Cock-ups, conspiracies and the failed Trump assassination

First, I have some corrections and expansions to yesterday’s post.

WPXI in Pittsburgh, who have good sources in Pennsylvania law enforcement, are now clarifying that no counter-sniper teams were staged in the building that Crooks shot from at all. They were rather on the second floor of an adjacent building, which I have circled here in red:

This should clarify why nobody heard Crooks moving on the roof before he opened fire. WPXI also note that law enforcement first took notice of the would-be assassin not thirty minutes, but a full hour, before Trump began speaking. This is when Crooks was seen fiddling with a range-finder, as Beaver County journalists reported, and it was the occasion for law enforcement to take their first photo of the assailant:

An important secondary mystery is who actually killed our shooter. This helpful New York Times analysis concludes, on the basis of audio recordings, that the shot came from the southernmost Secret Service counter-sniper team, which would make sense, as unlike their counterparts to the north, they had an unobstructed view of Crooks’s position. WPXI, however, are reporting that “a local police sniper” has been placed on administrative leave for firing his weapon at Crooks. The Butler County District Attorney nevertheless confirms “that it’s his understanding the shot that killed Crooks was fired by the Secret Service.” The Secret Service have also separately claimed responsibility for the kill. The problem is this: After Crooks concludes his eight-shot volley, I can find only one further shot in all the audio that is available to us. It’s possible, I guess, that I’ve missed something, or that our recordings simply failed to pick up all of the counter-sniper fire, but it’s equally possible that valued reader Bootsorourke was right, and that local law enforcement were responsible for the kill shot. Perhaps the Secret Service are claiming otherwise only to save themselves further embarrassment, and with the investigation in the hands of the FBI, local police have no means of establishing for themselves what really happened.

My last post generated a wealth of impatient comments. A great many valued readers find my “malicious indifference” theory of the failed assassination less than satisfying; they propose that there were two shooters, that it was not Crooks but Maxwell Yearick whom police killed on the roof of the AGR International building, and other things as well. Here, I want to explain how I think about these events in general, and why I default towards systemic, distributed explanations unless I’m given extremely good reasons not to.