Facile and politically motivated suggestions

The investigation into the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump has taken two dark turns. First, the Secret Service seems to have persuaded Team Trump to cancel his signature outdoor rallies. Second, a House Judiciary Committee hearing degenerated into a duel between those who wanted updates on the investigation, and those who turned their positions on the curved dais into soap boxes for gun control, censorship, and a possible refusal to hire anyone who supports Trump in government and especially at the FBI. These facile suggestions will do nothing to enhance the security either of Presidential candidates or the country. Accordingly, Trump should push back against them both.

Facile suggestion number one: cancel the outdoor rallies

Last night, Christina Laila at The Gateway Pundit reported on several articles and X posts about the first facile suggestion. From The Washington Post came an account that elements of the Secret Service effectively told Team Trump they couldn’t protect them outdoors anymore.

Secret Service officials encouraged Donald Trump’s campaign to stop scheduling large outdoor rallies and other outdoor events with big crowds after the assassination attempt on the former president in Butler, Pa., according to people familiar with the matter.

X influencer Sean Davis reacted in understandable outrage:

According to the Post, Team Trump:

is scouting indoor venues, such as basketball arenas and other large spaces where thousands of people can fit.

As of this morning, the Trump campaign is yielding to that facile suggestion – or veiled threat – according to NBC News. NBC also quoted other anonymous sources as saying Trump feels safer inside than outside.

The problem: Trump typically attracts 100,000 people or more to those rallies. World Atlas lists the ten largest indoor venues in the world. The world’s largest is The Philippine Arena, which seats 55,000. The largest American arena is the Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. Capacity: 24,000. In other words, the Secret Service has just limited Trump’s rallies to 24,000 people, or fewer.

Did the Secret Service just admit it cannot protect a Presidential candidate? Or did they just threaten Trump with facilitating another assassination attempt, unless he cripples his campaign? Or – as Rumble influencer Graham Allen suggested – did they plan to:

1. Warn Trump not to hold another big outdoor rally,
2. Tacitly let him hold it anyway,
3. Recruit another assassin to do the job properly and not bungle it, as Thomas Matthew Crooks did, and then
4. Blame Trump for holding the rally after they (the Secret Service) told him not to?

Trump shouldn’t stand for this!

Whatever the motives of the Secret Service – which appear not to have ended with Kim Cheatle’s tenure as Director – Trump shouldn’t stand for this. Nor does he have to. As Graham Allen pointed out in the above-embedded video, thousands of retired military servicemen (emphasis on men) stand ready to hire onto a private Team Trump security force, or even volunteer to serve without pay on such a force. Trump can afford to expand his own likely formidable private security force. But he could also raise campaign funds, because security is a campaign expense.

Furthermore, the notion that no security force can protect a large outdoor venue is demonstrably false. Operators of theme parks, some of which have capacities comparable to the attendance at a Trump rally, do it daily. Whether they necessarily “vet” all guests (or their own staff) as well as they should is, to be sure, debatable. But security is available, and always on the job. It must be – to stop people from walking among the struts of a roller coaster, for example, searching for dropped eyeglasses or cellphones, and risking decapitation by a passing coaster train. If security didn’t exist, those parks could not operate.

So the suggestion that Trump curtail his rallies is worse than facile. It is a deliberate attempt to cripple his campaign, to hide the painfully obvious fact that Trump packs ‘em in, Biden didn’t, Clinton didn’t, and Harris can’t. If the Secret Service can’t do its job, Trump should tell them:

You’re fired.

A plethora of facile suggestions

The second set of facile suggestions – and equally facile accusations – came from the Democratic contingent on the House Judiciary Committee. This morning, beginning at 10:00 a.m. EDT, that Committee convened in its hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building. At the witness table: Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI.

From the start of the hearing – meaning the opening statements of Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the Chairman, and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the Ranking Member, Republicans and Democrats divided into two sides, each with its own agenda.

Republicans spent half their time grilling Wray on the progress of the investigation of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Wray took care not to release any sensational information. But he made clear that the FBI has limited its brief to Thomas Matthew Crooks, his motives, opportunities, and means. The FBI probably will find no connections to other persons, because they won’t look for them. Regarding how well the Secret Service did its job, Wray referred the committee to the HomeSec Inspector General. Regarding whether Crooks acted alone, or in concert with another, Wray referred the committee to SecHomSec Alejandro Mayorkas’ “independent panel.” As CNAV has discovered before, that “panel” consists almost entirely of persons who have spoken ill of Trump in the past.

But again, Wray would not comment on any investigation by them. This illustrates a facile assumption: that these other agencies will act in good faith. The Trump assassination attempt requires one investigation by a special, plenipotentiary officer.

Other revelations from Wray’s testimony

Wray did reveal several details that cast further doubt on the performance – and the motives – of the Secret Service. Reporters for The Gateway Pundit covered each of them, as follows:

• The would-be assassin flew a drone around the rally site for eleven minutes, two hours before he took his shots. That drone closed to within 200 yards of the stage.
• Crooks had three explosive devices in his car. Yet the FBI insists Crooks was not searching the Internet on how to make a bomb.
• Crooks fired eight shots before a Secret Service counter-sniper killed him. That, the FBI knows, because they recovered eight shell casings from his rooftop perch.
• The FBI is not examining who decided to allow Trump on stage at a critical moment.

Yet somehow Wray has concluded, a priori, that Crooks had no accomplices. This is a totally facile conclusion, worthy of Earl H. Warren’s infamous Commission and Report on the JFK assassination.

Other questions Republicans had

Republicans spent the rest of their time touching on issues relating to the weaponization and politicization of the FBI. No one wanted to suggest that Thomas Matthew Crooks is another Lee Harvey Oswald who met his Jack Ruby. But several Republicans did want to know why the FBI seems to investigate conservatives more often than leftists. Questions along this line touched on Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances enforcement, for example. (And here Wray observed – belatedly – that since the Dobbs decision, most abortion-related violence now is occurring against crisis pregnancy centers. These centers exist to offer the obvious alternative to abortion – carrying the child to term – and support that decision.)

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) likely stunned the Democrats with questions concerning:

1. Proof of life and the mental capacity of President Joe Biden (“When did you last speak to [Biden]?”, and
2. Exaggeration, on the part of Biden and others, of the inherent threat of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

Regrettably, Republicans missed an opportunity to ask whether, for example, Ray Epps was an undercover FBI Special Agent.

Democrats – facile city!

The Democrats spent all their time addressing threats, not to President Trump in particular, but – as they see it – to all of society. Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) were arguably the worst offenders. Some took time to eulogize one of their own who died recently: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). Then came their litany of facile suggestions and pronouncements, as follows:

1. Too many firearms, particularly semiautomatic rifles similar (but not identical) to government-issue infantry rifles, are in civilian hands.
2. Any suggestion that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in hiring has weakened professional standards at the FBI (or the Secret Service), is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or whatever other kind of “phobic” Democrats care to name.
3. Political violence has at last touched Trump, after his supporters have engaged in it for years. Of course the Democrats raising this point, referred to the January 6 Event.
4. Foreign “bad actors” are influencing American elections through “disinformation,” and not by conspiring to have a Presidential candidate murdered.

The committee recessed for about an hour, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel addressed Congress in joint session.

Analysis

Republicans are either suffering from lack of imagination, or are only pretending to have Trump’s, and the country’s back. This case begs for a truly independent investigation. Chairman Jordan needs to introduce a bill to create an Office of Special Investigation of Presidential Campaign Violence. If the Senate won’t pass it, then let that redound to their embarrassment and discredit – and campaign on it. If it passes, and President Biden (or President Harris?) vetoes it, prefer Articles of Impeachment. And if it passes and Biden either signs it into law, or waits ten days to let it pass without his signature, tell him whom he should nominate as Officer in Charge. CNAV recommends Rumble influencer Dan Bongino, former Agent of the Secret Service.

This Special Investigative OIC will need plenipotentiary subpoena power and investigative authority. His authority must override all claims of “privilege.” No theory should be too outlandish to consider, including a conspiracy involving either the Deep State, the Chinese Communist Party, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, or any two or all of these, acting in an alliance of mutual convenience.

If this cannot happen, then House Republicans should hire Pinkerton’s to handle the investigation.

Trump, for his part, should fire the Secret Service and form his own security force. For him to confine his rallies to indoor venues is beyond facile – it is ridiculous, and should be a non-starter.

Ignore the Democrats

As to the Democrats, they had their chance to come together after the near-assassination, and blew it. Perhaps one should expect that, because the House Judiciary Committee has always been the most partisan committee of the House. (Its Senate counterpart holds the same distinction among Senate standing committees.) But to answer the Democrats’ points:

1. Confiscating firearms from all civilians will not make Presidential candidates – of either Party – or anyone’s constituents any safer.
2. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion should have been a non-starter, and its termination a no-brainer. The United States Supreme Court would certainly agree, at least in principle.
3. All the political violence has been on the left, not the right, except for agents provocateurs engaged in false-flag pseudo-operations.
4. Likewise the only misinformation has come from the left. Furthermore the foreign danger comes from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Gaza’s Islamic Resistance Movement, and the Chinese Communist Party. It does not come from the Russian Federation.

And by the way: the man who swung at Paul Pelosi (Nancy’s husband) with a hammer, was likely someone he, for his own twisted reasons, invited into the Pelosi home. (No forced entry – and furthermore, police discovered both men partially undressed below the waist.) It was not a conservative trying to knock off the then-Speaker of the House. And it certainly had nothing to do with the attempt on Trump’s life.

Summary

In sum, Democrats have put their rank hypocrisy on full display. As their counterparts in Oversight did, the Judiciary Democrats threw up clouds of irrelevancy. None of their questions had anything to do with the would-be assassin, or his motive for trying to kill President Trump. Indeed those Democrats stopped just shy of saying Trump got his just due. But that was something even they dared not say. So they resorted to irrelevant political statements – because they know how bad an assassination attempt makes them look. Their own rhetoric either provoked Thomas Matthew Crooks, or provided cover for a conspiratorial operation using him. Beyond that, their facile suggestions would work no better in preventing street crime (which in some cases, half their constituents commit against the other half) than they would have in preventing this latest attempt on Trump’s life.

Republicans, for their part, are too accustomed to acting like proper ladies and gentlemen. Quite simply, jungle combat has supervened. They should have raised points of order for every one of those irrelevancies – except perhaps for the January 6 event. Once the Democrats opened that door, Republicans should have asked whether Ray Epps was an undercover agent, and who took down the fencing and signs saying AREA CLOSED. And so far, they are throwing away an opportunity to design a truly independent investigation.