Butler rally shooting
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The Butler rally shooting is the attempt on Donald Trump's life at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which John Kiriakou treats as an open question rather than a settled one. He advances no theory of who was behind it. His objection is narrower and, in his framing, harder to dismiss: the facts as published do not fit together.

The reconciliation he cannot make is with the competence of the protective detail. The account works, he argues, only on an assumption he rejects, "Unless we accept the notion that the Secret Service is just a collection of incompetent boobs, and I don't think that they are."

What remains is a list of questions rather than an accusation: how an eighteen-year-old obtained a free shot at a president; how he got inside the event; how he got onto the roof; what the circumstances of his planning were; and, most pointedly, why he was not shot before he fired, when agents had already seen him on the roof and seen him preparing.

Kiriakou's answer to why it still matters is not about the living. He has, he says, long argued for complete and open investigations, and the audience he names is not the electorate but the record: the American people deserve an explanation of what happened that day, and so do historians and future generations. That the answers look unreachable does not soften the judgement. They are "questions that we're just never we're never going to know the answers to," and that, he says, is unacceptable.

See also

- Secret Service
- Donald Trump
- Charlie Kirk shooting
- John Kiriakou
