← The Tom Woods Show
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- [00:02]
A
Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know. You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.
- [00:19]
B
Hey, everybody, Tom woods here. I'm delighted for episode 2763 to be joined by Ken Silva, who is the author of the freshly released book the Trump Assassination Plots. What the investigations missed and why it matters. And you know, I followed this, I guess somewhat casually, this almost commonplace matter now of assassination attempts. I, you know, I think I've kept up with it as much as any reasonably informed person. And I thought, well, geez, in this day and age with the Internet and with information moving so quickly, you know, a book is going to be kind of old news. But not so not so. This book, the Trump Assassination Plots is. Takes all those little tiny bits of oddballery that you read about relating to them and puts it all together for you in one place. You know, like I, I took all the COVID craziness, put it put into a book so that we could get the full picture of the thing. And when you have the full picture of the thing, something comes into focus, but I'm not exactly sure what it is. Let's start with the obvious place to start, which is Butler, Pennsylvania. Now, there is so much that can be said here. We could talk about the preparation or lack thereof that was done in the days leading up to that event. We can certainly talk about maybe snafus that occurred on that day. We can talk about either an extreme lack of curiosity on the part of a lot of important people or the possibility that something's being covered up. And of course, we can only speculate what that is, you know, you know, all of it. So let me invite you. Where do you think we should start?
- [02:01]
C
Yeah, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on. I've been a fan of yours for about 15 years, so it's really a thrill to finally talk to you. And yeah, actually very proud of how the book turned out. We did. The first chapter is basically a minute by minute action scene of how July 13, 2024 unfolded from 8am through the shooting and up until midnight that night. Basically Congress did an investigation that really, you know, the findings were kind of what we already know. Like nobody covered the AGR rooftop that was later used by alleged would be assassin Thomas Crooks as a sniper perch. You know, Trump had been denied resources. A lot of people know about the whole slope roof fallacy where the former director said, we didn't have anybody up there because the Roof was sloped, which is obviously absurd. But what Congress did that was great is dump about 50 interview transcripts of all the Secret Service, state and local law enforcement agencies that they interviewed for their investigation. For some reason, like no other reporter actually read through these things. And so what I did is read through everyone and kind of triangulated the testimony with body cam footage, cell phone footage, radio communications and other evidence that came out to kind of try to paint readers a picture. So it all starts at 8am on July 13. The site advance agent shows up and nobody else is at the farm show and she's kind of frustrated. There's rumors that they had all been drinking out late at a Pittsburgh bar the previous night. People don't show up until about 10am and the secret Service holds a briefing where they actually don't allow state or local law enforcement to participate. There was a state trooper that tried to get in and he was actually kicked out. Which is, you know, just one of the many things that have never really been explained satisfactorily. Around the same time, Thomas Crooks, the would be assassin, shows up. He drives around, I guess he's apparently scouting it out and he goes back to his home in Bethel park, which is almost an hour away near Pittsburgh. You know, meanwhile the law enforcement is still setting up. Crooks allegedly gets his gun from his dad, he goes by some ammo and he buys a ladder too. But there's kind of a misconception that he got up on the roof with a ladder. The ladder was found in a wooded area near Pittsburgh. That hasn't been explained later or either. The first sighting of Crooks by law enforcement is around 4:26pm there's two snipers inside of the AGR building that they say saw Crooks down kind of lingering around. One of them leaves and says, hey, this guy looks suspicious. But this is the first really odd, unexplained thing is that Crooks was actually on the other side of the site. Cell phone footage was released a couple weeks later showing Crooks walking around by the vendors. So this sighting by law enforcement was not Crooks and it just, it's one of many like false Crooks sightings of that day. Law enforcement does we know for sure? They confirmed to see him shortly after 5pm with a range finder. These are the same snipers inside of the AGR building. One of the snipers takes photos of Crooks later looking at his cell phone. This is what got blasted out to the other law enforcement eventually. And then Secret Service is finally Informed by local law enforcement around maybe 5:35 45 that there's somebody suspicious outside of the perimeter with a range finder, the Secret Service command center agent Jeffrey Burr. He never puts that on over the radios. Instead he tells somebody else who calls somebody near Trump and they go searching, but it's really a half hearted search. Finally around 6pm the snipers up in the AGR building see Crooks again. He runs away. They think he's going all the way around the building, but instead he actually went up in one of the alcoves and climbed up on top. So while the local cops are all searching on the northeast side, Crooks is actually on top of the rooftop, presumably assembling his rifle that he had in his backpack. Law enforcement again is searching and finally somebody sees Crooks on the rooftop. This is around like 6:08pm by the way. The shooting's 6:11, so this is like four minutes before the shooting. They know he's on the rooftop. They don't take Trump off the stage. They're still, I guess, trying to get up there. The Secret Service is informed of this, but they don't take any action. Meanwhile, there's a cop at a Butler Township police station that's listening to all the chatter on the radio. He decides to help and assist in the chase because he's like a younger, relatively fit guy. He drives his car straight to the AGR building. He tries to climb up on the rooftop. He looks up, sees Crooks with the rifle. Crooks points the rifle at the cop. The cop drops down and says, hey, there's a guy on the roof with a gun. And this again is just over the local radios. The Secret Service says they never heard anything about this. And then it's about 30 seconds later that the shooting starts. So I'll stop there to see if you have any questions about, you know, the lead up.
- [07:51]
B
Well, I think what started to happen early on is that because we didn't get the kind of level of information that I think we probably expected we would get, a lot of online speculation began to occur about what really might have happened and who is this guy and could there have been a second shooter or could he have been a patsy or all these other kinds of things. And there is a point in your book where you talk about some of this online speculation and some of it done by perfectly decent people but arguing that this was actually unhelpful, that looks like some people were just going down the wrong roads. So maybe I'm getting way ahead of us and I apologize if so. But there isn't reason to think that somebody other than this guy was the shooter, is there?
- [08:36]
C
I believe that the shooter was definitely the guy on the rooftop, which is almost certainly crooks. The best evidence we have for that is during the search. I just told you the local cop from the police station drove to the AGR building, and his dash cam was actually on while he's trying to climb the roof. And he gets the gun pointed at him. And the dash cam is totally stationary. And at 6:11, when the shooting starts firing, you hear eight consistent shots from the same location that all sound exactly the same. And it's the same sequence that you hear from other cameras. I think in the immediate aftermath, you hear like there's cell phone footage and you hear different shots sounding like they're coming from different locations, but that's because the cell phones are moving. So I think that dash cam is pretty solid evidence. And then, you know, a lot of people have talked about that water tower. There's a water tower nearby. And there was rumors, actually, some of the attendees said that they heard people talk about a second shooter up on the water tower. You know, I've been to the site, though, and the water tower is actually right there. It looks like it's a lot farther away when you're watching, you know, the footage of the Trump rally just on your, you know, YouTube or whatever. But it's right there. Like somebody, obviously anybody could have spotted somebody if he was on the water tower. It's unclear how they would have made their escape. There's like a residential neighborhood right there. It's just very implausible. And coupled with the fact that the water tower you've been shooting almost like straight down, like, the trajectories don't really match. So we could definitely rule out the water tower. All that said, the most interesting testimony about a possible second shooter is that there were Secret Service snipers on a barn. If you're facing Trump, it would have been over his right shoulder. And they swear that they took fire. And the thing is that there were actually trees blocking them from crooks. So unless crooks started wildly spraying shots and one of the bullets went in between them, there's been a lot of speculation that maybe somebody else took a pot shot at the snipers. I still find that kind of dubious. But, you know, the testimony is what it is.
- [10:55]
B
So somebody. I don't remember the names the way you do, but person who ended up resigning was asked if they had. I think, was asked if they had viewed that slanted roof as a possible security problem was. Was that the question that she gave two answers to depending on which senator asked her the question?
- [11:14]
C
Yeah, that's former director Kimberly Cheadle. And she, yeah, she initially said that, oh, we, you know, we considered it, but we had it covered by one set of Secret Service snipers. She later said that, oh, that was the local's responsibility. That was outside of our site perimeter. There was a chain link fence separating the actual rally site with the AGR building. And yeah, technically it was, you know, all local cops there. But anybody with a brain can see that it was only 150 yards away. It had a clear line of sight. Apparently the campaign was supposed to have stationed like Penske trucks and farm equipment to block the line of sight. But you know, of course that raid just raises questions, leadership questions. Like, you show up and the equipment's not there. Like, what are you doing? How do you let. Just let this go on?
- [12:07]
B
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- [13:35]
C
Absolutely. And this to me is the biggest scandal that has been really ignored by conservative media and even Trump himself. So go back to the recent White House correspondent's dinner attack. Trump does a press conference afterwards and he said, well, the Secret Service today did a lot better job than they did at Butler. Although you know, my guy David, he's the Secret Service counter sniper that shot Crooks. He saved my life. From 400 yards away in 4.2 seconds he put the bullet through the would be assassin. Neither one of those statements by Trump is true. In fact, the Secret Service sniper was on a barn that would have been over Trump's left shoulder from only about 150 yards away. And more scandalously, he waited 15 entire seconds before returning fire. The actual shot sequences, Crooks shoots three relatively well aimed shots. The first one Nixon Trump's ear. And then there's two more shots. The second one buzzes right over his shoulder as captured by New York Times photographer Doug Mills. He won a, that's the one that won the Pulitzer Prize. You could actually see the bullet. And then Crooks does five very quick rapid fire shots where he's seemingly shooting indiscriminately. That's one of kills the firefighter Corey Comperatori. And that's all in the first five seconds. And immediately after that eighth shot is a ninth shot from a local cop on the ground. His name is Aaron Salaponi. He was deployed, he was on a QRF, a quick reaction force that was deployed maybe 15 seconds before shooting started. And he's on the ground, he shoots one shot and then all the shooting stops. 10 whole seconds, 10 more seconds pass until that Secret Service sniper puts the final bullet through Crooks. It goes into Crooks's neck, out the right side, back into the shoulder, fragments and causes two more re exit wounds. So you know, 15, like if we stop talking right now for 15 seconds it would get pretty awkward. Like that's a really long time. You could run 100 yard dash in that time and I could give him the benefit of the doubt to say maybe he was caught flat footed even though he was looking in that direction. The shooting starts, he panics a little and you know, even the best of professionals can make mistakes. However, his testimony raises very troubling questions. He initially testified to the Congressional Select Committee that was kind of formed to investigate this whole thing. And he told the committee that he didn't see Crooks until after the shooting began. And then a couple days later he testified to the Senate Homeland Security Committee and he gives a similar testimony. But one of the staffers, I don't know who this guy is, but he, I think he's kind of a hero. This is like a Perry Mason moment. He pulls out the Secret Service's notes and said, well, the notes that we got from your agency of what you wrote down right after the incident says that you saw crooks crawling into place and you actually witnessed the firing. And so that's like glaring contradictions between this guy's testimony. His name's David King, by the way. We figured out his name because Trump said his name is David. His name is David. I love David. And he's captured on police body cam with the patch D. King. So when Trump said his name is David, which he first said on the one year anniversary to I think the New York Post, Miranda Devine. I did a Google search for David King. Secret Service found his LinkedIn profile, messaged him. He declined to comment. And then Susan Crabtree, who's a great reporter since corroborated his identity. So that's for sure his name. Like I said, the contradictory testimonies really look bad for him. And again, maybe he's just trying to cover his own ass. They're painting him as a hero and he doesn't want to admit how bad he messed up. But if people view this with suspicion, I really can't blame them.
- [17:56]
B
What about Trump himself on this matter in terms of do you feel like as somebody who was nearly killed, I mean, if this analysis is to be believed, that it was just the fact that he turned his head to look at a graphic at just the right moment, that he didn't get certainly killed on the spot? Does it seem like he has pushed the question and asked enough questions and pursued it the way you would think somebody would pursue it?
- [18:23]
C
I think it's pretty obvious that he hasn't. I mean, he takes office and he basically says, yeah, I want a full briefing from the FBI and the Secret Service next week. He gets the briefing and at first he says, well, it wasn't really explained to me very well. But then he later says, you know, I guess it was just two crazy guys referring to the second would be assassin Ryan Roos. And since then he's been pretty tight lipped about it to the point where now we've got a lot of conspiracies proliferating that, oh, he's quiet about it because he was in on it. He staged his own assassination attempt. And I could tell you I don't believe that to be the case at all. I mean, the Bullets were real, the bodies were real, the blood was real, there was shrapnel flying everywhere. If you believe Trump's crazy enough to have live bullets fired at him, like, I guess it would be hard to really convince you otherwise, but I, I find that highly dubious. And keep in mind, he wasn't president at the time. This is Biden's Secret Service, Biden's FBI. He's surrounded by FBI informants. I'm sure they're listening to all his conversations. Like, where? When would he have had the chance to plot something like this without the people investigating him finding out? And moreover, like 10 days later, this thing is totally out of the media. So if the media is complicit, if the New York Times is like photoshopping bullets into photos, but then they totally memory hole it like 10 days later instead of playing it up as a propaganda event, that also doesn't make sense to me. And one of the most underrated pieces of evidence I think, that I found in these congressional transcripts is the fact that in the chaos when he's ushered off the stage, he leaves his own doctor behind. They actually took him to the butler hospital and because his personal physician was left at the farm show in all the chaos, they needed to fly, have a local Butler hospital doctor examine him, and then they took him on. Trump Force One to New Jersey was the next stop. The butler doctor had to fly with him. So again, if he was staging his own attempt, you'd think that he'd keep his personal physician close at hand. They go to the hospital and say, hey, nobody else is allowed to look at the ear for national security reasons. So I think we could pretty much put that to bed. But that again begs your first question, like, so what is going on here? And I really don't know, maybe crooks was some kind of like, on the Fed's radar, MK Ultra, maybe if this was sort of inside job, they threatened Trump's family. That's total speculation. But it is one of like, the most bizarre unanswered question we have is why? Why is Trump been so quiet about the own attempts on his life?
- [21:16]
B
Well, the why is always speculative. But tell me what would be three questions that aren't why, or a few questions that might be what or who or how that you wish we had the answer to from that day.
- [21:30]
C
Well, the biggest question I have is like, why David King, the counter sniper, waited 15 seconds to respond. Fire. Another one is there was a mystery ATF agent who was on the scene and he wasn't supposed to be there that day. The ATF wasn't part of the security plan. A Secret Service agent, like, spotted him behind the scenes in security. Basically, she strikes up a conversation and says, well, who are you? And he says, I'm with the atf. And she didn't pursue it further. And then when this comes out a couple weeks later, the ATF says he was there in his personal capacity. And he wasn't, though, like, the Secret Service agent swears, like, oh, I thought he was with, like, explosive ordinance devices, like, with that unit. So that's like, a big unanswered question is, like, who was this ATF agent? I found an ATF agent's name in some of the text messages exchanged with local law enforcement. There's a guy named Robert McLennan, and I looked him up, and before he was with the atf, he was with the Department of Energy working on nuclear security, probably as a top secret security clearance. Unclear why somebody would go from the DOE to a Pittsburgh ATF office. Like, I know this. Like, we're getting into, like, really? You could argue, like, conspiracy stuff, but that's a big one. That's always been puzzling to me. And then the Secret Service guy in charge of the command center who never radioed about anybody on the roof, swears he never heard it, even though local and state law enforcement say that, yes, we inform this guy. It turns out that he's actually the special agent in charge of the Buffalo field office, which I thought, very strange. This guy's in charge of a giant jurisdiction, and yet he's in Butler on July 13, just as kind of a boots on the ground poststander. And he's the guy that makes some of the most crucial errors. He's since retired, so those are a few of the many just questions I still have. That's just for Butler.
- [23:38]
B
Right. And we haven't moved on from Butler just yet. Before we do that, are there unanswered questions about who Thomas Crooks is? I mean, I know that it was that he's apparently got somebody somewhere has significant amount of, I guess, digital information related to him, but that we don't have access to. Is there anything contradictory in his actions on that day and things he was saying or planning or doing in his private life?
- [24:07]
C
He's a walking contradiction. So he graduated Community College in May 2024, and he was planning to go to Robert Morris University to study engineering that fall. And I obtained his community college emails, and it was like, June 14th or 15th, he emails the community college saying, hey, I need a copy of my diploma so I could go to the four year university this fall. That's less than a month of him winding up dead on a rooftop. And he just doesn't sound like a man who is preparing to go on a suicide mission. By all accounts, all public accounts, he was kind of the guy you'd want to have as your son. He was very smart, polite, studious. At one point, like for engineering project, he 3D printed a Rubik's cube and a chessboard and with braille on it. And his mother's like legally blind, so he's clearly very close with his mother. I've got a speech where he says, my favorite thing to do is like, cook with my mom. His teachers all loved him. His fellow classmates thought he was kind of nerdy, but they never thought he was like a Columbine trench coat type wearing kid. But that's kind of the public picture we have of crooks. He does seem to have a much darker online Persona, and this was revealed by tucker Carlson about six months ago. He obtained a trove of Internet, YouTube comments and other social media data about crooks around the 2019, 2020 era, where he would have been probably like 16. But he's openly discussing actually assassinating government officials on a YouTube video. So to me, that gives kind of like a clue of his online profile. He might have been involved in these kind of like extremist chat rooms. And when I say extremist, I don't mean like the SPLC definition of extremists. I'm talking about like these online chat rooms that are devoted to mass shootings, school shootings, just really gore videos, like really dark, dark stuff that we've seen these cases kind of proliferate in recent years. Like a lot of mass shooters hang out in these venues. So that could have been who crooks really was. But more importantly, because he was openly discussing violent rhetoric including assassinating government officials, he had to have been flagged to law enforcement in some capacity. Whether that was just like some computer system AI noting that this account was doing something, we don't know if any actual, like physical agents were watching him. But again, I do believe he had to have been on law enforcement's radar. The comments that Tucker obtained were from 2020, and he pretty much went dark and started using a lot more encryption for the next four years. So we don't really know what happened between him graduating high school and how he kind of evolved from that skinnier, nerdier kid with short hair to the, you know, Stringy haired guy that ended up on the roof. Yeah, it raises troubling questions for sure.
- [27:24]
B
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- [28:21]
C
Yeah, so about two months later, Trump had another attempt on him. And this was at his Palm beach golf course. He's golfing and I think he's on the fifth hole. The Secret Service is advancing to the next hole to make sure it's clear. And one of the agents sees somebody hiding in the bushes. The gunman, who turned out to be Ryan Ruth, points his rifle at the Secret Service agent. The Secret Service who is within a whopping five feet away. He doesn't hesitate. He immediately opens fire. Five shots. They all miss, but they cause Ryan Ruth to flee. Ruth gets in his Nissan Xterra. It was his daughter's car, but a witness sees him speeding away. The witness apparently heard gunshots, takes down the license plate number, and Ruth was caught about 45 minutes later in another county on the I95. They pull him over and this is probably the most tragic aspect of the whole event because a lot of people have kind of laughed at Ruth. He's like kind of a clownish type of guy. But as traffic's backing up, a car, you know, slams into the backup traffic and there's like this little three year old girl who was put into a coma as a result, and she's got permanent brain damage. So when people kind of like look at Ruth, at this lovable, dopey guy who just was, for some reason took a run at Trump, I think they need to realize, like, no, he's. His narcissism really cost the healthy life of a beautiful young girl. Any event, by that night, we learned a lot more about Ruth. You know, we got all the information about him, you know, having gone to volunteer in Ukraine and recruit foreign fighters. And the next day, the FBI holds a press conference where they say, you know, this guy was like a career criminal. And we did get a tip from somebody in Hawaii in 2019 saying that he was a felon in possession of a gun. We're sorry we didn't act on that tip, but gosh darn it, you know, we're trying to be transparent and admitting where we screwed up. Well, I live close to where Ruth grew up in Greensboro, and I got a lot of his local police records. And it turns out that the FBI wasn't telling the whole story. He was actually on the Fed's radar since 2002 when he was involved in this bizarre incident where he runs a construction business. He gets into a dispute with his employees, who are apparently illegal immigrants. They want to get paid. Ruth has a sawed off.420 shotgun. He threatens them with it. They wrestle him away. He gets into his car, speeds at these guys, almost hits them. So his employees call the cops, and when they finally arrest Ruth, they search his business and find that he's got, like, sticks of dynamite that are unregistered. He's not allowed to have them. So they arrest him for explosives. And the ATF was actually involved in that case. So we know, you know, he was on federal law enforcement's radar for over, you know, about 17 years longer than what the FBI admitted. The upshot of that explosive charge is that he's let out on bail. While he's out on bail, he gets into another dispute with a local cop. He had a machine gun on his passenger seat. He ends up boarding himself inside his house. For a while, there's a standoff. They finally get him to come out, and after all that, he receives probation. Again. Just very bizarre and inexplicable. He keeps getting more criminal charges. Maybe like seven years later, he gets caught up in this theft ring where he's like, paying crackheads to steal equipment from construction sites. Again, he's caught with, like, tens of thousands of dollars of stolen, you know, items from construction sites. And again, that triggers probation violation. But that gets set aside and he gets another sentence of probation for all that. Like, so two major, major felonies. He spends a couple days in jail, but never goes to prison after that. It's unclear of how he became a political radical. At one point, he's a Trump supporter in 2016. He later gets on the Tulsi Gabbard train around 2019. Putin invades in 2022, and he says in his self published book that he just couldn't abide by, that he had to go fight for justice. So he goes to Poland, crosses the border, signs up to fight, but they look at him, a 58 year old with no military experience, they turn him away. So he starts to recruit foreign fighters to join the cause, including Afghans and Syrians. And this gets him reported to the State Department which did open investigation. We don't know how seriously they were looking at him, whether they opened something on paper but didn't have any actual officials following or working on the case. But we know he was on State Department investigation while he committed his attempted assassination. So again, a really, really strange guy who had been on the Fed's radar for like over two decades before his attempt.
- [33:40]
B
No. What about his ability to be where he was? Because apparently this spot where he was was not some secret thing that the authorities knew nothing about. Apparently photographers were known to stand there to try to grab photos of Trump from time to time.
- [33:58]
C
Yeah, it's a paparazzi location and the Secret Service should have swept the golf course and kept that spot clear before Trump's trip. Their excuse was that this was a last minute plan for Trump, that they didn't know he wanted to golf until about 2am so presumably on September 14, right before he goes to bed, Trump says like, hey, I want to golf tomorrow morning. And eventually that message gets to the Secret Service and they have to scramble to make last minute plans, which is really a poor excuse. But I would argue more importantly, it actually exposes one of the two biggest unanswered questions that I have about Ryan Routh. And that's the final report on Ryan. Routh said the Secret Service was informed of his Golf plans at 2am but if you look at the state search warrant that was published maybe a month or so after the incident, says Ruth shows up to the golf course about a half an hour later, he's there like 230 or so and stays there for over 10 hours before shots are actually fired. And he had been camping out at a truck stop that was about a half an hour away. And to me, again, I don't have any proof of that, but this needs to be explained. Like, was there some kind of leak? Did somebody inform Ruth that Trump was going to be there? Because the timing is sure suspicious. I mean, it could have been just one hell of a coincidence. But again, this is one of the things that the investigations really missed.
- [35:37]
B
I want to have a little time to talk about. So the idea is you should get the book, the Trump assassination plots. You get the book, then you get all the details. But I want to just hit on a few major things because the other thing I think we have to say a little something about are the allegations that Iran was involved in any of this or in thwarted plots or anything like that. I mean, that seems awfully convenient. It just so happens to be the regime that's in the CIA's crosshairs. So what are we to conclude from all that?
- [36:06]
C
Yeah, so if you were to watch Tucker Carlson's interview with Ted Cruz, they get into this and Ted Cruz tells Tucker, well, you know, Iran tried to kill Trump. They sent an assassin there to tried to hire hitmen to take out Trump. Well, it turns out that those hitmen referenced by Ted Cruz were undercover FBI agents. And the whole notion that the Iranians were trying to assassinate Trump really appears to be a manufactured terror plot. Allah. Like the Whitmer fednapping plot of 2020, where the militia was said to have tried to kidnap Michigan's governor, but it turns out that, like half of them were either informants or undercover agents and they were driving everybody around setting up, you know, militia field exercises. It was totally an FBI driven plot. Well, same here. The case here is Asif Marshant, who was actually arrested, coincidentally enough, July 12, 2024, the day before Trump was shot in Butler. The case gets announced about a month later, and when it's announced, I think everybody said, oh, there has to be some kind of connection here. And a lot of people have taken the ball and just run with it, like, oh, the Iranians were definitely involved. Mike Waltz, Trump's short lived national security adviser, he was on the congressional panel investigating this. He's heavily suggested that, you know, there might be an Iranian connection here. Benjamin Netanyahu himself has said that the Iranians tried to kill Trump. But if you look at a closer look at the Merchant case, again, really shows it was manufactured by the FBI. He had actually been flagged by Israeli intelligence in early 2024. Apparently the US government was informed and they let him in the country on purpose. In April 2024, reporter named John Solomon had anonymous sources tell him that he was let in under the significant public benefit parole program, which is something that they use for national security purposes, either to recruit informants or to let people in on purpose just to track them and see where they're going to go. John Solomon's sources specifically described it as like the human version of Fast and Furious where they're letting the ATF was leading in like 20 in the late 2000, illegal gun sales, ostensibly to track the guns. This is the Biden administration, like, letting people on the terrorist watch list inside the country on purpose, ostensibly to track them and see where they're going. So this merchant guy, he immediately meets up with a friend from a local mosque who's driving him around. That friend turns out to be an FBI informant. The FBI informant introduces him to these two undercover agents who were posing as hitmen. They allegedly hatched some sort of plot to either assassinate government officials, stage protests, steal government documents. There was nothing concrete put in place that the defendant merchant told them that, you know, I'm going to go back to Pakistan. By the way, he's not even Iranian. He's a Pakistani guy. I'm going to go back. You meet me in Pakistan, and we'll tell you the target. He goes to leave the country in July 12, 2024. That's when he's arrested, held in solitary confinement for about 18 months, and his trial actually started the week that the Iran war this year started popping off. All I've described to you really is almost identical to what happened with things like the Whitmer plot or other FBI manufactured cases. However, you know, we gotta be devoted to the truth. And the most bizarre thing that I can't explain is that the last day of his trial, his lawyer inexplicably allowed him to testify and on the stand. He doesn't even speak English. He spoke Urdu through a translator. But he does say, yes, I was in Iran. I met somebody with the irgc, like an Iranian intelligence agent. They put me up to this. I thought they might target my family. So I went here. I didn't think I would succeed, but I did, you know, want to assassinate government officials. He didn't admit that Trump was the target. So really puzzling. Like, what are we to make of this? First of all, I don't think the guy was all there in the head. We've got text messages of him and the FBI informant trying to get a $5,000 wire payment to them so they could, like, make a down payment to the FBI agents. And, like, his cousins are kind of, like, laughing, like, dude, no way this guy's getting money. Like, this guy is a clown. So it seems like he wasn't all there. And I don't know who gave him the advice to testify. It seems like legal malpractice to me. But even if we're granting that he did have intent, you know, terrorism threat or an assassination threat, you calculate that by combining intent with Capability. And here he had absolutely no capacity. He didn't have any guns. He didn't speak English. He didn't have any money. An FBI informant drove him around everywhere. The hitmen were undercover agents. So, you know, we could definitely say that this was manufactured by the FBI. I've encountered arguments that, well, even if it was manufactured by the FBI, if they knew he really wanted to do this, like, it makes sense to the government to just catch him, let him into the country and make a case just to stick it to Iran. And, you know, okay, but let's keep in mind, while they're manufacturing this case in 2024, they let Thomas Crooks and Ryan Roos go right under their nose. So it's like, it seems to me, assuming there's not some sort of darker conspiracy here, at the very least, it was a misallocation of resources. And last thing I'll say about this is that the Secret Service, a week before Butler, got intelligence about an Iranian plot, and it's because of that that they said the Secret Service snipers to Butler to help guard Trump. This is the first time in history that Secret Service snipers guarded a former president, and the first time that they had guarded Trump during his 2024 campaign. And again, those are the same Secret Service snipers who waited 15 seconds to return fire. So if the FBI didn't manufacture this case, the Secret Service snipers wouldn't have been at Butler. It would have been local snipers up on those barns. And I could almost guarantee they would have done a better job because they would have been on the local radios. They would have heard what was going down the whole time, and I'd be willing to bet anything their response would be a lot quicker.
- [43:07]
B
Let me conclude with this. Obviously, we all have some curiosity about this, but you wrote a book about it. Was there one particular moment when you were trying to synthesize all this information in your own mind where you said, something doesn't make sense here and I have to do a book on it? Or was it. Or was it that you were writing a series of articles and then at the end, you realized, well, this is kind of a book. Why Ken Silva and not anyone else in the population?
- [43:31]
C
Well, thanks for the question. I. So I have actually been a journalist for about 15 years, but the vast majority of my career was doing local news until 2021, where, like, after Covid hit, I'm like, okay, I gotta start join conservative media. You know, I was trying to hold off. I know that kind of taints your career for getting so called respectable jobs. But I couldn't abide anymore. But the point is that I had missed Russiagate, I had missed Covid, I had missed the 2020 election January 6th. All these stories that came to define the political landscape of the next four years. And so when Trump was grazed with the bullet in Butler, I saw that and I'm like, okay, I just want to latch onto this one as a pit bull and be the leading reporter on it. And yeah, surprisingly I haven't had much competition, but I think I've managed to accomplish that.
- [44:26]
B
Well, the book is the Trump Assassination Plots, published by the Libertarian Institute. Another another great book published by the Libertarian Institute. The job they're doing is just off the charts. So Ken Silva has been our guest. That's the book. I'll have it linked@tom woods.com 2763 and Ken, best of luck and thanks so much.
- [44:48]
C
My pleasure.
- [44:49]
B
Thanks again and thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
- [44:53]
A
Make yourself and those you love less vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically. Get more forbidden information at Tom's free rebooks.com and be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you listen. See you next time.
- [45:15]
B
Like the sound of the Tom woods show, my audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out@podsworth.com Enter code WOODS50 to get 50 off your first order. If your recording sounds rough, the Podsworth app can make it not only listenable, but professional. Remember, when you use code WOODS50 you'll get half off your first order and you'll also be supporting this show.
- [45:40]
D
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- [46:12]
E
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