security Shortcomings:
  • Equipment meant to detect drones was out of order at the critical moment ([03:50–04:53]).
  • Technical issues (bad ethernet cable) delayed drone surveillance ([03:50]).
  • Poor inter-agency communication: Feds vs. locals, fractured radio channels, personal grudges among law enforcement ([04:53–08:14]).
  • Secret Service failed to relay timely information and did not act on multiple sightings of the assailant, Thomas Crooks ([06:46–09:06]).
  • Disinformation about ATF agents’ presence; official agencies stonewalled queries ([06:46]).

“If a couple of different decisions were made, or if decisions were made a few minutes early, I think things would have been a lot different.” – Ken Silva [03:50]

2. Timeline of the Butler Shooting (09:06–14:45)

• Assailant’s Movements: Crooks surveilled, left, returned with a rifle, flew a drone, and took a rooftop sniper position.
• Key Failings:
  • Local cops notified Secret Service about a suspicious individual, but information was not broadcast widely enough ([09:06–13:05]).
  • Radio channel confusion led to snipers in the adjacent AGR building not reacting in time ([13:05–13:46]).
  • Critical communication breakdown: Commanders dispute who was told what and when ([14:48]).
• Response Lag: Local policeman shot Crooks; Secret Service sniper watched through scope but delayed firing for over 15 seconds ([14:55–17:49]).

“Crooks got off eight shots in five seconds. And then…the ninth shot…came from a local cop on the ground. And then there were 10 whole seconds that passed again until the Secret Service sniper finally put that final bullet into Crooks.” – Ken Silva [14:56]

3. The Inexplicable Survival & Conspiratorial Aftermath (21:27–26:33)

• Miraculous Miss: The round merely grazed the skin above Trump’s ear ([21:27]).
• Conspiracy Outcry:
  • Many suspect a staged event; Ken debunks by referencing photos, blood evidence, medical records, and third-party medical exam ([23:35–26:33]).
  • “Luckiest guy in the world” explanation gains traction.

“If this was some kind of staged thing…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.” – Ken Silva [25:04]

4. Coverup, Autopsy Oddities & Incomplete Transparency (27:30–31:01)

• Autopsy & Evidence Issues:
  • Crooks’ body cremated before outside review.
  • Toxicology and autopsy reports incomplete or withheld ([27:30–31:01]).
  • Evidence supports that the local cop’s shot, not only the Secret Service’s, stopped the attack.
• Lack of Information:
  • FBI refused to share 99% of interview records with Congress ([34:55]), stonewalled inquiries.
  • Congress ended investigations without getting answers.

“The FBI totally stonewalled them...It was just a really piss poor job by Congress.” – Ken Silva [34:55]

5. Who Was Thomas Crooks? (31:01–38:58)

• Limited Backstory:
  • Gifted student, no apparent warning signs publicly.
  • Old social media shows violent ideation in his teens ([34:55]).
  • Crooks had been flagged previously; no evidence of wider conspiracy or handler revealed.

6. Trump & Congressional Silence (40:30–43:29)

• Trump’s Defensive Posture:
  • Trump shut down further investigation upon taking office.
  • Speculation over why he’d go silent about attempts on his life ([40:30]).
• Ongoing Grand Jury:
  • No public progress; much material still secret.

7. The Ryan Ruth Palm Beach Plot (45:16–54:40)

• Ruth’s Background:
  • Checkered criminal history, failed attempts at foreign volunteering, involved with US-connected actors, and flagged by multiple agencies.
  • Attempted to recruit fighters for Ukraine, flagged by multiple agencies, under federal scrutiny.
  • Set up a sniper nest at Mar-a-Lago; foiled by Secret Service, caught after fleeing ([45:16–50:28]).
• Questions Remain:
  • Ruth’s uncanny timing to Trump’s golf plans raises suspicions of a tip-off ([53:09]).
  • No evidence of Ukrainian or third-party direction, but exposure to vehement anti-Trump activists noted.

“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.” – Ken Silva [53:10]

8. The Possibility of Manipulation & Online Radicalization (55:28–61:10)

• Vulnerability to Manipulation:
  • Discussion of online entrapment and the possibility of foreign or domestic actors “fishing” for unstable people to encourage to violence.
  • Ken narrates a case where a young man, Nikita Cassip, was manipulated by Ukrainians online into committing murder, showing how digital radicalization and foreign manipulation can work ([57:59–61:10]).

9. “Iranian Plots” Against Trump: Media, DOJ & Reality (62:26–77:44)

• Narrative vs. Evidence:
  • Iran-linked assassination plots touted after the Soleimani strike, with little concrete evidence ([62:26]).
  • DOJ’s most publicized “plot” involved a hapless Pakistani, Asif Merchant, with no actual means, money, or viable plan, led on by FBI informants & undercover agents ([63:23–72:19]).
  • Ken, Scott, and Daryl all question the reality and motive of the government’s cases; emerge as manipulations or “fednappings,” modeled on “terror factory”-style FBI stings.
  • Whistleblower Stephen Friend calls these entrapments “just BS” ([75:21–77:14]).

10. Farhad Shaqiri & Further Iran “Plots” (79:14–83:52)

• Further Unsubstantiated Claims:
  • Case of Shaqiri mainly built on informant testimony about a separate (non-Trump) target, with evidence extremely tenuous.
  • Informants and the accused seemed entangled in murky quid-pro-quos; no evidence Iran directed Trump plots ([79:14–83:52]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Security Failure:

  "The locals did their best under the circumstances... they notified the Secret Service about this guy multiple times." – Ken Silva [09:06]

• On Conspiracy Theories About the Ear Wound:

  “If a bullet grazes the skin without actually cutting through the cartilage, there’s going to be a lot of blood, and it’s not going to leave a scar. So it is plausible, I grant you… But you know, the bullets were real, the blood was real, the bodies were real.” – Ken Silva [23:44]

• On the Secret Service Sniper Delay:

  “Either he's covering his ass, that's bad enough, or it's something even more nefarious.” – Ken Silva [16:15]

• On Trump’s Silence:

  “Trump’s silence on this has been the most puzzling thing of all… You’d think this would be something he’d be harping on 24/7.” – Ken Silva [40:30]

• On the Ruth Plot and Suspicious Timing:

  “The final report ... says that the Secret Service was informed about Trump’s golf plans at 2am; Ruth shows up around that exact same time.” – Ken Silva [53:10]

• On FBI Iran Plot Cases:

  “They're all, at the very least, highly controlled sting operations that never pose any kind of danger to Trump.” – Ken Silva [63:23]

• On Classified Evidence & Lack of Transparency:

  “There’s millions of items of classified evidence, which the government is allowed to hide in discovery… So who knows what's in that evidence?” – Ken Silva [78:50]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening, book intro, "Swiss cheese" analogy: 00:01–04:00
• Butler, PA breakdown (sequence of security failures): 04:00–14:45
• Secret Service response delay scandal: 14:55–17:49
• Daryl’s question on Crooks’s movements: 19:19–21:27
• Trump’s miraculous survival, conspiracy theories: 21:27–26:33
• Autopsy and cover-up discussion: 27:30–31:01
• Background on Crooks, online footprint, speculations: 31:01–38:58
• Congressional silence, investigation stonewalled: 40:30–43:29
• Ryan Ruth and the Palm Beach plot: 45:16–50:28
• Ukrainian/foreign links question: 51:04–54:40
• Suspicious timing, how did Ruth know where to be: 53:09–55:28
• Radicalization, online manipulation, Nikita Cassip case: 57:59–61:10
• Iranian plots and DOJ sting operation breakdown: 62:26–77:44
• Shaqiri/Iran follow-up “plots” and informant maneuvers: 79:14–83:52

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Tone and Style

The conversation is direct, wry, and deeply skeptical of official narratives, heavy on investigative detail with a penchant for dark humor (“Keystone coptitude,” “luckiest guy in the world,” and dry asides about staged events and government coverups). Scott and Ken are forthright about uncertainties, drawing clear lines between fact, informed speculation, and conspiracy.

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Summary Conclusion

Ken Silva’s reporting and book illuminate not just the unsettling vulnerability of US political leaders—even with layers of security—but also the persistent institutional secrecy that shrouds the full truth. Both assassination attempts—while almost surreal in their “lone kook” characteristics—are enveloped in a fog of missed signals, bureaucratic inertia, and a continued lack of transparency. Meanwhile, supposed Iranian plots paraded by officials turn out to be feeble, manufactured, or highly exaggerated. The episode ultimately raises more questions about government competence, credibility, and the nature of "threat," leaving listeners aware of the profound limits to what the public is being told.

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For further details, analysis, and original documents, Ken Silva’s book “The Trump Assassination Plots” (Libertarian Institute) is recommended.

Transcript

[Scott Horton]

Tonight on the show, Daryl Cooper has tech problems. So who's the boomer now, huh?

[Daryl Cooper]

All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is

[Scott Horton]

that gods can break, humans negotiate.

[Ken Silva]

Now end this war.

[Scott Horton]

You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present and future. This is Provoked. 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. Marty, the most honest and accomplished historian in American history, 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, but 15 more that I only published but didn't write. This one is if I can get the glare off the COVID for you. Here it is, the Trump assassination plots, only without the burp in the title. The Trump by the great Ken Silva, who is, I guess, something or other fellow at the Libertarian Institute. And welcome to the show. Ken, great to have you on tonight.

[Ken Silva]

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.

[Scott Horton]

Good. Well, we'll have to think of a title for you or something. I did, and you're welcome, and thank you. It was a mutually beneficient 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 gonna 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 nt, NTSB investigations and tells the stories of how planes crashed. And he likes to use this analogy of this, 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 mountain. 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 poor 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. 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 boneheaded cop stuff and not providing good enough security, while the proverbial lone kook was able to slip through the cracks. Tell us your, your basic assessment here.

[Ken Silva]

Yeah, well, if you want to frame it in the, you know, 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 guy, 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 like 4pm and the thing gets running at 4:15pm well, the alleged would be assassin, Thomas Crooks, just flew his drone over the site at 4pm 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.

[Scott Horton]

So now a few of these were just, you know, from my notes here, the guy stayed up late drinking the night before, which seems to be a story of Secret Service failures oftentimes. The Ethernet cable thing that you mentioned, I mean, as a 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, so 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. 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 intra cop personalities means 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 guess 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, 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?

[Ken Silva]

I certainly have my suspicions about the ATF agent. Yeah, what you're referencing is there's this Secret Service lady who's I guess walk 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 stonewalled. Congress and all the, you know, investigators, they said he was, quote, there in his personal capacity. It is, it is very strange. I, I found local text messages where there's a Robert McLennan 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. Like 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, it's very strange. He 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, maybe the ATF guy was there for that. But that's, that's total speculation.

[Scott Horton]

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 give us, you know, walk us through what Thomas Crooks was doing and you know, 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 seems so crazy and never even mind. We'll talk more about the, the perpetrator in a minute and the craziness of his whole character and all that in the situation there that morning. At the, the very best. We have some real keystone coptitude going on, but still, like help us understand how it happened.

[Ken Silva]

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 cased 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 4:30pm 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 sighting of Crooks was shortly after 5pm 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 you 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 sniper snipers on the barn. Crooks is seen a couple more times in the 5 o' clock hour. The shootings at 6:11pm by the way, right after 6pm 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 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 like 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 they have a guy on the roof, he radios that on channel three, which is like all it was like the traffic cops, some sheriff's deputies on the ground. But channel four 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 later.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, so, well, that you did answer one thing that I, 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 into 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 is a long time after seeing him up There. Even if the guy sprained his ankle, like, 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.

[Ken Silva]

Yeah, his body cam shows that he falls down and he had a gun pointed at him. So he sprints to his car to, like, go get his rifle, I guess.

[Scott Horton]

Well, fair enough, too. You know what? Okay.

[Ken Silva]

And at that point, the local command center does switch it over to channel four. 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 a bicycle and 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. But that's.

[Scott Horton]

So he's distracted by the bicycle there. Yeah.

[Ken Silva]

All right, now. And this is the. The real scandal starts now, if you want to get into that.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, well, go ahead.

[Ken Silva]

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. Suspicious. But this next part's 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. Ninth shot in like, the sixth second came from a local cop on the ground. And then there were 10 whole seconds that passed again until the Secret Service sniper finally put that final bullet into Crooks. And like, I've been thinking about this lot a lot. Like, I could have given the Secret Service sniper the benefit of the doubt, saying maybe it was hard to get him in his scope. He had to, you know, calibrate things. And then the local cop hits Crooks. Crooks staggers back. He has to re aim. 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. Stop 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, right, 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, she's covering his ass, that's bad enough, or it's something even more nefarious.

[Scott Horton]

Well, I mean, is it, is it possible that he missed his first couple of shots or something like that, or we know exactly how many casings. Etc.

[Ken Silva]

So, yeah, there were 10 shots.

[Scott Horton]

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.

[Ken Silva]

At 23 seconds in total from the time he start 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.

[Scott Horton]

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?

[Ken Silva]

I mean, well, that's hard to know because these secrets, he. 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, 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 return to the contradictory testimony, which Just looks really, really bad. And another weird thing is that Trump, after the White House correspondence dinner attack a couple weeks ago, he again called this guy 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 like Trump's just misinformed about the attempt on his own life.

[Scott Horton]

All right, well, I better let Mr. Cooper get in here. You got anything for us?

[Daryl Cooper]

So I guess I'm, 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 till a couple hours ago. So forgive me on that. I haven't had a chance to look at the book yet.

[Scott Horton]

Maybe you've entered it, but that too, I didn't decide to move him to

[Ken Silva]

Scott does that so, hey, I was

[Scott Horton]

trying to get the thing done.

[Daryl Cooper]

All of the extenuating circumstances like leading up to this that you've mentioned, like, I, 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, that seems, it just 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?

[Ken Silva]

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 pensky trunks 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, 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. Well, and then of course, you know, you got the Secret Service director saying the roof was too slow to actually post somebody on top. Like that's probably the thing that everybody remembers from this event is the slope roof fallacy. But yeah, again, just a piss poor excuse.

[Scott Horton]

All right, so look, I mean I got a couple of pages worth of 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, and motive for a great many conspiracies is the fact that this 556 round, or was it 2, 2, 3? But whatever this thing, it hit probably the part of the body like this, 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 above the cartilage. Got the slightest nick and cost, 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 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, yeah, 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, 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?

[Ken Silva]

Yeah, and I've really yet to encounter a coherent theory for how he actually could have staged this. So. 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, you know, grazes the skin without actually cutting through the cartilage, there's gonna be a Lot of blood with, and it's not gonna leave a scar. So it is plausible, I grant you. It's, he is just like the luckiest guy in the world, I guess. But you know, the, the bullets were 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 they're 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 think that if this was some kind of staged thing, the, 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, I would hope that would convince, you know, most rational people.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, well, hold on, let me get one in. 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 photographer you were talking about and brings him over and puts him in position. Position as that flag is being lowered down behind. What is going on with that?

[Ken Silva]

That's a great question. And so, yeah, people say the flag gets lower 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 into 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 escort 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.

[Scott Horton]

Now you talk a bit at a couple of different points in the book, Ken, 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 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.

[Ken Silva]

Yes. Yeah. So I was the reporter that actually published the autopsy and the toxicology reports in late 2024.

[Scott Horton]

I should have 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 write, which are like 10%.

[Ken Silva]

Yeah, those exclusively obtained documents. So thank you for plugging that. And yeah, so the autopsy says that Crooks was shot in through the left side of his neck, out the right side, and then the bullet went back into his shoulder, fragmented and created two re exit wounds, which is. That's probably what happened. It was a 300 win mag. 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 223 did hit something. We think if it might have even hit the buttstock of Crooks's gun. But either way, the local cop had to have done something because Crook stopped firing after the local cop shot. So despite bad evidence and all the reason that would dictate that the local cops bullet obviously saved the day, the medical examiner and the FBI both insisted that no, it's just a secret Service that 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 it Twitter sleuth came to me and said it looks like this report is incomplete. The examiner collected like nine specimens from, 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, other types of drugs

[Scott Horton]

which have been tied to all kinds of, you know, mass shootings and other, you know, crazy crimes. So yeah, all right, now look, I don't want to skip to, to Ryan, Ruth or the Iranians yet. We still do have some time. So I, I do want to focus still on crooks here a little bit. You know, we basically covered all the Keystone Cop stuff and, and most of the red herrings, you know, and all of that kind of deal. But so, and, and, and to Daryl'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 BlackRock 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, this guy? Whether he was just what, some kind of fame seeking kook or like what his motive was or whether anyone else helped 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. Right? That's the thing that they always 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, or what do we know about him that could help us to understand why this kid basically would dare to attempt such a thing?

[Ken Silva]

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. Sam. 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 BlackRock 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. Like Ryan Ruth being in an Azoff Battalion commercial is probably more interesting.

[Scott Horton]

Well, as long as you bring that up and we'll get back to that in a minute. But yeah, that was. What was so weird about the BlackRock commercial supposedly was that people mistook that Azov battalion video of Ryan Ruth as also being a black rock video. So. And I've seen people numerous times say, oh my God, explain that, that both of these guys were in BlackRock videos when. No, only one of them was. The other guy was in a Neo Nazi video. It's just different. So with a coincidence, it's an interesting coincidence. Without the coincidence, it's totally meaningless.

[Ken Silva]

Exactly, exactly. 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 in their 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 that 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 Hearing Committee. They got a tour at Quantico where they were shown crooks his rifle and shown a few heavily redacted documents, but they didn't get anything from the FBI either. And you know, I know you know Ron Paul or Rand Paul's 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 14, 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 crooks is all straight A student, blah blah, blah. But Tucker Carlson did obtain some social media activity from him a couple months ago that kind of show a whole nother 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 tip 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 might. 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 that we have.

[Scott Horton]

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 Culli and his great tax advice. It's agorist tax advice.com and I probably should have done a better job in the past of 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 tax man. This is none of that gimmicky, loophole stuff where you don't have to pay taxes, you do, too, but Matt Sersley will just make sure that you pay the absolute minimum of what you have to pay. That is agorist tax advice.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?

[Ken Silva]

Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

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, 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. He's. 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 to, like, that you've seen about why that would be, or if that's. If that's the case?

[Ken Silva]

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 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. He's been pretty much radio silent on it ever since. And, yeah, I've also heard that he used the one that shut down the investigation himself. 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? You think this would be something he'd be harping on 24 7? Yeah, that. 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. The answer that a lot of the pro FBI people have given is like, well, the. Who the hell is Joe Kent? Like this. It's like a bureaucratic turf war where they just don't want him butting 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

[Daryl Cooper]

what is the open criminal case in this. In this instance?

[Ken Silva]

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, they. Maybe they suspect that, you know, the racing. Feel like you had to assume there's no way that they just didn't know about what their son was doing. But it turns out that they, 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, like, 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 it's 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 that I, you know, I hope that answers your question. That's pretty much it.

[Scott Horton]

Well. And yeah, 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 terabytes? Four and a half terabytes, yeah. Worth of data on this guy and all these other things.

[Ken Silva]

So 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 50amonth. So at this pace, you know, we'll all be dead before all 75,000 are released.

[Scott Horton]

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, first of all. So this is the guy who attempted to. He never even 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 Mar a 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 low 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 to have motivated him to try to kill Donald Trump?

[Ken Silva]

Yeah. Unlike crooks, we've got pretty much Ruth'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 has a. 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 time felon. Now we're in the 2010s. He seems, you know, just like kind of a dirt bag 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 that, 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. 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, CIA. 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 and Syrians. The State Department even opened up an investigation into him for arm 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 him 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 Ramiro about trying to get some AFGHANS into the U.S. it was, 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 launcher from somebody in Ukraine saying, you think Trump's gonna be good for you? Like we gotta 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 golf course about 11 hours before Trump shows up. Trump's golfing on the fifth hole. The secret Service is doing an advance. An agent spots him hiding in the bushes. The agent shoots five times from about five to 10ft away, but misses all five times. Crooks runs away, gets into a Nissan Xterra and drives away. But a witness who heard the firing took the plates and then he's pulled over on the i95, about 45 minutes later. So another instance where the Secret Service didn't even catch the guy. It was, it's thanks to this witness. They got him a little bit later, but he could have been at large for God knows how long.

[Scott Horton]

Man, that's a lot.

[Ken Silva]

Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

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 gotta 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 I've seen any indication that that myself, but I wonder if you have.

[Ken Silva]

No, I haven't seen any evidence. And in fact I. 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 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 anytime. 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 like thinks the P 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 talks 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 there. 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 2:30am and is camping there for about 11 hours before the incident. And Trump's golf plans were last minute.

[Daryl Cooper]

That's what I was gonna ask. Yeah.

[Ken Silva]

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 2am so that happens at 2am 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 know exact 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 Lindsey Graham, huge Ukraine sponsor, was set to golf with Trump that day. Trump and Steve Witkoff. 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 bag off at the last minute.

[Scott Horton]

That's just a coincidence. Water bed. He had to go. All right, well, yeah, now 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. 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, of information. Daryl Cooper.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I mean, I guess or he got lucky, but that seems very. That seems like the least likely exploration 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, 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 like, put A picture together of a lot of what that, you know, like 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 them 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 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 so 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 him and whatever, move on. Yeah, 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 prison, so 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. But they were stonewalling Congress. You said, what, what, what is their excuse for that? I mean, ongoing investigation.

[Ken Silva]

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 foil, like, oh, if the investigation's closed, can we have the records? And I get a response. And after a couple months saying, you 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 Cassip, 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, saying, like, we need. He's into. He was like a accelerationist. It's one of these chat rooms are into like, Satanism and like extreme Neo Nazism and like, the idea is to collapse society so we could have the Ubermensch 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, Daryl, is 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.00.1 of the population, percent of the population is in, is interested in like mass shootings or school shootings or committing these types of acts of terrorism. But they, 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. All kinds of heinous Things. Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

So now is the Mundos 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. It's. You just go to Scott Horton.org 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 Coffee so now for the Mundo's 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 ayatollah. Comedy. 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?

[Ken Silva]

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.

[Scott Horton]

It was all a diabolical plot by me and Iran to make them. And listen to my Moon Doze artisan coffee commercial. Also, everyone buy my books. Provoked enough already. Fool's errand. They're really good. Okay, sorry, go ahead.

[Ken Silva]

Yeah, we heard when the war started earlier this year, one of the reasons that they kind of threw against the wall and 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.

[Scott Horton]

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 Darryl. We've been sitting there going, is it the money? Is it the blackmail? No, it's. He believed this crap, dude. Oh, man.

[Ken Silva]

He actually might believe it. That. 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 refer referring to Butler and Palm Beach. And Netanyahu goes, yeah, like through their proxies, they tried to kill me too. And he clearly the reporter was asking about Butler and Paul Beach. So it's pretty disingenuous by bb, you know, surprise, surprise. But, you know, even if we go into these cases that the DOJ has been 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 12, 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 Asif Merchant guy and what happened in Butler. And I haven't found any link. But either way, this, the case itself shows that it was really like a Whitmer type Fed napping 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 US 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, recruitment, somebody to be an informant. And a reporter named John Solomon had actually had a source that told him 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 cases with here. In 2024, the Biden administration was apparently letting in people on the terrorist watch list on purpose to monitor them, see where they go and, you know, I guess make cases like this Merchant one. So Merchant gets into the country, 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 Mershant has even proposed to do anything illegal. They do have some. A meeting in a hotel where Mershon is talking about assassinating politicians. And this is. You might have seen it circulating online. He's. The hotel room is wired for surveillance, and he's talking, drawing 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, who, 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 Merchant 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 Merchant and he thought he saw people tailing him, I guess, unmarked vehicles. He calls up the FBI and they say, oh, we're putting Marshad under surveillance, that we've been following him. Will you work for us and just play along and see what he does and kind of be our eyes and ears? And I guess he agreed. That's. That's the official story. So that's. That's how he became an informant. He eventually introduces Merchant 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 12 that he was arrested. I think you're muted, Scott.

[Scott Horton]

I always do that. I think that probably is just coincidence. And before we go on here, I'll ask both of you, because I'm not sure which it is, but. 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. Your 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. It ain't like he just kind of snuck in or whatever. He was deliberately allow by federal police intervention with the state department. Yeah, the. With state or the customs and border, whatever, dhs, to get him into the country. And then now the informant that was driving him Around. I think this is something. I got lost in the story. Why were we supposed to believe, or how are 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?

[Ken Silva]

Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

Is a usual, like sometimes a hard one to broach, you know.

[Ken Silva]

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. I know some guys. I'm in. In the. In here deep in New York City, the. The undercover FBI agents were also posing not only as hitman, 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. Thing.

[Scott Horton]

Okay, well, Cooper, go ahead and get in here if you want, man.

[Daryl Cooper]

While I think of things, think quickly because honestly, I don't really know much about this case.

[Scott Horton]

I'm.

[Daryl Cooper]

I'm learning more about it from YouTube talking right now than I probably have.

[Scott Horton]

All right, well, I got my, 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 some kind of low level theft to. 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.

[Ken Silva]

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 12 and the next day, day he has like a proffer session where he admits that he had. He thinks he has a handler in Iran who told him to take certain steps and make connections. Again, keep. Keep in mind, he didn't Speak English. Didn't have any money. Didn't. 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 there. 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. Like, he's. He's like a joke. So, yeah, he did. 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 missiles at US 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, you know, while they're fomenting this plot, they let Crooks and Ruth slip right under their noses. So that, like, 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.

[Scott Horton]

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 Tsarnaevs, who the older brother was an 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 terrafactory FBI entrapment cases and just says, this is just bs. So can you tell us a little bit about Friend and what's his deal?

[Ken Silva]

He was an FBI agent. And by the way, I'm still hearing feedback as I wonder if it's my fault. It might be me

[Scott Horton]

now. I can't hear you at all, Ken. Whatever. You just changed.

[Ken Silva]

Okay.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, now you're back.

[Ken Silva]

All right, so maybe this is better. Yeah. Steve Friend was an FBI agent who turned whistleblower after January 6th. And his main disclosure was that instead of treating January 6th 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 six. So that, 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.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. All right. And I guess bottom line, though, is whoever it was that was supposedly putting him up to this, we don't really know who that was or that they were Iranian at all or what. And it seems quite odd 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, because. Explain. Because they had a trial, right?

[Ken Silva]

They went to court.

[Scott Horton]

And so. But in discovery, we didn't get to find out anything about the, the secret Iranian boss back home.

[Ken Silva]

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 Murad Yousef, and he says that he followed these instructions because he has family in Iran, even though he's a, he's a Pakistani guy. He said he was acting under distress and that's why he went to the US 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. Should have brought this up in the Ruth case. The Ruth case and this Merchant 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 what's in that evidence? But, you know, it raises question, especially with the Ruth case, like, why the hell is there classified information there?

[Scott Horton]

Right, yeah, exactly. All right, so some horrible varmint was posing a threat to martyr maids chickens, and he was not about to let them be martyred, so he went to go and save those chickens. 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?

[Ken Silva]

Or not. Well, he was. He was 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 Shqri guy who's in Iran communicating with two street thugs and New York City having them conduct surveillance on this Iranian dissident journalist, Masi 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.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ken Silva]

So the Shaqiri 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.

[Scott Horton]

And now I think you say that there's an informant. Do I have this right? That the FBI has a guy on the line in Iran and. 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 friend. Is that right?

[Ken Silva]

And that. That is Shaqiri. That's the guy.

[Scott Horton]

Okay.

[Ken Silva]

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 very. It's like almost like they burn their own informant who's giving him all this information, and then they make him a defendant. But the charging papers 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.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, well, what happened to his friend? Did he get time off his sentence?

[Ken Silva]

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 referenced in the charging papers. Real. Another thing we should probably add is there is an unindicted co conspirator named in the criminal complaint who is 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.

[Scott Horton]

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'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 [e-mail] and occasionally he 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 the most boring pod. Provoked. See y' 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. Go follow at ProvokedShow on X and YouTube and tune in next time for more Provoked.