More Questions Than Answers About Trump Assassination Attempt

Happy Wednesday! Our favorite speaker so far at the Republican National Convention (RNC) has been West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s bulldog, “Babydog,” who made an appearance on the stage last night.

“She makes us smile, and she loves everybody,” Justice said about his pooch. “And how could the message possibly be any more simpler than just that?” 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey was convicted in his federal corruption trial on Tuesday on 16 felony counts—including bribery, extortion, and wire fraud—related to his receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for using his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to benefit the government of Egypt. The senator, who is scheduled to be sentenced on October 29, said he would appeal the verdict. Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, was charged along with her husband in the scheme that allegedly brought the duo hard cash, gold bars, and a Mercedes convertible, but her trial will be delayed indefinitely, a federal judge ordered Tuesday, as she undergoes treatment for breast cancer. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Menendez to resign after the verdict was announced, and other Democratic leaders—including New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey—reiterated such calls. Menendez is currently running as an independent to hold onto his seat, against Democratic nominee Rep. Andy Kim and Republican nominee Curtis Bashaw.
• A group of House Democrats drafted a letter to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) opposing its move to formally nominate President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee via a virtual roll call vote weeks before the party’s convention in August. The early nomination vote was first announced in late May to avoid any potential issues with an August 7 ballot certification deadline in Ohio, since the party’s convention is set to begin on August 19. The Ohio legislature, however, has since passed legislation extending the deadline to September. Now some Democrats see the early vote as an attempt by Biden allies to run out the clock on efforts to replace him on the ballot and preclude a convention fight. Politico reported yesterday that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is taking calls from House Democrats concerned about Biden at the top of the ticket and that at least one of those members “ended the phone call with the distinct impression that Pelosi believed Biden should exit the presidential race.”
• Biden called on Congress Tuesday to pass a bill to prevent “corporate” landlords from raising rents above 5 percent annually. Specifically, landlords who own at least 50 properties would see certain tax benefits revoked if annual rent increases to exceeded 5 percent, the White House proposed. “Today, I’m sending a clear message to corporate landlords,” Biden said in a statement. “If you raise rents more than 5 percent on existing units, you should lose valuable tax breaks.” Meanwhile, the Biden administration also instructed federal agencies to identify federally owned land that could host newly constructed affordable housing units.  
• After months of aggressive Chinese targeting of Filipino vessels around disputed territory in the South China Sea, China and the Philippines agreed on Tuesday to establish a hotline between the two nations’ presidents. Last month, the Chinese Coast Guard illegally boarded several Filipino vessels.
• U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Jeff Flake will step down from his post in early September, Axios reported Tuesday, a move the former Republican senator from Arizona later confirmed. The 61-year-old Flake, who served six years in the Senate and 12 years in the House of Representatives, endorsed Biden in the 2020 election cycle.
• Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill—the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth (SAFETY) Act—into law on Tuesday that will bar school districts, school boards, and officials from public and charter schools from requiring teachers and other school employees to share a student’s gender or sexual identity with “any other person” without their consent. The new law will reverse measures recently passed in several California municipalities that require school officials to inform parents if their child comes out as transgender or nonbinary.

A Foggy Picture of Security Failure

The family of Jim Copenhaver, one of the two men critically wounded in the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday, released a statement on Tuesday. “Jim would like to especially thank the first responders, medics, and hospital staff who have provided him with initial and continuing care,” it read. “Additionally, Jim would like to express his thoughts and prayers for the other victims, their families, and President Trump. He prays for a safe and speedy recovery for them all.” Copenhaver and David Dutch, also injured in the shooting, remain in critical but stable condition. The widow of Corey Comperatore, who was killed on Saturday, revealed yesterday that she received a call from the former president.

Three days on from the shooting at a campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, many questions remained about the security failures that allowed a would-be assassin’s bullets to come within a hair’s breadth of killing Trump.  

The FBI has continued its investigation into the Saturday shooting, which it is considering an attempted assassination and possibly a domestic terror event. But the motive of the 20-year-old gunman is still unknown even as authorities cracked the shooter’s phone and other “electronic devices,” according to an FBI press release on Monday. Scott Duffey, a retired FBI supervisory special agent, told Fox News this week that getting access to the devices should allow investigators to answer more questions about the shooter. “[What] they’re going to be looking for is who, if anyone, he was in contact with,” Duffey said. “And if not in contact with anyone, then gather information about what he was reviewing, reading, and researching.”

The FBI has yet to publicly share any findings from its digital search, but the agency has seemed to err on the side of transparency in the early days of the investigation. “This is not typical, but we’re leaning far forward here, given the circumstances, and want to keep everyone well informed,” Deputy Director Paul Abbate told reporters on Sunday in a call with the FBI officials leading the inquiry into the shooting. 

Still, the portrait of the shooter remains roughly where it was at the beginning of the week: He appears to be a loner without overtly clear political motivations. The gunman was a member of a shooting club near Pittsburgh that has a 200-yard rifle range, but it’s unknown whether he used the facility to practice for the assassination attempt. The investigation’s findings so far seem to confirm that the shooter acted alone. “At this time, law enforcement has reported that their investigation has not identified ties between the shooter and any accomplice or co-conspirator, foreign or domestic,” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the president’s National Security Council, said Tuesday. The New York Times reported yesterday that U.S. intelligence agencies had been “tracking a potential Iranian assassination plot” against Trump in recent weeks, but that intel officials did not believe those threats to be related to what took place over the weekend.

As authorities continue to dig into the gunman’s life, more scrutiny has focused on the law enforcement and Secret Service actions that preceded Saturday’s shooting.  

“It was unacceptable,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said on Tuesday in an interview with ABC News, her first public remarks about the assassination attempt. “It’s something that shouldn’t happen again.”

“The buck stops with me,” she added, brushing aside some calls for her to resign from her role. “I am the director of the Secret Service.”

But at the same time, Cheatle suggested that the local law enforcement teams working with the Secret Service were responsible for securing the building where the shooter was positioned. “In this particular instance, we did share support for that particular site and that the Secret Service was responsible for the inner perimeter,” she said. “And then we sought assistance from our local counterparts for the outer perimeter. There was local police in that building. There was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.” 

Local authorities have contested this version of events. “Secret Service was in charge, and so it was their responsibility to make sure that the venue and the surrounding area was secure,” said Ronald Goldinger, Butler County’s District Attorney. “For them to blame local law enforcement is them passing the blame when they hold the blame, in my opinion.” The Secret Service issued a statement early Tuesday saying, “Any news suggesting the Secret Service is blaming local law enforcement for Saturday’s incident is simply not true.”

Ultimate responsibility for the former president’s safety lies with the Secret Service, including decisions on how to work with local law enforcement. When asked why there wasn’t Secret Service personnel on the roof of the building occupied by the shooter to begin with, Cheatle gave a curious answer. “That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point,” she said. “And so, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building from inside.” 

Also coming under scrutiny is the promptness of law enforcement’s response to reports of the shooter crawling up on the roof. Video footage from witnesses appears to show spectators informing law enforcement that someone was on the roof at least a minute before the shooting began; some witnesses said they informed police of the shooter’s position for “two or three minutes.” Additional videos show the two Secret Service sniper teams on the buildings behind the stage, manning their rifles and scopes in the direction of the shooter approximately two minutes before the first shot was fired. There are also unconfirmed reports that local law enforcement spotted the shooter sitting on the roof nearly a half hour before shots were fired.  

“I don’t have all the details yet, but it was a very short period of time,” Cheatle said of the window between when law enforcement was alerted to a suspicious person on the roof and the shooting began. “Seeking that person out, finding them, identifying them, and eventually neutralizing them took place in a very short period of time, and it makes it very difficult.” 

Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe confirmed on Monday that a local police officer tried to climb onto the roof shortly before the shooting began, but dropped off when the shooter pointed his gun at the officer. “All I know is the officer had both hands on the roof to get up on the roof, never made it because the shooter had turned towards the officer, and rightfully and smartly, the officer let go,” Slupe said. “People think the officers are supermen, like, you hold on the roof with one hand while you are hanging on for dear life and pull a gun out. It doesn’t work that way.”

The unanswered questions and blame-shifting dynamic between local law enforcement and the Secret Service make a timely review of the incident all the more important, particularly as the relative dearth of information has led to an explosion of conspiracy theories online. “It’s preposterous,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday of conspiracies about the assassination attempt. “It is also dangerous to propagate rumors that are so unequivocally false and provocative.”

Mayorkas said he’s in the “process of selecting who will lead the independent review” of the shooting ordered by President Joe Biden. “We need to move with swiftness and urgency because this is a security imperative.”

Trump will hold his first rally since the assassination attempt with his new running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, on Saturday after the Republican National Convention concludes. The rally will be held indoors, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

Worth Your Time

• “The scene was shocking, to be sure. But sadly, it wasn’t surprising,” John Grove wrote in Law & Liberty about the horrific attempt on Trump’s life. “In fact, one might be forgiven for wondering at the fact that more bullets haven’t been flying at political rallies. You don’t have to look far on any social media outlet to find people salivating at the prospect of a politics of enmity and blood. … The enmity is only slightly masked among the more ‘respectable’ classes, who still present politics in existential terms, simply leaving the ‘destroy our enemies’ as an unspoken implication.” But the source of the enmity is surprisingly shallow. “One characteristic of today’s disease in the public mind is that it seems to be driven specifically by our political life—not by underlying social conditions,” Grove argued. “The vitriolic politics we practice is not feeding off already-simmering social tensions. It creates these identities and ‘communities,’ most of which would not otherwise cohere on their own. Rather than managing and mitigating the tensions that naturally arise in any society, our political process actively generates new ones and calls forth the worst in human nature to bolster them.”
• “Sixty years ago, the sentence ‘Europe’s fate is in Germany’s hands now’ would have been terrifying,” Noah Smith wrote in his Noahpinion Substack. “What a difference half a century makes. The U.S., which was supposed to be the guarantor of stability in Europe, is now the world’s most unstable great power. The likely return of Trump to the presidency will probably signal the end of U.S. support for Ukraine, and at least a partial disengagement from NATO and the transatlantic alliance in general.” Smith argued that if the U.S. does indeed withdraw from Europe, Germany will need to fill the vacuum left behind. “None of this is to say that Germany is the leader of the EU, or of NATO,” he wrote. “But Germany is so big and important that if it doesn’t step up and exercise some sort of leadership within those organizations, they will tend to be rudderless and inertial.”

Presented Without Comment

President Joe Biden, in an interview with BET News: 

When I originally ran, you may remember Ed, I said I was gonna be a transitional candidate, and I thought that I’d be able to move from this, just pass it on to someone else. But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided. And quite frankly, I think the only thing age brings, a little bit of wisdom. And I think I’ve demonstrated that I know how to get things done for the country, in spite of the fact that we were told we couldn’t get it done. But there’s more to do, and I’m reluctant to walk away from that.

Also Presented Without Comment

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, speaking at the Republican National Convention:

You don’t have to agree with Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him. Take it from me, I haven’t always agreed with Trump.

Also Also Presented Without Comment 

Washington Examiner: Biden Appears to Bungle Policy Proposal in Unsteady NAACP Speech

“Look, folks, the idea, the idea that corporate-owned housing is able to raise your rent, [300], 400 bucks a month or something? [Under what I’m about to announce], they can’t raise it more than—” Biden said, pausing and leaning forward while squinting, “$55.”

The crowd cheered in response to the major proposal. Unfortunately for those excited about the drastic rent raise cap, the real amount was probably actually 5%.

In the Zeitgeist 

Lionsgate announced earlier this month that the magician-heist movie series Now You See Me will return with its third installment next year. Mark Ruffalo, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, and Morgan Freeman will be among the actors reprising their roles in Now You See Me 3, which is scheduled to hit theaters in November 2025. 

The first film, released in 2013, followed a group of clever illusionists—“The Four Horsemen”—who used their sleight-0f-hand skills to orchestrate elaborate heists before live audiences.

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Sarah and Mike broke down Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Trump and both the Dispatch Politics team and Nick explored the implications for the GOP in Trump selecting Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate.
• On the podcasts: Jonah is joined by American Enterprise Institute President Robert Doar on The Remnant for a wide-ranging conversation about New York City, the Eisenhower administration, and neoconservatism.
• On the site: Kevin examines what J.D. Vance brings—or doesn’t bring—to the Republican ticket, Mike reports on the good vibes at the RNC amid expectations of victory in the fall, Cliff Smith writes about the long history of Iranian influence operations in the U.S., and Jonah reiterates the need for Biden to step down from the Democratic ticket.

Let Us Know  

What are some ways that you think Americans could actually “turn down the temperature” in our political rhetoric and public life?