Executive Summary
The Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt against then-candidate Donald Trump is no longer a story about institutional failure. It is a story about institutional protection — of an agency, by an agency, from accountability to the American people. This week on The Mel K Show, independent journalist Ken Silva — author of the new book The Trump Assassination Plots: What the Investigation Missed and Why It Matters — walked through what nearly two years of relentless reporting and Judicial Watch FOIA litigation have actually uncovered. The Secret Service counter-sniper, David King, told both the House and the Senate that he did not see Thomas Crooks until Crooks had stopped firing. His own contemporaneous notes — produced by the Secret Service itself to Congress — say he saw Crooks crawling into position with a rifle before any shots were fired. The agent in charge of Trump's protective detail that day, Sean Curran, is now the Director of the entire Secret Service. The DHS Inspector General, Joseph Cuffari, has formally written to the Senate Homeland Security Committee stating he is being blocked from investigating Butler. The FBI has more than 75,000 records on Crooks and is releasing them at a few dozen pages per month. Judicial Watch — the only Washington transparency organization still pulling on these threads — was publicly attacked by FBI Director Kash Patel. The September 15, 2024 Ryan Routh attempt at Trump's Palm Beach golf course made it worse: Routh was on the active radar of seven federal and international agencies, with an open State Department arms-trafficking investigation against him on the day he walked onto the course with a rifle. We have seen this exact pattern before — JFK, RFK, MLK, Oklahoma City, Enron, 9/11. The people who do not solve the crime are the people who get promoted. The covenant between government and governed cannot survive another decade of this. We the People have to demand the truth — regardless of which political team holds power. Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
The Smoking Gun Inside the Sniper's Own Notes
The Secret Service counter-sniper on the barn behind Trump that day was David King. He was approximately 200 yards from the AGR rooftop where Thomas Crooks took his shots. King told the House under questioning that he never saw Crooks until after Crooks had stopped firing. He told the Senate a similar story a few days later.
Then a Congressional staffer — anonymous, but as Ken Silva put it, a real hero — produced King's own handwritten notes, written in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Those notes were turned over by the Secret Service to Congress as part of its own production. The notes say King saw Crooks crawling into position with a rifle before any shots were fired.
This is not ambiguous. It is sworn Congressional testimony in direct conflict with the witness's own contemporaneous written record — a record his own agency produced.
That alone should be the lead story on every newscast for a week. Instead, it is being covered almost exclusively by independent journalists.
What Really Happened in Those Fifteen Seconds
The publicly assembled timeline runs like this. Crooks fired three discrete initial shots — the first grazing Trump's ear — followed by rapid fire. A Butler SWAT team member, Aaron Zelipony, who had just been dispatched to the scene with bullets passing over his head, returned fire on the ninth shot. The Secret Service sniper did not fire until ten more seconds later — the tenth bullet that finally killed Crooks.
Fifteen seconds. From a trained counter-sniper. With a rifle on a former President of the United States.
And yet at a recent press conference, President Trump told the public that King is his hero — that he responded "in 4.2 seconds from 400 yards away." The actual distance was about 200 yards. The actual delay was at least 15 seconds. And the man whose round actually caused Crooks to stop firing was Zelipony, the local SWAT officer with no incentive to fail and no career to protect inside the agency that failed.
July 13th should be Aaron Zelipony Day. Instead, Sean Curran — the man who ran Trump's protective detail that morning — is now the Director of the United States Secret Service.
The Inspector General Who Was Blocked — On the Record
The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General is the official whose statutory job is to investigate the Secret Service. The sitting Inspector General, Joseph Cuffari, formally wrote to the Senate Homeland Security Committee earlier this year stating that he is being blocked from investigating Butler and the Secret Service.
The block, per his letter, traces back to Sean Curran's Secret Service.
So the Director of the agency under scrutiny is the man who was on the failed detail — and the Inspector General whose job is to investigate that agency is publicly telling a Senate Committee, in writing, that he cannot do his job.
This is the literal definition of institutional capture. The investigated have become the investigators. And the public consequence has been zero.
The 75,000-Page File Nobody Is Allowed to See
When it became clear the FBI was not going to voluntarily disclose what it had assembled on Thomas Crooks, Judicial Watch filed a federal FOIA lawsuit. In January, the parties reached an understanding. The FBI revealed it had more than 45,000 records on Crooks responsive to the suit. A subsequent status report disclosed another 30,000 records.
The total is more than 75,000 pages on a twenty-year-old who allegedly acted entirely alone.
The Bureau is now releasing those records in monthly batches of a few dozen pages at a time. Five productions. Roughly 200 pages released. At that release rate, the file outlasts every reporter currently asking for it.
What has been released already raises more questions than it answers. Ken Silva obtained a July 14, 2024 email — written less than a month before Crooks was killed on the rooftop — in which Crooks asked his community college faculty for proof of graduation because he had not yet received his diploma and needed it to enroll at Robert Morris University that fall. That is not the documentary trail of a man preparing for a suicide assassination. Crooks's father gave him the rifle that morning and then told the FBI his son had been struggling with mental health problems. The family is represented by Quinn Logan, a high-cost Pittsburgh law firm. They are no longer under investigation.
Then there was the New York Times front-page story claiming Crooks had previewed the attack on Steam, the gaming platform. The story was sourced to a private FBI briefing to Congress. It turned out the Steam account was a hoax — created by someone other than Crooks immediately after the attack. The story made it from a fake account, up through an FBI analyst, into a closed Congressional briefing, and out the front page of the paper of record. The Times stealth-edited the piece after the truth came out. No public accounting has followed.
The Golf Course Made the Pattern Undeniable
On September 15, 2024 — two months after Butler — Ryan Routh was found hiding in the bushes on the fifth hole of Trump's Palm Beach golf course. A Secret Service agent doing the advance to the next hole spotted him. Routh pointed his rifle at the agent. The agent fired five times from about five feet away and missed every shot. Routh fled to his Xterra and would have escaped entirely had a civilian witness not heard the gunfire and written down his license plate.
Routh's profile defies every claim that this was a lone unhinged actor who fell through the cracks. He had explosives charges from 2002. He had a string of late-2000s felonies including a scheme paying drug addicts to steal more than $30,000 of construction equipment from unguarded sites. He had been reported to the FBI, DHS, and Customs by a travel nurse. He had been flagged by a named CIA officer, Sarah Adams. He had been reported to Interpol. He had been arrested in Ukraine. And he had an open State Department investigation against him for arms-trafficking violations on the date of the assassination attempt.
He was on the active radar of seven federal and international agencies. And he walked onto the President's golf course with a rifle.
His extended family includes a Special Forces alumni association leader and an uncle who was a neurosurgeon operating on insurgents in Iraq, appointed lieutenant colonel under the Obama administration, now working at Fort Gordon — which also hosts an NSA facility. Whether the FBI has interviewed them is unknown to the public.
The Pattern That Connects Butler to 1963
Most of you who watch my show know that I am quite confident that the coup or capture of our nation kicked into high gear on November 22, 1963. Allen Welsh Dulles — fired from the CIA by President Kennedy — was then placed on the Warren Commission to investigate the very assassination he had every reason to want covered up. Anyone who questioned the Commission's conclusion was branded a conspiracy theorist for sixty consecutive years.
This is not conspiracy theory. This is documentary history.
Merrick Garland was involved in Oklahoma City and rose to Attorney General. Chris Wray was involved in Enron and rose to FBI Director. Sean Curran was head of the Butler detail and rose to Secret Service Director. Kimberly Cheatle resigned as Director and still receives taxpayer-funded Secret Service protection. The people who do not solve the crime are the people who get promoted. The 1947 single-page memo that created the modern intelligence apparatus appears to lack any self-correcting mechanism.
The hardest part of this conversation is the part nobody wants to write. President Trump himself has shut down further investigation. Kash Patel went after Judicial Watch — the one transparency organization in Washington still worth a damn — over a redaction his own agency later corrected. Patel and Bongino, who built their independent media audiences screaming about Epstein, came in and signed off on no further indictments. We the People do not get to look away because our preferred political team is in office. The covenant does not bend to convenience.
Recovery Begins With Refusing the Amnesia
The addiction to conflict and chaos depends on amnesia. We are supposed to forget last summer. We are supposed to trust that whatever is happening this week is more urgent than what happened on a rooftop in Butler. We are supposed to keep cheering for the team in office and stop asking questions.
That is exactly the behavior the institution depends on. It is exactly the behavior that lets the same pattern repeat for another sixty years.
We the People are the answer. We always have been. But that answer requires the discipline to keep the record straight — to refuse to move on, to keep buying Ken Silva's book, to keep amplifying Judicial Watch, to keep asking why the Inspector General is blocked and why the sniper lied to Congress. Not for partisan tribal contest. For the republic.
Key Takeaways
- The Secret Service counter-sniper at Butler told both the House and the Senate that he did not see Thomas Crooks until after Crooks stopped firing — but his own contemporaneous notes, produced by the Secret Service to Congress, say the opposite.
- Sean Curran, the agent in charge of President Trump's protective detail at Butler, was promoted to Director of the United States Secret Service.
- DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari formally notified the Senate Homeland Security Committee that he is being blocked from investigating Butler and the Secret Service.
- The FBI has over 75,000 records on Thomas Crooks and is releasing them at a rate of a few dozen pages per month under a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit.
- Ryan Routh — caught in the bushes at Trump's golf course on September 15, 2024 — was on the active radar of seven federal and international agencies, including an open State Department arms-trafficking investigation, on the day of the attempt.
- The New York Times ran a front-page story sourced to a private FBI briefing claiming Crooks previewed the attack on the gaming platform Steam — the story was based on a hoax account and was stealth-edited after publication.
- President Trump has shut down further investigation and FBI Director Kash Patel has publicly attacked Judicial Watch, the only transparency organization still actively litigating for the Crooks records.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is no one in major media reporting the contradiction between the sniper's testimony and his own notes?
Because the contradiction implicates the institution itself, and major media has been structurally aligned with the institutional narrative since the Warren Commission. Independent journalists like Ken Silva, who has no career inside the system to protect, are the ones still doing the work. When the New York Times runs a hoax on its front page and stealth-edits it without an apology, you are seeing the alignment in real time.
Wasn't Trump shot? Doesn't that prove this wasn't staged?
Yes. Ken Silva — who has investigated this story longer than almost anyone — is clear that the attempt was real. The bullets were real, the bodies were real, the blood was real. Local Butler Hospital doctors examined the ear because Trump's personal physician was left behind at the farm show, and that local doctor had to be taken to the next campaign stop because they could not retrieve the personal physician. That is not the documentary footprint of a choreographed event.
Why hasn't anyone been charged?
Because the people who would file charges work for the agencies under scrutiny. The Inspector General is being blocked. The records are being slow-walked. The President himself has shut down the investigation. And the FBI's current leadership is publicly attacking the only organization still litigating for the documents. Until that changes, no charges will follow.
How is this the same pattern as JFK or 9/11?
Same shape: the people who failed (or who had motive) become the people in charge of the investigation. Allen Dulles, fired by JFK, was placed on the Warren Commission. The intelligence community that missed 9/11 was rewarded with new powers and budgets, not consequences. Sean Curran, who ran the Butler detail, was made Director of the Secret Service. The pattern is the institution rewarding loyalty to itself above accountability to the public.
What do you say to people who think this is too dark to dwell on?
I say it is empowering, not defeating, to know the truth. Knowledge breeds confidence, which leads to calm. Ignorance breeds petulance, which leads to pointless conflict. You cannot fix what you refuse to name. And you cannot restore the covenant by pretending the institutions are not breaking it. We the People are still the answer — but only if we refuse the amnesia.
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