Shawn Ryan

One of which, so Butler itself, no one is saying is linked to the FBI, but two days before the Butler assassination attempt, we arrested a guy named Asif Murshant.

He was just, you know, prosecuted and I think going to jail.

We arrested him for being recruited by Iran to come here and attempt to assassinate President Trump to avenge the death, to avenge the killing of Qasem Soleimani.

Merchant had a FBI informant that was working with him.

Merchant didn't know he was an FBI informant, obviously.

And they basically set up a scheme to conduct an assassination against President Trump using a sniper.

They arrest Merchant, and then two days later, a sniper tries to kill Trump at Butler.

I wanted to look for potential linkage between those events.

Was completely shut off and blocked from that.

You were?

No, NCTC was.

The National Counterterrorism Center.

Certainly.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't know.

Again, we were told, hey, the Merchant trial is ongoing, so you can't look into any of the information.

You can look at a little bit of the information, but we can't...

We can't really do much there, but my question was always, you know, is there any linkage between anyone that Merchant talked to and the people who were there at Butler and Crooks?

You know, because we can say all day long they're not linked, but are we sure that we had everything that Merchant was doing under control?

Is there any linkage between those two events?