“This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said on Friday. “But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do. And that certainty gives me internal peace, even in storms.”
What he was referring to was his decision to dissolve his campaign for the presidency and endorse Donald Trump. After holding a press conference on Friday, RFK appeared on stage at a Trump rally in Arizona.
There is a lot here to think about, and we are all chattering. But the BBC mentions something interesting: “Before welcoming RFK Jr to the stage on Friday, Trump promised, if elected, to release all remaining documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy.”
It is worth mentioning that Donald Trump had promised to fully de-classify all the JFK assassination in his 2016 presidential campaign. But did not. Not fully.
Roger Stone, who has written a book on the subject, has discussed, many times, what we have learned so far from what Trump did release. (For instance, that Lee Oswald was an FBI informant who had gone to CIA language school to speak Russian.) But Trump did not release everything; “20 percent” he kept back. When Mr. Stone asked Trump why, Trump said he couldn’t. “It’s so horrible, you wouldn’t believe it,” is what Stone says Trump told him. (Judge Napolitano relates an almost identical explanation from Trump.)
Joe Biden, of course, did not release all of the remaining documents, as Stone relates. RFK Jr., now endorsing Trump, has a stake in the disclosures — his uncle being the subject of the whole issue, and his father (whom he believes was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan) was running for the presidency when he was himself assassinated, perhaps for being too close to obtaining information from The Files.
Maybe Bobby Kennedy’s deal with Trump was an assurance on full disclosure. After all, Trump — surviving a near miss from an assassin’s bullet — may now be more inclined to follow through. “So horrible” regardless.
The old rule of journalists and the motives of their sources: “All I care about ‘are the documents verifiable’ and ‘are they in their public interest.’”
Now, says Glenn Greenwald — that is, after the 2016 election, in which journalists repented of their reporting that sure seemed to have helped defeat Hillary Clinton, their dearly beloved candidate — the rules have changed.
“As the 2020 campaign began approaching,” Mr. Greenwald related on System Update (#315), “and all of these institutions and establishment sectors were desperate to ensure Trump didn’t win a second term and Biden won instead, they did something that is now screwing them. And they deserve it so much because what they did was so corrupt. What they did was they announced that from now on, ‘even if we got in our hands material we that we know is authentic … and even if they are of great public interest, even if they shed enormous light on one of the two presidential candidates … if they believe it comes from a foreign country and it’s designed to influence our election.” Greenwald says this is a brand new rule. Journalists “radically revised” the rules of journalism to protect their candidates.
But now there is a dump of emails from the Trump campaign. Oh, how they would love to release them, promote them, comment upon them, etc. But their new rule means they cannot.
That is, if they honor it in a non-partisan way.
Place your bets now. Will they repudiate their rule and go back to doing journalism (and also helping their party), or will they stick to their new rule which usually (but not in this case) helps their candidates?
Since Paul Jacob’s Wednesday column, “Unburdened by the Leftism,” in which he mentioned the big story sidelined by the Democrats and media, more information about the July 13th attempted assassination of Donald John Trump — said “big story” — has come out.
One significant revelation has been the body cam footage of the local police who had encountered someone “on the roof” that the head of the Secret Service was “too steep” to place a sniper upon. The policeman caught on vidcam complains that he had warned the Secret Service before the event that the building should have been protected by a sniper:
“I (expletive) told them they need to post the guys (expletive) over here. I told them,” one video records a local police officer saying. “The Secret Service. I told them that (expletive) Tuesday.”
Paul has advocated for body cam usage since the Ferguson shooting, and this footage from the local police may be crucial to unraveling the mysteries of July 13th.
According to Minnesota’s Supreme Court, “The duty to retreat when reasonably possible — a judicially created element of self-defense — applies to persons who claim they were acting in self-defense when they committed the felony offense of second-degree assault-fear with a device designed as a weapon and capable of producing death or great bodily harm.”
Though the ruling affects the rights of gun owners (hence the picture, above), the accused person was wielding a machete.
The ruling was decided 4 – 2, with one justice arguing that this “duty to retreat” is novel and unrealistic. “Until now, the collective wisdom of judges nationwide over hundreds of years has never imposed a duty to retreat before making threats to deter an aggressor,” he wrote.
The ruling, as it stands, provides a precedent for Minnesotan judges, and is not binding outside the state. Nevertheless, it will be awfully tempting for other state courts to mimic. A duty to retreat seems diametrically opposed to “stand your ground” laws and rulings in other states.
Paul Jacob has written about the self-defense issue for years. For example:
Jessica Tarlov’s encomium for President Joe Biden is curious. “Joe Biden bows out of the 2024 race — we lost a good president and a good man,” ran the whole Fox News headline, but it’s second part, after the dash, that is curious. To the best of our knowledge, Sleepy Joe Biden did not resign the presidency.
Ms. Tarlov has been a contributor to Fox for many years. She is a well-known “liberal Democrat.” The article’s praise for the Biden Administration is clear in the blurb: “American Rescue Plan, infrastructure funding and gun safety are all things Joe Biden can be proud about.” Uh, OK.
“Biden just announced that he won’t be seeking re-election this November. And even though I knew it was coming, it feels profoundly sad to me,” wrote Ms. Tarlov below the headline.
Sad on a human level. Joe Biden is a fundamentally good man who did not want this outcome. He believes he can win, even if the data doesn’t say so. And sad on a political level. Biden was an incredible president with a record to be enormously proud of. Whoever is at the top of our ticket will no doubt celebrate his accomplishments – and him! – but there’s a joy to how he talks about what the Biden-Harris administration has gotten done that I’ll really miss.
“I know that I speak for regular Democrats in thanking Joe Biden for an incredible four years and saying that we’re really, really sad. Father Time came for a really good one,” concluded Tarlov.
Chad Pergram, reporting on Fox, claimed that White House insiders had called Biden’s debate performance in late June evidence that his campaign was “unsustainable.” Since that June 27th night, and usually with a pretense of shock at Biden’s decline, major Democratic Party bigwigs, from Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to a huge cadre of billionaire donors, had been calling on him to give up the campaign.
But, oddly, not to resign the presidency. Apparently running the country is no biggie; running a winnable campaign is.
Does the lack of curiosity by the press seem natural? Has the stone-walling by government officials effectively squelched profitable discussion of last Saturday’s shooting of former president and current candidate Donald John Trump? Brett Weinstein notes the general lack of interest in facts by the “news media”:
Am I missing something, or has the usual series of post-shooting press conferences simply not materialized? It seems we don’t even know the basics. How many of these questions have a satisfactory/confirmed answer? Beyond ‘AR-15’ what weapon, exactly? How was it equipped? What type of ammunition, exactly? How many shots? How many unfired rounds left in the magazine? In the backpack? How many people were hit/grazed? Who are they and what are their injuries. What are President Trump’s injuries? How many fired rounds have been recovered? From where? Is the venue still an active crime scene, and if so, why was the roof being washed? What was the presumptive shooter doing over the several days prior? What was the transmitter for? What else was in the car? Was the shooter in contact with anyone by phone or other device while at the rally? Was the water tower covered? If so, how? If not, why not? Feel free to provide any answers you think we have official confirmation of. And please suggest other questions that should be readily answerable.
Speaking of the water tower, as Dr. Weinstein was, a mobile something/someone was caught on video on said tower:
Despite so many questions unasked and unanswered, revelations are bursting forth. According to Senator Josh Hawley (R‑Mo.), we have learned something about the make-up of Trump’s security team in Butler: it wasn’t really filled to the brim with trained Secret Service agents!
“Whistleblowers who have direct knowledge of the event have approached my office. According to the allegations, the July 13 rally was considered to be a ‘loose’ security event. For example, detection canines were not used to monitor entry and detect threats in the usual manner. Individuals without proper designations were able to gain access to backstage areas. Department personnel did not appropriately police the security buffer around the podium and were also not stationed at regular intervals around the event’s security perimeter,” Hawley wrote in a letter sent Friday to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“In addition, whistleblower allegations suggest the majority of DHS officials were not in fact USSS agents but instead drawn from the department’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). This is especially concerning given that HSI agents were unfamiliar with standard protocols typically used at these types of events, according to the allegations.”
Michael Flores, “Whistleblowers Bombshell! Untrained Security weren’t even Secret Service!” Substack, July 19, 2024.
On Monday, Paul Jacob concluded his column on the assassination attempt with these words:
Heads must roll at Secret Service. (Figuratively.) A new and beefed-up detail should be protecting Trump. And it is past time for RFK, Jr., to be granted Secret Service protection as well.
Well, Biden did finally grant RFK, Jr., a Secret Service detail, almost immediately after the Butler, Pennsylvania, event. But is there cooperation with the congressional investigation also immediately started?
Rep. James Comer, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has issued a subpoena to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle compelling her to appear before the committee on Monday for what is scheduled to be the first congressional hearing into the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Comer said initially that the Secret Service committed to her attendance but that Homeland Security officials appear to have intervened and there has been no “meaningful updates or information” shared with the committee.
Comer said the “lack of transparency and failure to cooperate” with the committee called into question Cheatle’s ability to lead the Secret Service and necessitates the subpoena.
Rebecca Santana, Associated Press, “House committee subpoenas Secret Service director to testify on Trump assassination attempt,” PBS News, July 17, 2024.
Multiple investigations have been started, but how much investigating will actually go on, and what the purpose of these investigations really is, could be open to questioning:
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general also said Wednesday it has opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security for Trump on the day a gunman tried to assassinate him at his Pennsylvania rally.
In a brief notice posted to the inspector general’s website, the agency said the objective of the probe is to “Evaluate the United States Secret Service’s (Secret Service) process for securing former President Trump’s July 13, 2024 campaign event.”
There was no date given for when the investigation was launched. The notice was among a long list of ongoing cases that the inspector general’s office is pursuing.
Biden already had directed an independent review of the security at the rally.
The shooting has raised questions about how the gunman was able to climb onto a roof with a clear line of sight to the former president, who said he was shot in the ear.
Ibid.
Notice two things about that last paragraph.
The focus is on one gunman, not multiple gunmen. This is a repeat of the Warren Commission focus.
A mid-week report still treats President Trump’s injury not as a matter of fact but as a matter of testimony: Trump was not “shot in the ear,” but, instead, “said he was shot in the ear.”
