Taking the ball and going home is the shorthand for a position John Kiriakou took within days of the July 2024 shooting at Butler, when asked whether the attempt might have been deliberately enabled rather than merely botched.
The objections
His gut answer was no, or likely no, and he gave three reasons. The first is scale: an operation of that kind would have so many moving parts that it would be virtually impossible to carry out.[1]
The second and third came from a conversation the same day with a friend who is a former FBI agent, and who had been giving it a lot of thought herself. If they were going to do that, she said, they would not have outsourced it to a twenty-year-old — “just some local yokel from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania” — and they would not have done it in front of thousands of people.[1]
Kiriakou is careful to mark what he is not saying. He is not claiming that such operations have never been carried out in the past; only that this is not how one would be carried out.[2]
The decisive point
The argument he treats as conclusive is the outcome. Had it been the military or any American organisation, Donald Trump would not be alive. A state operation would have provided secondary and tertiary layers precisely in case the first shooter missed — including a shooter tasked with killing the patsy.[2]
From that Kiriakou draws the behavioural rule his interviewers found most striking, and which they immediately contrasted with the prediction that a thwarted plot would double down: a state actor that has failed once does not try again. It takes its ball and goes home, as after the Bay of Pigs.[2]