Tag: Corey Comperatore

Kill box

By Steve Woodward

“They put Trump in a kill box.”

Podcaster and investigative journalist Benny Johnson arrived at this grim conclusion after spending a day in Butler, Pennsylvania, with his production crew and two members of Congress, Eli Crane (R-AZ) and Cory Mills (R-FL), on the site of a July 13, 2024, campaign stop where an assassination attempt targeted President Donald Trump.

Rep. Cory Mills (left) joins Rep. Eli Crane on infamous Butler, PA, roof

Crane is a former Navy Seal sniper, who was deployed five times during a 13-year career. Mills is a retired member of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division and Joint Special Operations Command, who was wounded during a deployment to Iraq in 2006. 

During an extensive visit to the open field in Butler on July 26, 2024, Johnson and his traveling companions captured drone video and climbed atop the roof of the now infamous building that was ignored by Secret Service ahead of and during Trump’s rally. 

They also revealed how a chain-link fence on one side of the property separated the rally stage from an open space where many individuals gathered. This area was in closer proximity to the podium – about 80 yards — than the roof where Thomas Crooks fired eight shots from about 140 yards. No one behind the fenced area was subject to security screening. They were outside the perimeter established by Secret Service. Various television news reports capture these groups of people calling out to law enforcement after they spotted Crooks on the nearby roof. Their warnings were ignored.

“You’ve been lied to,” said Johnson at outset of his podcast, The Benny Show, which has 2.27 million YouTube subscribers and a total of eight million-plus subscribers across multiple podcast platforms. “The truth is so much worse than you could possibly imagine.”

If you want to understand the sheer incompetence and mysterious indifference exhibited by Secret Service agents and local law enforcement personnel assigned to the Butler rally, setting aside 90 minutes to watch the July 27 podcast is strongly recommended. Click here to watch. It’s riveting.

During Johnson’s daylong investigation he said they encountered no one representing the federal government, the Secret Service or any law enforcement agency. There was no police tape protecting any area or structure. “There wasn’t anybody trying to preserve the crime scene,” he said. 

Johnson’s reporting delivers three dominant headlines.

First: The American Glass Research building, its easily accessible roof, and its proximity to the rally was deliberately ignored by security. After seeing it in person, Johnson could draw no other conclusion. Second: If a nearby water tower, the tallest structure for miles, had been manned by snipers Crooks never would have survived his arrival atop the AGR building. He would have been taken out immediately. But the tower also was ignored. Third: An opening along an unmonitored, unsecured fence could have been exploited by any person or group bearing explosives or weapons, which would have turned the rally into “a war zone”.

“It’s going to take me a long time to process what we just witnessed because what we just witnessed was, without any question in my mind, a deliberate attempt to ensure that something bad happens to President Trump,” Johnson said.

Upon returning to his Tampa studio from Butler, Johnson provides a detailed account of what they observed, and what additional information sources close to Crane, Mills and Johnson himself have provided. These are among the unavoidable conclusions that the corrupt corporate media are unlikely to report:

  • “(Crooks) tried to enter the Trump event — that’s brand-new information. He was turned away at security. Where are those security guards? Where’s their body cam? … He was flagged as behaving very suspiciously and was turned away. … Security had already rebuffed Thomas Crooks and said you will not enter and flagged him as suspicious. Why did they let him go? Why did nobody track him? Why was nobody looking at Thomas Crooks?”
  • The Secret Service assigned to Butler were denied requests for drones to surveil the rally grounds.
  • “Whistleblower allegations suggest the majority of DHS, Department of Homeland Security, officials were not in fact Secret Service agents but instead drawn from the Department’s Homeland Security investigations unit. This is especially concerning given that the HSI agents were unfamiliar with standard protocol typically used in these types of events.”
  • A sniper team that was in (an adjacent building with a view of the AGR rooftop where Crooks took his position) was incapacitated. “One member was sent home. How that’s possible? … One guy gets locked out of the building (after he was) told to go investigate (Crooks’ whereabouts). He gets locked out and the other (remaining) sniper gets removed from his post and goes to check on his buddy locked out of the building.  The result, no matter how it all happened, is that Thomas Crooks was able to get his shots off without any engagement.”
Butler water tower captured by Johnson drone

The most scandalous lapse of that ill-fated day (that resulted in the shooting death of Corey Comperatore, 50) was the absence of federal snipers atop a massive water tower. “The tower has a railing along the side (on top) that is perfect for a security detail. You could have put 10 men on this tower to have a virtually 360-degree perfect, eagle-eye view of everything at the event. Every single sniper location, every one, every single security position is made irrelevant by this tower since this tower is so much higher and is so much more protective of President Trump.”

  • “There were hundreds if not maybe thousands, in the aggregate, of individuals who were able to bring lawn chairs, who were able to bring roller bags, who were able to bring luggage, who were able to bring pelican cases, to bring tailgating equipment within 80 yards of President Trump (separated only by a chain-link fence).”
  • “What if just 10, 20, 40 (terrorists) were able to walk up to this fence line, and they had rocket propelled grenades in their little roller kits; they’re just walking in with a little cart. They just roll up with that cart. It’s filled with RPGs. It’s filled with firearms. It’s filled with, God forbid, who knows, and what if these people were tactical?”

    Congressmen Crane and Mills have since appeared on various news outlets describing what they observed in Butler while accompanying Johnson’s crew. They are certain that the tragic moments that unfolded on July 13 are not to be written off as resulting from a comedy of errors.

On July 29, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the formation of a 13-member task force to investigate the assassination attempt. One member, Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), was in attendance during the rally and is familiar with local law enforcement personnel. Another, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD), recently visited the scene in Butler.

Crane and Mills, despite their thorough investigation on site and extensive sources, were not named to the panel.


Collateral damage

By Steve Woodward

In the aftermath of a glaring security failure that allowed a deranged man-child to aim his rifle and fire multiple rounds at President Donald Trump, wise media overlords are warning that we must strive for national unity. This is a vile diversionary tactic intended to spin a narrative that every American is equally to blame for the so-called polarization that defines our times.

Instead, it must be loudly vocalized that what we observed on July 13, 2024, in rural Pennsylvania was a perfect storm of a vast mentally ill sector of our population converging with the relentless weaponization of corporate media, social media and our legal system.

The latter has been taking aim at Trump and his 75-million-plus legion for eight tumultuous years by trivializing physical threats against Trump or, worse, ignoring them.

But we’re once again called upon to unite, and lower the “temperature” of political discourse. It’s a sophomoric, hollow ploy to provide cover to the Biden regime’s army of surrogates in the White House, on Capitol Hill and within the corrupt, decaying journalism profession, all solely responsible for stoking smoldering embers of wrath.

“(Trump’s) opportunity now is to present himself as someone who can rise above the attack on his life and unite the country,” instructs a Wall Street Journal editorial.

It is “on all Republicans, all Democrats to come together, to lower the temperature (and) to measure the rhetoric,” said U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) during a television interview. Republicans? Are Republicans the ones drawing frequent comparisons between and Adolf Hitler and Trump? Are Republicans cheering on deeply corrupt attorneys general intent on imprisoning Trump?

The blue ribbon for post-Pennsylvania sermonizing goes to the Journal’s Gerard Baker, who wrote: “If there is room for emotional restraint in the aftermath of this horror, there is also reason to hope for a small movement toward de-escalating the mutual loathing to which so many Americans have fallen prey.”

Let us unpack the absurdity of Baker’s bloviation: Conservatives, many guided by Judeo-Christian principles, loathe hypocrisy, deceit and threats to our inalienable rights and freedom. Conservatives have not called for the execution of Joe Biden, however. 

By contrast, the Left hates us. As people. You. Me. Our very existence. There is no pleasure to be gained from knowing this, but there is no escaping the reality that it is so. If we are collateral damage in their war on American exceptionalism it’s our fault. We keep getting in the way. Military veteran Ashli Babbitt got in the way of a bullet on January 6, 2021, the day she died in the U.S. Capitol, an unarmed protestor. What explains a Capitol Police officer’s impulsive firing of a pistol that took her life? Rage? Contempt? The question never was formally asked. Lt. Michael Byrd was not charged. 

The Left coldly refuses to contemplate the collateral damage trailing in its relentless wake. Consider the the human toll during nearly a decade of Trump Delusion Syndrome. Lives lost. Jobs lost. Careers destroyed. Businesses closed or vandalized by BLM brigades. Kids trafficked. 

Something resonated with the Pennsylvania shooter. How can we not conclude that this mentally damaged person believed his cause was just? He believed that Trump needed to die. What triggered that belief and his act of terror might never be known. Take your choice on what influenced him. Trump is 21st century Hitler. Trump is an existential threat to “democracy”. Trump’s supporters are racist, sexist, transphobic. These narratives have bubbled like a toxic brew for years. Suck the hope out of human souls for long enough and some of them will snap.

The collateral damage in Butler, PA, was a firefighter, 50, attending Trump’s rally, Corey Comperatore. He is deceased. He took bullets to save his wife and daughter. David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 74, remain hospitalized and critically wounded by the gunman’s erratic shots.

These names are added to the rolls of lives ended, or upended, by the a weaponized federal government during the Trump presidency, and by the current Biden regime. Many of these shortened lives include growing numbers of victims of murderous illegal aliens swarming our homeland, aided and abetted by Team Biden’s open border betrayal.  

Recent victims of immigrant misconduct are Lisbeth Gutierrez-Salazar and her two sons, Juan Gutierrez-Salazar, 10, and Julian Cardona-Gutierrez, 7 (photos nearby), who died in an arson fire set in Stockton, CA, by three-time deportee Jose Carmen Cardona. Joining the list of needlessly deceased: Kristie Thibodeaux, 43, of New Orleans, fatally shot by three illegals, including Joshua Bonifacio-Avila, 19, a Honduran citizen who illegally entered the U.S. on an unknown date at an unknown location. Authorities say he was arrested for theft and released on two previous occasions. In New Mexico, Tiger Gutierrez, 22, was killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver on July 1, 2024. Mexican national invader Jesus Sandoval-Martinez, 21, is charged with vehicular homicide. 

These incidents are just a few of many happening almost everyday across the homeland. And this is only one category of Biden-era carnage.

After then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s self-acknowledged refusal to bring in 10,000 National Guard troops to the U.S. Capitol ahead of an openly scheduled January 6, 2021, rally, Capitol security is seen welcoming citizens through the doors (contrasted by smaller pockets of more aggressive protestors). Rather than take responsibility for encouraging crowds to surge in, Pelosi and fellow Democrats doubled down. More than 460 January 6 patriots have been or are imprisoned. More than 1,260 have been charged with offenses. Matthew Perna, 37, one of those charged, committed suicide more than one year later as the feds prolonged an investigation without explanation.

Capitol police officers were not unscathed by the orchestrated free-for-all. At least two committed suicide in the aftermath

Trump surrogates have suffered greatly amid perpetual law-fare waged by the Left. Gen. Michael Flynn. Roger Stone. George Papadopoulos (the alleged Russian collusion agent). Peter Navarro (who will complete a four-month federal prison sentence on July 17, 2024). Steven Bannon (who reported to federal prison to begin a four-month sentence on July 1). Navarro and Bannon refused to testify before a sham House panel “investigating” January 6.

Finally, let us not diminish victims of Left-imposed pandemic hysteria, lockdowns and forced injections. Thousands were fired or suspended from jobs. Military service members were demonized and stripped of pensions for refusing the mRNA jabs. Teen suicide was rampant. But once the Left recognized that compliance was widespread, and that a virus during an election year worked to its advantage, there would be no further introspection, no reassessment. No regrets, certainly.

Former Centers for Disease Control chief Dr. Robert Redfield testified on July 11 to what many Americans knew instinctively three-plus years ago when he observed, “They never should have been mandated. It should have been open to personal choice. (mRNA jabs) don’t prevent infection; they do have side effects.”

The overlords are begging us to embrace a side effect of the bloodied side of Trump’s head. Unite, they say.

But Trump had it right as he rose, defiant, from the stage. Fight.