In the wake of what happened near the fifth green at Trump International Golf Club on Sunday, it seems we should consider some implications. Grave ones, actually. Because after two attempts on President Donald Trump’s life in only 64 days, a pattern that is more suggestive of a crumbling society than perhaps anything else among a panoply of foul auguries flashing in front of us, mere happenstance is highly unlikely as an explanation. Ryan Routh is clearly a nutcase. He’s been a danger to those around him for more than 20 years since he was arrested after barricading himself inside a roofing business he owned with a fully automatic machine gun in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2002. Routh shouldn’t have had the AK-47 rifle he pointed through a fence at the fifth hole green at Trump International, laying in wait for Trump and his party for some 12 hours before a Secret Service agent noticed the barrel of the rifle poking through that chain-link fence and frightened Routh off with a pair of shots, but he did. And somehow Routh, a North Carolinian who lives in Hawaii when he’s not traveling the world billing himself as a recruiter for the Ukrainian Army (it appears he is no such thing), knew that Trump would be golfing at Trump International on Sunday. That isn’t public information. Routh had ceramic body armor and a GoPro camera to go with an AK-47–style rifle with a scope, which indicates he was going to film himself shooting Trump dead. Which he would likely have done had it not been for the Secret Service agent scaring him off and then the local police subsequently apprehending him thanks to a tip, which included a photo of his car and license number, from an eyewitness who saw him flee the scene of his would-be assassination of Trump. This didn’t play out in the same fashion that the first attempted assassination of Donald Trump did two months ago in Butler, Pennsylvania, but nevertheless both were miraculous close shaves. But on Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that his state law enforcement agencies will conduct their own investigation of the attempted assassination rather than allow the FBI to lead the case unencumbered by anyone looking over their shoulders. And that’s as it should be; Routh is charged with attempted murder, a state crime, so state law enforcement is the proper investigative authority. It’s as it should be for another reason: the FBI is disqualified as an investigative agency where Donald Trump is concerned. From Peter Strzok’s “insurance policy” to the Mar-a-Lago raid, we’re nearing a decade of abuse that the agency has committed against Trump as a political candidate, president, and private citizen. There might well be individual FBI agents who are honest and willing to do a proper job, but the agency as a whole has lost its integrity. Its performance to date in investigating Butler has been hopelessly flawed, as congressional investigations have turned up far more in the way of context and details. From the reports of the congressional investigators, it’s clear that more was going on in Butler than some one-off, lone-nut attack on a Trump rally. There were key holes in Secret Service coverage, holes that were clearly going to provide a golden opportunity for an attacker to get to Trump. And it’s implausible that Thomas Crooks, an antisocial nerd barely out of high school with a menial job emptying bedpans at a nursing home, would somehow know that he could take a position on a rooftop barely 130 yards from the stage where Trump was speaking and get off at least four shots at the president before he’d be taken out. You’d expect, as a trained sniper, that there would be no way that roof could be available to you. Even as an untrained sniper with some situational awareness, you wouldn’t figure you could get to that rooftop without being accosted by security personnel or law enforcement. And yet Crooks got onto that rooftop, in plain sight of many rallygoers, casually set up his shot, and missed taking Trump’s head off by a couple of centimeters through divine intervention alone. Then 64 days later, there’s a sniper nest at Trump International where someone lays in wait for 12 hours at the fifth hole, and he’s not molested until he’s just about ready to finish Trump off. The media refuses to talk about this other than to scold Trump over his “rhetoric” while they’ve been ginning up would-be assassins for months with talk of Trump as “Hitler” or a “dictator.” But in any other context, you would have a national panic over the level of political violence being perpetrated, now at the highest levels, in this country. It all smells like not just a plot but a campaign. As I’ve noted, these seem like crab traps being laid on the waterbottom — when you lay a crab trap you don’t actually watch what’s happening; you just know that if there are crabs nearby, they will make their way to the bait. Security vulnerabilities like we’ve seen twice in 64 days are crab traps, at minimum. Though they could be more. These crabs might be doing more than simply chasing the bait. And that’s why DeSantis’ investigation must proceed. What if the governor’s investigators find inexplicable holes in Trump’s security coverage again? What if they prove that Ryan Routh had help? Obviously, it’ll matter from whom. Are there elements within the U.S. government — or outside of it with the ability to manipulate the federal agencies — willing to plot an assassination of a presidential candidate? Well, if you were investigating a crime, you’d look to means, motive, and opportunity. Ryan Routh, a certifiable maniac with violent tendencies and a clear political animus for Trump (he’s being termed a Trump supporter because he’s said to have voted for him in 2016, but that’s hard to make stick given the Biden–Harris bumper sticker on his vehicle and the 19 separate ActBlue donations he’s made to Democrats of recent vintage; he didn’t come to assassinate Trump out of love), looks an awful lot like the sort who ends up an asset for some intelligence agency or other. Was Routh acting alone? The good news is he wasn’t killed in the attempt as Crooks was, so Routh might be able to offer some information as to whether he served as a means for someone else’s ends. Motive? I don’t think it’s difficult to see that there are Deep State operators with a motive to end Trump physically or politically. Certainly Team Biden is out to get him; they’ve programmed an illegally appointed special prosecuter to bring dubious federal criminal cases against him and similarly sent local prosecutors after him in New York and Atlanta to charge him with conduct that is not criminal. And we saw, when 51 high-ranking intelligence community spooks got together to publicly lie about the Hunter Biden laptop story and call it “Russian disinformation” that there are elements within that community willing to go rogue for political ends. Is it really so difficult to imagine an assassination is the next step when they refer to Trump as a Hitler? Is it out of the question when Trump says during a debate that he’ll negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine and 10 days later someone who careened around Kyiv claiming to be boosting their war effort with Afghan Army vets on offer shows up as a would-be assassin on that golf course? As for opportunity, that’s also clearly present. Are we talking about bureaucrats within the federal government? The intelligence community? Law enforcement? Military? All of those elements would have the opportunity once the glass of a constitutional republic in which civilian elected officials wield power is broken. And most Americans believe that glass was shattered some time ago. Rogue operators within the federal government — or even outside the government with penetration inside it — would have the opportunity to plot such an assassination as was nearly perpetrated in Butler and in Palm Beach. This proves nothing, of course. I’m not claiming to be some clairvoyant Jim Garrison; I’m merely presenting scenarios and posing questions. The proof must be obtained, which is what DeSantis’ investigation is charged with doing. Perhaps there is no “there” there, and perhaps Trump is simply outrageously unlucky and amazingly fortunate at the same time. Maybe what we’re seeing is merely the foreseeable confluence of breathtaking Secret Service incompetence and media/political irresponsibility in demonizing him in front of the crazies. One has to believe there’s more going on, but maybe that isn’t true. But maybe it is. Maybe we’re looking not just at a plot to kill Trump but a whole campaign to do it. And maybe the Florida investigation pulls at enough threads to unravel the entire fabric. Because if there is a plot to kill the former president, it can’t simply fade into the woodwork when its intended climax fails to materialize (perhaps multiple times). The plotters much be exposed and punished in the severest possible ways. And I trust Florida far more than the FBI to do that. READ MORE: Trump Assassination Attempt With GoPro in Tow The Real Reason Democrats Fear Losing in November The post Florida’s Investigation of the Trump Assassination Attempt Could Yield Frightening Results appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.