☕️ DISCLOSED ☙ Wednesday, September 16, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Space Force has weapons in orbit but won’t say what; Golden Dome hits hardware in a year; and FBI’s 8th Butler file drop adds “Bob Dole,” anonymous cremation donors, and a ladder found 40 miles away.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Today’s electrifying roundup includes: the Space Force admits it has weapons in orbit and won’t say what they are; Golden Dome goes from press release to hardware in under a year while its own director warns the money stops October 1; and the FBI’s eighth Butler file drop produces a ‘Bob Dole,’ an anonymous cremation donor, an unidentified range buddy, two unidentified gun-store companions, and a ladder that turned up in the shooter’s own hometown.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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We begin with a rare confession: I was wrong. (Sort of). On Monday, I wrote about China’s mysteriously disintegrating spy satellite and the U.S. allegations linking Chinese-supplied imagery to an Iranian strike that killed three American soldiers. I suggested the satellite’s unfortunate career change might have been related to the strike. My closing thought: “… I suspect that it is past time to welcome everyone to the space wars. Because nobody will ever declare them.”

Welp. I was wrong— the same day, Space Force declared the space wars. Well, more or less. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported, “Meink Reveals Space Force Has ‘On-Orbit Space Control Weapons’.” (I was right about everything else, of course.)

Occasionally, when I indulge in connecting dots, random critics show up in the comments demanding sources. This time, the Secretary of the Air Force delivered them for me. Speaking on Monday at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference, Secretary Troy Meink announced: “The Space Force now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

Since we are keeping up the list of Trump 2.0 Accomplishments— notice the tense. Not will have. Not has commissioned a bipartisan feasibility study whose executive summary needs three banker’s boxes. He said, “now has.” Whatever “space control” is, it’s in orbit. The interesting hardware has already been uploaded.

Reporters asked, what sort of space control hardware? Meink politely declined to identify it, discuss its testing history, or explain whether it shoots bullets, lasers, or possibly extremely mean tweets. “We’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested, not tested, or anything else,” he said, and that was that.

Get it? Meink’s announcement was the final part of The Message. (The message to China we discussed Monday.) The Pentagon confirmed the existence of orbital weapons, then carefully declined to provide any more information that might allow enemies to find them. Meink even said that the announcement was intentional —meaning the timing— and the wording was “very well thought out.” He explained that revealing the weapons’ existence could help deter adversaries (i.e., like China), but “talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit that deterrence.”

This fits the pattern we discussed Monday: the attributed intelligence disclosures about Chinese imagery, the sudden lifestyle change of Yaogan-50, and now a public acknowledgment of American orbital space control weapons, accompanied by an equally deliberate refusal to dish the details. In plain language: those are nice spy satellites you have there. It would be a shame if they gave the Iranians any film.

Space is no longer just a decorative ceiling above the real war. Military operations and the civilian economy depend on it. Last year, then-Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman warned that fighting an adversary with unrestricted access to space that we lacked would be “a recipe for death and destruction.” Losing the advantage in the heavens can become a very earthly problem for the Americans underneath it.

🚀 Secretary Meink next moved to Golden Dome, Trump’s missile-defense initiative, and the story became even more interesting.

In his first week in office, President Trump signed an executive order launching the “Iron Dome,” which in February he renamed to “Golden Dome,” probably because the Israelis sent us a nasty trademark infringement letter, or possibly because Trump just wanted to beat them. Gold is obviously better than iron. So there.

Golden Dome is a Space-Based Interceptor program (“SBI”), which is intended to help shoot down incoming missiles from space. It is basically the literal realization of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense system, which was more aspirational than effective. The project only began last January.

But on Monday, Secretary Meink reported that SBI has gone from “initial contract to flight-ready hardware”— in less than a year. By “flight-ready,” he didn’t mean it is fully operational. Still, testable hardware is a refreshing change for Washington, where a military build program usually spends its first year deciding whether the working group should be called a ‘task force’ and picking a logo.

One reason why it is moving so fast is that they structured the interceptor program as a competition with multiple players. This is also quite different for Washington. Space Systems Command reported 20 agreements with 12 companies, carrying a potential combined award value of up to $3.2 billion, with an initial ‘integrated capability demonstration’ targeted for 2028.

The intended constellation of SBI satellites would put interceptors in low Earth orbit, to engage missiles wherever they are. Meink described four “gates,” which anyone else might call milestones, and announced that the competitors had all passed through the first gate, which requires a finished design and the commencement of component testing.

General Michael Guetlein, Golden Dome’s director, said he wants proof that the capabilities work and, “more importantly, that they’re scalable and affordable.” When he said “affordable,” several reporters fainted. Last month, General Guetlein reported that Golden Dome had its first operational ground station up and running at Fort Story, Virginia, and had finished two successful tests, including one at White Sands Missile Range.

“We are digging dirt around the homeland,” he said, presumably referring to activity more interesting than what the armadillos do every night in my front lawn. I took his meaning as physical construction— which, again, is happening at a dizzying bureaucratic velocity unprecedented for a project of this scale.

At the same time they are building on the ground, they are also building in the sky. The service awarded SpaceX —Elon’s outfit— a $4.2 billion contract in May to begin launching another constellation of satellites to track anything in the air, like planes, missiles, and AOL on her broomstick. Meink said its first satellites would launch this month— September. (He did not say how many, but SpaceX launches tons of its own satellites. They can scale.)

As of Monday, the United States is publicly acknowledging existing weapons in orbit, holding a competition to develop space-based missile interceptors, breaking ground on new domestic operational facilities, and adding a brand-new satellite constellation to track airborne threats. I’m not sure there’s ever been a comparably significant peacetime mobilization, and you wouldn’t know about any of it from corporate media.

This is starting to look like the kind of military transformation historians will name as the beginning of an era. I’m not the only one who noticed. Though we had to travel all the way to India Today to find this morning’s story:

On Monday, I mistakenly wrote that the space wars era had arrived unannounced. I think they just announced it. Same day. You read it here first.

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India Today has been doing a lot of current-events reporting that our own corporate media seems unable to cover. Yesterday, its headline asked the astonishing question, “Who paid to cremate Trump shooter Thomas Crooks? New FBI files reveal a mystery donor.” The subheadline explained, “Fresh federal records say an anonymous donor paid for Thomas Matthew Crooks’ cremation after the Butler rally shooting.” Nothing says transparency like unquestioned anonymous donors helping destroy evidence.

For more than two years following Butler, conservatives have not been arguing over a settled story. We’ve been staring at a hole in the ground where a story should have been. Nobody has produced a motive that stuck. Nobody has explained how a twenty-year-old with a rangefinder and a rifle walked onto an unsecured roof in plain sight of a presidential rally while the world’s most expensive protective detail surrounded him.

The shooter’s politics stayed foggy, his online life stayed half-told, and the Bureau’s public account kept landing on “lone wolf”— without the paperwork that would let a normal person sleep with any peace. The body was released and cremated before a House investigator could look at it. Key physical evidence —a ladder, a bag, a phone that agents still seem to be hunting— drifted in and out of official language without any clean inventory for the public. Layers of the file stayed sealed or blacked out for reasons nobody would name.

By the time Trump took office again, the conservative complaint was not “we refuse to believe he acted alone.” It was simpler and meaner: if this was an open-and-shut case, why does it still feel like it’s stuffed in burn bags tucked away in a hidden FBI safe room?

This week, we finally got some new information. Spoiler: it only raised more questions.

🔥 Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has been running his own Butler inquiry. The FBI finally turned over a trove of interview summaries and related records, and only the New York Post and Fox reported the disturbing new facts. In part: Crooks used a bizarre pseudonym, “Bob Dole,” to order weapons parts online, the father gave a useless account of not knowing anything was up, and of course, the anonymous cremation reveal. Around the same time, an Eighth Circuit FOIA dump in the prolonged Crooks litigation spilled another hundred-plus pages of FBI Pittsburgh 302s, evidence logs, and internal traffic— all heavily redacted, with nearly a hundred pages withheld outright.

Attorney General Todd Blanche praised FBI Director Kash Patel for his “herculean” scrub of what the Biden crowd had left behind, and said the fresh material on the shooter’s background had been turned over to the Senate. “I think we looked at some 27 devices,” Blanche announced yesterday, “exfiltrated all the data off of them, looked for connections to individuals in America and overseas, and we found no evidence that that individual was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents, who he resided with.”

Why did he need to email his parents, who he lived with? Never mind. Blanche said the disclosures include information “we recently discovered” and that “was not provided to us.” He is clearly blaming Biden’s FBI. Why would they play games with the Crooks files?

Then Trump unleashed a rhetorical space laser in the form of a Truth Social post that directly accused Democrats of involvement in the plot:

The New York Times did not, apparently, find Trump’s astonishing accusation sufficiently newsworthy to print. ABC covered it, but added the classic “no evidence” gag right to the headline, as though a Truth Social post is a motion for summary judgment.

No evidence? Was the President supposed to attach affidavits, Bates-stamped email logs, and a sealed appendix before clicking post? Accusing Democrats of trying to assassinate him is kind of a big deal. This is the kind of “somebody says something” event that is actually news, but corporate media decided to frame it as a mean tweet.

🔥 It’s not just that none of the facts add up. The part that really keeps the controversy moving is the FBI’s apparent lack of concern about the parts that don’t add up. Crooks’ family has consistently been described as financially strapped. They couldn’t even afford to cremate their son. A sympathetic anonymous donor had to do it. How did the donor find out about the need?

And now we’ve learned that Crooks, an unambitious live-at-home with a part-time, minimum wage job, whose father was unemployed and whose mother was on medical leave, had up to 27 devices, ordered enough weapons parts using a fake name to equip a below-average arms dealer, printed ghost Glocks on what must have been a very well-equipped 3D printer, and possibly paid for subscriptions to multiple secure comms channels. Never mind his many weapons and the cost of his “training” at the shooting range.

A household that can’t even pay a funeral home doesn’t usually look like a small armory with a server closet and a secure comms channel. Where is the official curiosity? Why are the Senate and Judicial Watch’s lawyers required to drag all this information out of the Bureau over a period of years?

Are we seriously going to say we’re respecting the privacy wishes of an anonymous donor who just happened to appear ten days after the shooting offering to pay to destroy the body? Look, I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t get HIPAA for paying to destroy the remains of the man who just shot a president.

It’s not only that they could dispel the rumors by saying the donor was confirmed to be a friend of the family and leave it there. They don’t know. The family’s lawyer told them it was anonymous and that was that. Biden’s FBI just accepted “anonymous donor” at face value, diligently wrote it down on the interview form, and then diligently moved on. Just what kind of investigation was it? Well, the kind of investigation that dropped the body into an oven before a House investigator could take a look at it.

Was the FBI the anonymous donor? Just asking.

🔥 To his credit, Fox’s Bret Baier raised an obvious point. “The new documents say Crooks had 27 devices,” he exclaimed. “Twenty-seven they combed through? I have four, maybe!” Columnist Marc Thiessen suggested it was no big deal: “On the other hand, we are still debating the motivations of Lee Harvey Oswald... so it’s not unprecedented.”

CLIP: Fox discusses Kash Patel’s conclusion Crooks only emailed his parents (1:50).

I categorically reject the Kennedy comparison. The tech we have in 2026 is not comparable to the primitive evidence collection of 1963. Kennedy gave us one grainy home movie. Kash Patel “scrubbed” twenty-seven devices. Whose devices? Why devices? Does that include spare USB drives in the kitchen junk drawer? Xboxes?

Look, I’m just a lawyer. I’m not a senior FBI investigator with access to an international database. But did it occur to Kash Patel that the only reason he found emails to Crooks’ parents on 27 devices might be because all the other traffic had been removed? Or is that what Kash is quietly trying to tell us? Is he letting the patent unbelievability of the lack of electronic evidence speak for itself?

There is a lot more.

🔥 The FBI traced comms from Crooks’ phone using at least four encrypted Mailfence email accounts. Mailfence is Belgian. On July 15, the FBI sent urgent foreign-dissemination requests to two governments (names redacted) for “any and all records” from the foreign accounts. There is no record of any reply. During previous Congressional testimony, FBI officials disclosed more than 35 digital accounts accessed by Crooks.

The new disclosures reveal the FBI was dumpster-diving for a cell phone near a shopping center forty miles away where an alert citizen found the ladder. That makes three cell phones that Crooks used that we know of. The FBI never found the third one. It’s still missing. It’s probably traveling overseas with the FBI’s curiosity.

But wait. The FBI records stated they got the aforementioned ladder from the aforementioned alert citizen who found it in a “wooded area” near a remote shopping center near Crooks home, along with Crooks’ gun bag, including two empty ammo boxes and his range ID. What? How did that stuff travel from the scene to a shopping center forty miles away? Did it fly? Use the Star Trek teleporter? Was it a wrinkle in time?

A week after the report dated the FBI taking possession of the ladder, then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress the FBI still didn’t have the ladder. (Technically, Wray the weasel told Congress, “we did not find the ladder at the scene.”)

The FBI report did not speculate on how Crooks’ kit got there. He obviously didn’t drive it there after the shooting. He was dead. So either he ditched the gear for some reason —why?— and Butler was climbed another way (the ridiculous AC unit story), or someone living moved a dead assassin’s ladder and bag halfway across Allegheny County while the biggest manhunt in Pennsylvania was on. The Bureau collected the props, noted the citizen, and treated the teleportation as an unexplained logistics footnote. Where is the curiosity?

The FBI report noted that it collected the ladder and bag from the citizen in the parking lot of a Crowne Plaza. He drove it there in his pickup. During the handoff, the report says “a slim piece of black plastic, with potentially a button on one side” fell out of his tailgate. The citizen said it wasn’t his. Agents bagged it. The file never says what it was.

The new disclosures also reported that video footage from the range on the day before the shooting shows Crooks practicing and speaking with an unknown club member who was the only other person on the range. What? How could that member possibly still be unidentified? Every gun range I’ve ever been on requires signing in and paying. What on Earth?

According to the file, agents pulled stills of the man and his car off a club official’s phone, then ran DMV against every name on the sign-in sheet. The last human conversation on the public timeline before Butler is on video on a rifle range with a man the Bureau can’t name. Whatever that ‘investigation’ produced was not in the FOIA release. What did they talk about— yardage, optics, politics, a ride, snacks— nothing? Was the guy a regular? Did he know Crooks well? Did Crooks seem off? Is the guy still unidentified?

Either the FBI never interviewed this critical witness, or it didn’t turn the interview over to anyone. Neither is good. But wait. It gets worse.

🔥 According to a tip from the Keystone Armory gun shop in Edinboro (about a two-hour drive), on May 25, 2024, a ‘person resembling Crooks’ spent about an hour with two men— a mid-30s white male and an older white male with a gray beard. He bought 20 rounds of 7.62×54R on a MasterCard— yet apparently, still, two years later, they cannot confirm it was Crooks. I mean, come on! Whose name was on the card slip??

The FOIA writeups stated the ‘person resembling Crooks’ used his MasterCard at precisely 12:41 p.m. to buy the 20 rounds of 7.62 ammo. The FOIA did not state the cardholder name, the last four digits, or the bank return. So either the Bureau never pulled the slip (malpractice), pulled it and left it out of the dump (omission), or pulled it and redacted the only line that would end the baffling mystery over a “person resembling Crooks.”

Oh. And the FBI investigators didn’t find this. The store called it in and turned over the video.

Guess what? The FBI disclosed neither the IDs of the two men nor any witness interviews with them. Remember: The FBI accepted his father’s statement that Crooks “had no friends.” Um.

🔥 I don’t know about you, but this lawyer is beginning to detect a pattern.

An unidentified witness at the gun range the day before the shooting who remains unidentified. Two men Crooks spoke with for over an hour seven weeks before the shooting who also remain unidentified (and laughably, Crooks himself remains unidentified). An unidentified good Samaritan who found the ladder and kit bag 40 miles from the scene, with no identified reason for the evidence to be there. (Did they check Flock cameras?) Another unidentified ‘anonymous donor’ who paid for Crooks’ warp-speed cremation. Foreign governments that apparently have not responded to FBI’s urgent asks for email traffic.

No interview reports from any of them.

As for interviews, apparently all the Senate got was Crooks’ clueless father who, like Sgt. Schulz from Hogan’s Heroes, knew nothing useful. (Though he first learned of the shooting from CNN. Reporters found him before Secret Service, the FBI, or local police. Maybe the reporters should take charge.)

There could be good reasons for these iceberg-sized gaps in the information. But if there are good reasons, the FBI isn’t telling them. We —and the victim, President Trump— are left to fill in the blanks ourselves. That’s not okay.

Everything about this ‘investigation’ stinks. From what we can see, it could be the worst FBI investigation ever performed. It could be a cover-up. It could be selective disclosure. It could be incompetence. (It could be all three.) None of those possibilities are reassuring. Nothing about this evidences the kind of transparency the assassination attempt demands or even a good-faith desire to extinguish conspiracy theories.

I’m climbing out on a tiny limb here, but it is safe to assume President Trump —the DOJ’s boss— knows more than the general public. He just called it a Democrat plot. We don’t have enough information to decide, just inexplicable gaps, but we can safely assume that if Trump had information proving it wasn’t a Democrat plot he would have hedged. And if Trump doesn’t know— then who does?

This is far from over. You might even say it is finally getting started.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Come on back tomorrow, for another intellectually nutritious serving of essential news and caffeinated commentary that the corporate media will never dish up.

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