☕️ UNITY ☙ Monday, July 15, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump golfs after shooting; FBI finds nothing; unanswered questions roundup; bizarre Blackrock connection; cops confront shooter without effect; mystery ladders; lone gunmen; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! The Republican Convention begins this morning, so expect lots of interesting news this week, including the long-anticipated big reveal of Donald Trump’s new vice-presidential pick, and I bet it’s not Mike Pence. Today’s roundup includes: errata and important fund-raiser news; Trump golfs after surviving assassination attempt; unexpected beneficiary of the Trump assassination attempt; FBI works fast to find … nothing; unanswered questions remain; Blackrock’s bizarre connection to the shooter; cops confronted shooter before the attack but nothing happened; mystery ladder questions unanswered; and thoughts on lone gunman theory.

Yesterday, a new contender emerged for best Trump Shooting headline. This one won the foreign media category; behold the winning entry from the Times of India:

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🪖🪖 FUND-RAISER: I’d planned to order a second multiplier today for the two wounded rally attendees and for the family of the tragically killed rallygoer, Corey Comperatore. But Fox News ran a terrific story last evening headlined, “GoFundMe 'authorized' by Trump for Butler, PA, victims exceeds $3m; Vivek Ramaswamy donates $30k.” Shortly after the shooting, President Trump's campaign had already launched a GoFundMe supporting the victims and their families.

According to Fox’s story and the GoFundMe list, Vivek Ramaswamy donated $30,000, Kid Rock and the Heritage Foundation both kicked in $50,000, Ivanka and Jared Kushner contributed $10,000, Nicole Shanahan gave $20,000, and Ben Shapiro shelled out $15,000, among many others. Nearly fifty thousand Americans have joined in.

There’s been no word yet on Nancy Pelosi’s donation.

As of this morning, and as you can see above, the Victims’ GoFundMe has swelled to $3.6 million, and here is the link if you’d like to donate. Given that it is already so far over the original $1 million goal, I am not officially ordering a multiplier. But I also kicked in, and it felt great. If you do the same, let us know in the comments.

🪖🪖 ERRATA: I normally pin my errata at the top of the comments, where it is easy for alert readers to locate. (Note that, notwithstanding the occasional corrections, C&C maintains a 99.6% accuracy rate, which compares favorably to corporate media, whose rate is down somewhere in the 30’s.) But this correction deserved more prominent placement. Yesterday I unfortunately identified Dr. Karen “Karen” Pinder as a professor at the University of Cape Town who, before deleting her account, lamented that if Trump had been killed it would have been ‘glorious.’

But alert Cape Town readers were understandably annoyed, since Dr. Pinder actually infests the University of British Columbia in Vancouver:

The confusion arose because Karen got her Phd at Cape Town. She also did her post-doc at Johns Hopkins (unsurprisingly). Anyway, since you can no longer reach Karen on her now-deleted social media accounts, Karen’s email is karen.pinder@ubc.ca, and her number is (604) 822-1797.  If you need those for any reason.

I apologize to Cape Towners for accidentally besmirching your city’s reputation. Hopefully, this cleared things up. I blame Karen.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 According to unofficial reports, President Trump promptly arrived for his 9:00am tee time yesterday morning, despite being 78 years old, despite being shot the night before, and despite the inexplicable mystery of how Jeffrey Toobin is still working at CNN. (But I digress.) After golfing, Trump boarded a plane and flew to Milwaukee to attend the Republican National Convention. So, it is now undeniable that President Trump is tough. Allow me a quick moment to point out some other Trumpian qualities.

Trump has unmatched business skills. He might be the greatest problem-solving entrepreneur American has yet conceived. As evidence, they tried to sue the former President into a bottomless pit of bankruptcy oblivion with a massive, unpayable, history-making civil fine arising from a 30-year-old novel legal theory of defamation. So Trump created a new social media platform, took it public, and paid the fine — an unprecedented maneuver that was even more impressive and historic than the fine. Problem solved.

The former President also has an unmatched strategic mind. They tried to throw him in jail for over a hundred years on a creatively prosecuted witch hunt over the way his bookeeper coded a few legal expenses in Quickbooks. So Trump took an entirely different case to the Supreme Court, and got one of the most historic high court decisions, a decision that changed the nature of the Presidency itself. That decision probably solved his jail problem.

And most indefinably, he’s lucky. When all else failed, they tried to kill him, starving his Secret Service detail of resources just before the shooter struck. Trump turned his head at precisely the right second and survived with a graze (although a bystander wasn’t so fortunate).

At this perilous time in world history, with World War III looming, with the economy in free fall, and with the dollar on the international chopping block, what sane person wouldn’t want the country’s best business mind, most strategic thinker, top problem solver, and let’s be honest, luckiest man alive? How, absent profound mental illness, could anyone prefer a guy whose idea of problem-solving is calling Ukraine’s martial law leader “President Putin?”

🔥🔥 An unlikely political beneficiary of the Trump Shooting has emerged: Joseph Robinette Broccoli. Sorry, Biden. Joe’s free fall into the bottomless vegetable garden is over; nobody’s talking about the Biden Brain. The Associated Press ran a story early this morning headlined, “In prime-time address, Biden asks Americans to reject political violence and 'cool it down’.” More than anything, when last night the expressionless Oval Office Chief addressed the Nation, he demonstrated leadership, capacity, and endurance, speaking all by himself for a full six minutes. (Reading from a script, of course. Don’t be ridiculous.)

In his second post-shooting address yesterday, Biden, trying this time to lead from the front (which usually works better anyway), called for Americans to remember that politics is not, in fact, the most important thing in the world:

“I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics. And to remember, [mumble] may disagree, we are not enemies, we’re neighbors, we’re friends, coworkers, citizens, and most importantly, we’re fellow Americans. We must stand together. Yesterday’s shooting at Donald Trump‘s rally in Pennsylvania calls on all of us to take a step back, take stock of where we are, how we go forward from here.

Let’s remember, here in America, our unity is the most elusive of all goals right now, nothing is more important for us now than standing together.”

Haha, that was the polished published transcript. Biden struggled to coherently read his unity speech , his beady eyes rhythmically tacking back and forth as he dutifully read from his teleprompter. The Nation’s top executive struggled with his enunciation, offering up chesnuts like “former Trump,” the “pass forward,” and the “ballad box.” After about the four-minute mark, his brain crashed at least once: “I’m asking every American to recommit, to make America so, make America, whhhh … think about it. What makes America so special?”

Well, at least Biden’s generous comments showed they do know how to call for peaceful politics when they want to. But more importantly, the AP specifically noted how the assassination attempt on President Trump benefited Biden by blocking calls for him to drop out:

It was a recurring theme in the many stories about Biden’s otherwise unremarkable address (which nearly all omitted the actual video). For example, Rolling Stone explicitly observed the same salubrious effect in its own article about the Biden Address.

I suppose it would be unseemly, a bad look, to carry out a political assassination of the old guy right after someone actually tried to assassinate President Trump. According to Politico, last week Biden angrily told donors on a mental reassurance call that “we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

Apparently, putting Trump in a bullseye worked. They switched out the Biden Brain narrative in a single day. Score one for the Kumquat.

🔥 Say what you want about the FBI, but they work fast. The Trump Assassination investigation is almost done! Bloomberg ran a story late yesterday headlined, “FBI Says Trump Rally Shooter Appears to Have Acted Alone.” So there you go. Quit whining, it was just another lone gunman scenario. America apparently has lone gunmen like coyotes have fleas.

Here’s what the FBI has come up with so far: nothing. Remember Die Hard?

HANS GRUBER: You asked for miracles, Theo? I give you the F-B-I.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been unable to penetrate the wily defenses on Thomas Matthew Crooks’s cell phone. It keeps asking for a passcode! The feds have no idea how Thomas, 20, got hold of his father’s gun. They don’t even know who to ask. Baffled agents are scratching their heads over what motive could possibly have led Thomas to create an elaborate and successful plan to penetrate the Secret Service’s defenses at Saturday’s rally.

FBI investigators also remain clueless as to why Thomas had a rudimentary bomb in his car trunk, or what it was intended for, if Thomas knew he was taking a one-way trip to the terminated assassins’ club? Why bring the bomb? No reason!

For additional reassurance, the article quoted FBI Director Chris Wray and DOJ chief Merrick “Grandma” Garland, neither of whom said anything useful. This take may be a little hard on the FBI, since they’ve only had one day —Sunday!— to work on the case, except for the fact that they  already concluded Thomas worked alone, which makes them fair game for merciless mocking.

Anyway. The FBI may be satisfied, but Coffee and Covid still has questions.

🔥 The first unanswered question, and the weirdest news so far coming out of the Trump Shooting, was this New York Times headline, which I screenshot so you wouldn’t think I was joking:

That’s right. The same Orwellian corporation that is trying to buy up everything in America that the government doesn’t already own —are you using that extra chair? We’ll take that, too. Well, that mega-corporation is bizarrely and unexpectedly linked to the same man who just tried to murder President Trump. The Times’ story explained that the shooter, while still an 18-year-old high school student, appeared briefly as an extra in a Blackrock commercial.

The Times reported that Blackrock pulled the ad, promised to cooperate with law enforcement, and said it will turn over any unpublished video that might still be available, just as you’d hope a responsible corporation would do. So that’s good, nothing to see here.

Now, I’m only asking. But what kind of connections does someone need to score a fun, easy, lucrative temporary job working as an extra in a Blackrock commercial? How did it all come together? How much did the shooter get paid? Was there a contract? Who signed it? The article didn’t say, and the New York Times doesn’t care.

It’s probably nothing. But it’s also sort of like finding out fifty years later that the JFK shooter was on the CIA’s payroll three weeks before the assassination. It’s one of those things that makes you go huh?

🔥 The second unanswered question arose from a passel of articles ironically intended to resolve a different question. The Hill ran the story headlined, “Local police officer reportedly encountered alleged Trump shooter seconds before shots fired.” They want us to know that law enforcement did notice the shooter. But wait. There’s more.

Neither this article, nor any others about the same story, identified the anonymous “local police officer” who, investigating bystander reports, climbed up the ladder to see for himself. According to reports, Thomas the Shooter pointed his gun at the officer, who apparently then experienced a rapid unscheduled dismount. Or maybe he just climbed back down, which makes much less sense, given that was the end of the officer’s involvement, as far as they tell us.

Either way, quickly, so fast it all happened before the officer could do anything, the story says after threatening the laddered officer, in the span of a few seconds, Thomas the Shooter returned to his ‘post,’ coolly aimed his rifle (not sniper gear), calculated the wind speed factors, and immediately took his shots, showing the kind of clear thinking under pressure normally attributed to combat veterans and not unemployed drifters. Then Secret Service agents blew Thomas’ brains out, and that was that.

But wait. How did that giant ladder get there? The article was 100% silent on that score. Are they telling us this unemployed 20-year-old brought a long gun and a giant ladder in his small car and then carried them from the parking lot to the building without anyone noticing? Or did Thomas perhaps set up his ladder ahead of time, like the day before the event? If so, how did security miss a stray ladder leaning against a building that also happened to be the closest elevated vantage to the rally?

If the young, unemployed drifter’s planning was sufficiently sophisticated that he placed the ladder ahead of time, how did he know security would miss the ladder, on which the entire plan depended? And how did he know the roof would remain unguarded? These seem like critical unanswered questions contradicting the FBI’s conclusion that Thomas “appears to have acted alone.”

But what do I know? I’m just a lawyer, not an FBI assassination investigator. But as a lawyer, it’s way too early to say he acted alone.

What do you think?

Have a marvelous Monday! Tune back in tomorrow morning, java in hand, for all your essential news and commentary, including the first RNC’s day.

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