Important Takeaways:
- Lawmakers, legal groups urge government to release first assassination attempt documents
- A conservative legal watchdog group is heading to court to get the U.S. Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to explain how gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks had been able to “fire a relatively simple shot that came within an inch of killing President Trump and struck fellow Americans.”
- In a lawsuit filed Thursday, America First Legal (AFL) alleges that the Secret Service and DHS illegally concealed government records related to the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. The organization claims it submitted multiple public records requests about the incident but still has not received any documents.
- AFL requested documents pertaining to the Secret Service’s staffing shortages, hiring and employment standards and all communications to or from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and two senior DHS officials, Kristie Canegallo and Jonathan Davidson.
- According to AFL, the Secret Service said it would not process their expedited public records’ requests because there was “no threat to the life or safety of anyone” and that there was no urgency to grant their request.
- Lawmakers on Capitol Hill — both Republican and Democratic — have also been trying to obtain documents from government agencies related to the events that unfolded that day and what security lapses may have occurred.
- In light of the second attempted assassination of Trump’s life at his golf course in Florida last week, AFL said in it statement: “There is no denying that President Trump currently faces genuine threats, and AFL’s requests would help to ensure that USSS and DHS leadership are sufficiently trained and staffed to ensure the safety of President Trump.”
- “The American people and Congress need total transparency,” the group said.
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Important Takeaways:
- Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” that former President Donald Trump’s politics of “hate and division” put the United States’ security in danger.
- Clinton said, “I’m very hopeful, and even optimistic that Americans who do not want to see a continuation of this politics of hate and division will reject Trump.”
- She continued, “The object in this case is Donald Trump, his demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world. You know, they were merciless about what they saw as President Biden’s problems in the debate and calling for him to withdraw. I believe Donald Trump has disqualified himself over and over and over again to be a presidential candidate, let alone a president.”
- Clinton added, “I do think more and more Americans are rejecting the kind of chaos that he represents. We can’t go back. That’s what the Harris campaign says all the time. We’re not going back. We’re not going back to, you know, what he failed to do to protect American lives during COVID. We’re not going back to the, you know, romance with dictators that puts innocent lives at risk and puts America’s security in danger. We can’t go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Ryan Routh, a 58-year-old man living in Hawaii, has been identified as the would-be assassin who targeted former President Donald J. Trump as he played a round of golf on Sunday at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The suspect, currently in the custody of law enforcement, had an extensive social media presence almost entirely focused on support for the Ukrainian war effort and opposition to Israel.
- The would-be assassin appears to have been deeply involved with efforts to send Afghanistan military veterans, who fled the country after the Taliban retook power, to Ukraine to bolster the Eastern European nation’s efforts to halt the Russian invasion.
- According to his social media and two 2023 interviews with Semafor and The New York Times, Routh ran the International Volunteer Center in Ukraine and spent a great deal of time in Kiev over the past several years.
- “Most of the Ukrainian authorities do not want these soldiers,” Routh told Semafor last year. “I have had partners meeting with [Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense] every week and still have not been able to get them to agree to issue one single visa.”
- FOREIGN TIES.
- Even more concerning with respect to Routh’s foreign ties are the comments he made to the NYT. “We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” he said regarding plans to move Afghan soldiers to Ukraine to join their fight. Routh insinuated he’d move the soldiers to Iran and, from there, fly them to Ukraine.
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Important Takeaways:
- Former President Donald Trump is “safe and unharmed” after Secret Service agents engaged with a suspect pointing a high-powered rifle at the Florida golf course where Trump was golfing Sunday afternoon, officials said. The suspect fled but was later taken into custody.
- The FBI and U.S. Secret Service are investigating the incident, which the FBI said “appears to be an attempted assassination of former President Trump.”
- “President Trump is safe following gunshots in his vicinity,” Steven Cheung, Trump campaign communications director, said in a brief initial statement.
- Law enforcement officials confirmed that members of Trump’s U.S. Secret Service detail opened fire at the armed suspect after spotting him on the edge of the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, a few holes ahead of where the president was golfing. Secret Service officials said it was not clear if the suspect fired any shots.
- Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said in a briefing that Trump was about 300-500 yards away from the man with the gun.
- Officials say rifle, scope, GoPro camera recovered
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Important Takeaways:
- Routh, who has so far refused to talk to police following his arrest on Sunday, was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number. He faces additional charges related to the alleged assassination attempt.
- Routh, according to news reports, appeared in court with shackled hands. He smiled and laughed as he talked to his attorney, according to Fox News producers who were inside the courtroom.
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Important Takeaways:
- The debate will be hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia at 9 p.m. ET and will be moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis.
- There’s been much back-and-forth over the debate, the first in which Trump and Harris will face off since she launched her campaign last month.
- A big point of contention between the two campaigns has been over whether the candidates’ microphones should be muted when it isn’t their turn to speak
- While ABC News has not officially released its rules for the debate, on Tuesday, Trump said on Truth Social that they would be “the same as the last CNN debate” that took place between him and President Biden on June 27.
- Those rules included no studio audience, no props or pre-written notes allowed on stage, no questions shared in advance and no campaign staff allowed to interact with the candidates during the commercial breaks.
- Neither ABC News nor the Harris campaign has publicly confirmed these rules.
- A date for the second presidential debate has not been set yet, but it is expected to be hosted by NBC News. The vice-presidential debate will be hosted by CBS News on Oct. 1.
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Important Takeaways:
- Independent US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is considering ending his campaign to join forces with Republican rival Donald Trump, Kennedy’s running mate said in an interview posted online on Tuesday.
- The vice presidential candidate, Nicole Shanahan, said that as independents, she and Kennedy ran the risk of drawing support from would-be Trump voters and clearing the way for Democrats Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to win the November election.
- “Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump,” she told Los Angeles media company Impact Theory. When asked about the timing of their decision, she did not say.
- “Not easy, not an easy decision,” she added.
- Earlier in the interview, Shanahan stated, “I did not put in tens of millions of dollars to be a spoiler candidate.”
- “I put in tens of millions of dollars to win, to fix this country, to do the right thing,” she said. “We don’t want to be a spoiler.”
- “We wanted to win. We wanted a fair shot,” Shanahan added.
- Trump told CNN on Tuesday he would “certainly be open” to Kennedy playing a role in his administration if the independent candidate drops out of the race and endorses him.
- “I like him, and I respect him,” Trump told the network in an interview after a campaign stop in Michigan.
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Important Takeaways:
- Trump has held nearly a dozen election campaign events since the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, on 13 July, but all of them have been indoors. At a recent indoor rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Trump lamented the location and said: “We’re not giving up the outdoor rallies.”
- A Secret Service official told the Washington Post that ballistic glass would be used at events by Kamala Harris if warranted.
- The glass is usually used exclusively for serving presidents and their vice-presidents.
- A House task force was set up in July to investigate the Trump shooting, and is required to issue its findings by 13 December.
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Important Takeaways:
- Do you believe Donald Trump? He is entirely convinced that if we stay on the path that we are currently on we are heading into a “great depression”, and many believe that he is right on target. Unemployment is rising, manufacturing activity is contracting, bankruptcies are soaring, home sales have fallen to depressingly low levels, the cost-of-living crisis never seems to end, poverty is soaring and homelessness is at the highest level ever recorded. Since Barack Obama first entered the White House, our politicians in Washington have been propping up the economy by adding 25 trillion dollars to the national debt. Now our national debt has crossed the 35 trillion-dollar mark, and our politicians continue to spend money at a pace that is absolutely absurd. But despite this tremendous influx of borrowed cash, the wheels are starting to come off the U.S. economy anyway.
- This week, everyone is talking about a “recession” because of what has been happening in the financial markets.
- Prior to Tuesday’s session, more than 6 trillion dollars in global stock market wealth had already been wiped out…
- Bloomberg estimates that approximately $6.4 trillion has been erased from the value of global stock markets over the past three weeks.
- Last Friday, the Sahm rule was triggered when the unemployment rate went up again…
- The Sahm rule, created by the former Federal Reserve official Claudia Sahm, triggers when the unemployment rate’s three-month moving average moves 50 basis points above its 12-month low.
- That rule was triggered Friday, with the moving average rising 53 basis points above that one-year trough, according to the real-time Sahm Rule Recession Indicator from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
- The Sahm rule has successfully predicted every single recession since 1970, and it is indicating that another recession is here.
- Today, we learned that Dell is planning another round of mass layoffs…
- While Dell has confirmed the layoffs, it hasn’t revealed how many employees are losing their jobs. SiliconAngle reports that roughly 12,500 Dell employees are being laid off this week, citing an unnamed source. Impacted employees are primarily on Dell’s sales and marketing teams. A layoff tracker has since reported the same number.
- Former Dell employee Ian Armstrong, who previously worked on the company’s UX design team for eight years, called the layoffs a “bloodbath” in a post, reporting that Dell has now laid off 24,500 staff in the past 15 months.
- Meanwhile, the cost-of-living crisis continues to crush working families all over the nation.
- At this point, it takes an additional thousand dollars a month for the typical U.S. household to buy the exact same goods and services that it did three years ago…
- The typical U.S. household needed to pay $227 more a month in March to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation, according to calculations from Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi shared with FOX Business.
- Americans are paying on average $784 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,069 more compared with three years ago, before the inflation crisis began.
- That is one of the primary reasons why credit card debt is at an all-time high and credit card delinquencies are soaring into the stratosphere…
- As I discussed a few days ago, we are witnessing a very alarming surge in business bankruptcies…
- Over the past year, business bankruptcy filings are up 40.3 percent, and have now reached a number not seen since the second quarter of 2020, at the peak of lockdowns. American households are following along, with total bankruptcy filings up 16.2 percent in the past year, including 132,710 new filings in the second quarter of 2024 alone.
- A 40 percent increase in one year is quite serious.
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Important Takeaways:
- A Secret Service sniper claims that another assassination attempt against a presidential candidate seems inevitable before Election Day because the attack on former President Donald Trump exposed the weakness in Secret Service security, according to a scathing letter circulating within the agency.
- “This agency NEEDS to change, if not now, WHEN? The NEXT assassination attempt in 30 days?” read the letter, first published by RealClearPolitics.
- “We all SHOULD expect another attempt to happen before November. We’ve exposed our inability to protect our leaders due to our leadership.”
- Law enforcement sources verified the authenticity of the letter to The Post.
- It was sent Monday to the entirety of the Secret Service Uniformed Division — the agency’s police force that secures the White House.
- The sniper demanded the resignation of high-level supervisors, whom the agent accused of failing rank-and-file Secret Service staff.
- “Sadly we have fallen short for YEARS. We just got lucky and looked good doing it. I have conveyed these thoughts to not only supervisors … Only to be brushed off as those with less experience somehow knew more than me,” the letter read.
- “Secret Service SUPERVISORS ‘knew better’ and the foot soldiers working, made the best of a BAD situation.”
- It went on to say that the reputation of the Secret Service and all its agents had been marred by the failures of July 13, which resulted in Trump being shot in the ear and a hero firefighter behind him being killed. The sniper said the day was “a stain I will never be able to cleanse.”
- The identity of the counter-sniper who wrote the letter is unclear. They described themselves as a veteran of the Marine Corps, and a member of Secret Service’s counter-sniper team for more than 20 years.
- Law enforcement sources previously told The Post that a full 30 seconds elapsed between when local police confronted gunman Thomas Crooks and the first shots he fired at Trump — prompting questions as to why Trump was allowed to remain onstage.
- The acting Secret Service director said Tuesday agents were never warned that Crooks was on the roof with a rifle.
- Meanwhile, newly revealed footage from the site of the shooting showed local cops encircling the building he shot from for more than two minutes before the attack, reinforcing that baffling question.
- Local police were in charge of the grounds from where Crooks fired, but the Secret Service was ultimately in charge of coordinating the day’s security.
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