Gordon_R
Honorary Master
BBC provides a lot of background so far:
What we know about the Trump attack and the suspect
A suspect is in custody and has been identified by security sources in the US.
www.bbc.com
Errrrr......
US authorities learned of potential Iranian assassination plot against Trump weeks before deadly shooting
US authorities were warned about a potential assassination plot against former President Donald Trump by Iran weeks before the deadly shooting at Saturday’s rally.nypost.com
The suspect, Asif Merchant, entered the country in April and was arrested on July 12 as he prepared to leave the country. It appears that Merchant was the Iranian threat the Secret Service was briefed on before the July 13 rally in Butler, PA.
The FBI arranged his entry into the U.S. According to an August Twitter post from Fox correspondent Bill Melugin, Merchant “was admitted into the U.S. via parole for ‘significant public benefit’ when [Customs and Border Patrol] encountered him at the airport in [Texas] in April after he flew in from overseas.” The sponsor of his parole, Melugin reported, “was the FBI’s Dallas office, for ‘security interests.’”
Melugin’s sources told him the FBI had intelligence on Merchant “before he arrived in the U.S. and needed him to physically come into the country to develop the case on him and arrest him, and that if they had arrested him at Customs, they would not have been able to gather evidence and information about his plot.”
But to date there’s little evidence the FBI developed a case based on intelligence collected before Merchant’s entry. Rather, it seems more likely that federal law enforcement imported a terrorist entrapment target for the purpose of fabricating a plot.
There are other signs that there’s something not quite right about the Merchant plot. Arbabsiar was ready to pay $1.5 million for killing the Saudi ambassador. Poursafi put a $300,000 bounty on Bolton’s head and said he had an additional job for which he’d pay $1 million, presumably to kill Trump. But Merchant offered only $5,000 to kill Trump. And he didn’t even have the money. He had to travel from New York to Boston to make arrangements to have $5,000 sent from a foreign country, which, according to the affidavit, was likely Pakistan.
Actually its the difference between the supersonic crack and the explosive sound. It also the the sound difference of different calibres and different locations. The first three shots are from one source and the next five are made up of two or three at a slightly shorter distance and two and a much longer distance. You also have a ballistic event in the back of the stands with no sonic signature. that a line can be drawn to the trees.You understand though that there's 7s between the first shot and the sniper's response?
Also, just so we're on the same page. The question here isn't how far away the sniper is from the shooter, it's the distance differential between the sniper and the videographer. We know the sniper was about 130m away. The videographer is probably a similar distance away from this shooter so that the sound from the shooter's rifle would reach the sniper and the videographer at the same time. Of course if the videographer is closer, the audio would be ahead of the video.
In the case that the videographer is 165m away from the shooter, that's a 35m differential to the sniper - i.e. about 0.1s.