Here comes Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch. Good morning, Tom. Good morning. How are you both? Good. Thank you. Great. How are you? Hopefully you can elevate the conversation beyond the scientific phenomenon that is known as brain freeze. I doubt it. A couple of things. I first want your thoughts. I want to get into the one-year anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Trump’s life. But first, your reaction to what we’ve all been sort of discovering this week and uncovering with regard to the Epstein files, whether they even exist or not, and what the latest is on this, because I know at Judicial Watch you’ve been trying to get some foyas on all this stuff.

Yeah, that’s right. We have a federal lawsuit for essentially all the Epstein records, and I’ve got to tell you, that memo that was unsigned, undated, and leaked was pretty confusing and disturbing in some respects, mainly about the memo’s decision as announced by the Justice Department and FBI to not release anything. It became particularly strange, because the day after the memo’s release, more or less, they’re telling the court in our case, well, we’re still reviewing documents for potential release. So it’s confusing in many ways. It seems like a predominant argument here, as people are trying to sort of forensically after the fact figure out exactly what this memo was meant to achieve and what’s really going on there, is that there are a lot of people, very high-profile names, that may be included in these files that are in fact innocent, that even though their names have been named, they’re not actually guilty of anything.

Because let’s face it, Tom, as soon as these records come out and anyone’s name is there, they’re going to be presumed guilty. It’s going to be presumed that they did all the horrible things that Jeffrey Epstein was known to have done. Is that a valid argument for basically saying nothing to see here, case closed, move along? No, it’s not. Depending on the context in which the names emerge, it’s just information. Epstein was a billionaire who had a lot of business communications and contacts and information about that. People will ask questions, but many names have already been released that he was in communication with.

It just raises questions and people answer them. President Trump notably knew him for a period of time and once he seemingly figured out what he was about, he didn’t want to deal with him anymore. What’s the issue there? I’m not convinced that this could be an excuse not to release information, but under FOIA, I don’t know if it’s a reason. Tom, I think we all recognize that yes, you might have been mentioned, a person might have been mentioned in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, but there is nothing wrong with them coming out, clearing their name and explaining, and you know what? The chips will fall while they fall, but there should be some transparency.

I’d love just to shift over to another interesting case where we don’t have a lot of information, which is the assassination attempt on President Trump last year in Butler. We’re coming up this weekend on the one-year anniversary since that time, and I don’t know if we know much more about the assassin than we have within the first couple of months of the assassination attempt. What is going on in that case here, Tom? As best I can tell, the FBI hasn’t released one document under FOIA since a year ago. We’re just finding out today, in the Washington Post, the name of the Butler County SWAT team member, who may have been the one who actually stopped the assassination.

His name is Aaron Zeppolini, a big guy who fired his rifle and caused, it looks like, caused Cook to stop to allow the Secret Service sniper, who really screwed up, in my view, to get his act together and actually take him out finally. But let me take another attack here. Not only do we need more about what happened with him, the assassin, the would-be assassin, there’s got to be an investigation of the deprivation of security for President Trump. Some of this is incompetence by the Secret Service. It’s a disastrous organization. I’m not confident that it’s been reformed or even capable of being reformed.

But secondly, we know the Biden administration denied the President adequate Secret Service protection. He had to curtail his campaigning. He was under not only, obviously, just general rep because of his role and his prominence, but the Iranians were trying to take him out. Yet this Biden administration refused to provide him with adequate protection. And in my view, there should be a criminal investigation of that. Just not, quote, an analysis. So why happened that? I mean, it seems like it would be in the not only interest of transparency and openness and giving the American people some confidence in the way our federal government and the Secret Service are operating in a very vital role to protect the President and those in the chain of command there for the presidency, which, by the way, should be enough.

But frankly, that also sort of serves President Trump’s political interests, I would think, to show the incompetence of the prior administration. So why do you think this hasn’t been done? You know, I’m not quite sure if it’s on the radar there in terms of everything that’s going on, but it would be consistent in the sense that just generally these agencies are slow to get on the ball when it comes to transparency. And we’re kind of going back to the issue we opened up with. You know, we kind of saw how they messed up the initial release of information about Epstein earlier this year.

And it’s entirely too reactive. And they kind of wait to be sued. And for people like me to start yelling until till they start releasing material, and then it’s not proactive. It’s just more reactive. Based on what you know, Tom, about the assassination attempt of Donald Trump, did Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20-year-old resident of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, that’s pretty much all we know about him at this point, do you think he acted alone, number one? And number two, do you have any understanding of what his motive may have been? It’s amazing.

It’s a year later, and we don’t know basic answers to those questions. Did he act alone? And what was his motive in trying to assassinate Donald Trump? We don’t know. There’s some indications. We did get some more material from the locals, judicial watch did, up in Pennsylvania than we have from the government in terms of photographs and material from the event that took place or the attempted assassination and the murder of the poor individual. But read this. Listen to this in the Washington Post today. Hours before Trump’s arrival, a local officer told Zalaponi he was concerned about four suspicious individuals he saw hanging around the warehouse.

Four people, each wearing distinctly colored shirts, had remained even as the property owner, tried the shoe spectators away. The officer referred to one of the suspicious individuals who, as Zalaponi later learned, was Crooks, had a gray shirt. Interesting. Interesting. And again, I don’t know what the make of it, other than it’s in the Washington Post today. So I don’t know if I can believe it. And it would be really nice if we don’t have to wait two decades to get all the documents pertaining to the assassination type of Donald Trump. Because I’m looking at 20 years of conspiracies now that are going to be hatched.

And for people who decry conspiracy theories, they happen because information is withheld. Because it happens all the time, Tom, that the second administration says, you know what, the American people can’t be trusted with this information. That’s when it all starts to spiral out of control. Trust us with the information. We’re big. We’re grownups. We can handle it. The jails are full of people put there on conspiracy theories. Literally, conspiracy is a crime, you know, as that, you know. But, you know, all we can do is keep on, you know, so despite all the noise, all we can do is, you know, continue our independent investigations into the shooting, which to me has been more substantial than the FBI has been at least willing to disclose.

And with Epstein, we’ve got our lawsuit. I mean, so for all the noise, they still have to tell us what documents they have and what’s being withheld and why. So none of this is going to go away. Administrations come and go, majorities in the House and Senate come and go, but Judicial Watch is still there. And they really are the oversight that you can count on to continue to diligently work on this stuff. To all we always love talking to you, Tom Fitton. Thanks for being our guest today. Hey, you’re welcome.

Thank you, guys. [tr:trw].

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