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Shots Fired: Analyzing Security Breaches and Politicized Media

A Conversation with Rich Helppie

Editor’s Note: We hope you enjoy the video above. If you’d rather just listen to the podcast, click the button below to Apple Podcasts: The Common Bridge. It is also available on all other podcast platforms. We have included the transcript to this program below. We offer this program in it’s entirety to our paid subscribers, and welcome all to subscribe below.

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Brian Kruger  

Hello and welcome to The Common Bridge. My name is Brian Kruger, and I'm the producer of the show. Today we were supposed to have a mailbag episode which our audience really likes. That's where the audience either emails in, writes in, or responds on Substack and Rich talks about that in response. But because of the assassination attempt this past weekend, we're going to scrap all that and just have a conversation with Rich about that and really what's been going on in the last week and what will be going on in the next week. So without any further ado, Rich is heading into the studio right now, let's just go to that. Hey, Rich, a Monday morning of historical proportions, right?

Richard Helppie  

And right on the day, this is July 15, yes, and when we were going to do a mailbag...really interesting what might be in the mailbag these days.

Brian Kruger  

We're going to put that aside for now though, as everybody knows, a couple nights ago, on Saturday night, an attempt was made on former President Trump's life. I was at a wedding on the west side of the state. What were you doing and what were your thoughts as all those events started to unfold?

Richard Helppie  

Well, it was a Saturday, I had moved five yards of dirt with the help of a couple other guys and I was filthy. It was really hot. I was sitting in my living room and I got a notification - I can't remember which news source it came across - that Trump had fallen. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting and I flipped on the television. I went to CNN, I think they're typically quick about this thing, and I saw the President reaching for his ear and I heard the pop, pop, pop, pop. I thought, well, somebody's got a 22 pistol up close to him. He gets up, is escorted out and then of course, we found out what it was. That was really scary because as they're taking him out, one of the Secret Service agents wasn't even tall enough to cover his face. I mean, he was just shot at it toward the head and the shooter or shooters missed him. Some of the Secret Service looked like the keystone cops. I mean, it was utterly ridiculous.

Brian Kruger  

Well, Trump's a big guy. What is he? Six three, so I mean, he had to get somebody that's going to cover that, right? 

Richard Helppie  

Exactly. Just physics, right. You need a bigger body to cover a smaller body, but also anybody that's ever handled a pistol, you better be able to holster and unholster that gun. If you can't put it back in your holster, you're deemed a threat - you have a weapon out!

Brian Kruger  

What did you see that I didn't see? What happened? What are you referring to?

Richard Helppie  

There was a female agent in front, left handed, had her service weapon out. She was kind of spinning around, like, what do I do, where do I go? She couldn't reholster her weapon, okay. (Brian:  I've got to watch that.) The holsters are...they're stiff. They're made out of Kevlar or some kind of plastic. They clip back and they're designed to be able to draw out and put back in. And I'm thinking, oh, my God, did they put the most junior staff on because, again, anybody that's handled a pistol understands that. Then it was revealed that the shooter...I turned to my wife and I said, they're going to find out this guy has no military training, because once it came out that the AR 15 - which is a highly accurate rifle, you could shoot from that distance with steel sights and put it in a pattern the size of your palm - you would have gone for a body shot and then moved up. It was like, just a confluence of circumstances. Of course, the slight turn of his head caused that bullet not to go through his brain but go through the ear.

Brian Kruger  

We were looking at it on the web, and for a full half hour after that shooting on CNN, they had - online - a picture of Trump bleeding from the ear but the cutline said an incident at Trump speech had him removed from the stage. I quickly went over - because you and I, we're Common Bridge so we try to look at both and every kind of news angle we could see - I went over to Fox and they called that the President's been shot, right away. And I'm wondering, was CNN trying not to alarm anybody? What do you think that was about? Because we were all talking like, why is it an incident? He's bleeding!

Richard Helppie  

Well, it's one of two things, either they didn't know, okay, and they were being cautious or they went to where the established media go all the time now:  what's the narrative. It's not, what are the facts? It's what's the narrative? So you could look at it in a harsh light that they were afraid to go against the narrative. I'm sure had it been President Biden, it would have been within minutes, extreme right wing gunmen are shooting at the President or something like that. But we don't know how they made that decision, or who put the headlines up. We know they got it wrong. They got it terribly wrong. And we've learned that they're not accountable, of course [that's] why people are leaving them in droves. Then, Brian, look what's happening to our audience. I mean, we're gaining I think, in the last 30 days, like 1000 subscribers a day; people are either waking up or they're becoming emboldened. But look, if you run this back, remember, July 11th was supposed to be the day that the judge in the so-called hush money case - which isn't about hush money, it's about business records that they managed to extrapolate into a crime, that they managed to extrapolate into 34 counts - Trump was supposed to be sentenced July 11th and they moved it back. We thought July 11th was going to be about was Trump going to be trying to prep for the convention from a jail cell. And instead what we had on July 11th, we had President Biden giving a press conference, a highly orchestrated press conference with NATO, an attempt to say he's all there. I watched that, of course, start to finish. And look, I think he tried, and I think they prepped him and he did better than he did in the debate, save for calling Kamala Harris, Vice President Trump, kind of a big miss there. But he just looked like a guy that had been over-served at the bar trying to drive home real careful so the cops wouldn't see him so he's driving five miles an hour. I mean, they're being cruel to this man. He clearly was coached or got to the point when he got confused as you can see his train of thought drifting off. It was, oh, anyways. So the story was, what are the Democrats going to do? There was a lot said about that, and a lot written about that; how are they going to get out of this? I don't know what they do now. So now, 48 hours later, we're not talking about what are the Democrats doing? We're talking about the former president, current nominee, is being shot at. There are a lot of loose ends, like, how did this guy get to the site? How did he get up on the roof? Where was the handy ladder? How did [people] not see him? How did they let the President get on the stage when a police officer had gone up, seen the guy and gotten down after the guy pointed a rifle at them?

Brian Kruger  

You've heard the audience accounts, because everybody's got a phone. Everybody was filming because that's what you do on those if you're in the crowd. They've got audio and guys going, I see a guy on a roof over there. There's a guy on a roof over there with a gun. There's a guy over there with a gun on the roof. And it was a minute and a half before he was shot and they're trying to tell police officers what about that guy on the roof over there? It's just astonishingly bad for the head of the Secret Service. I think the people on the ground just react to gunshots, I think they're reactionary people. But the planning and the what had to happen at that site beforehand, I think is really wild negligence, amazingly wild negligence.

Richard Helppie  

In a true administration, the head of the Secret Service would have tendered her resignation to the President and the President would have accepted it because there's got to be accountability. This notion that the Democrats are trying to push right now - which is, don't worry about who the president is we have a whole team - in other words, there's no deep state. If you remember in Orwell's classic, is big brother a real person? Is he a real man like you or me? Because he never aged, never changed, was always right, always in the present. I'm thinking are people not able to see this? And then President Biden comes out yesterday - I'll give him credit - he did call Donald Trump, and in a weird circumstance, did not call him Hitler but called him Donald. He said, hope you get a full recovery and then he said, we don't know where this violence comes from but then they take down all their campaign ads. So when you spend months - President Biden has done it, starting with his speech in Philadelphia or continuing it, and I've written about that multiple times - dividing the country, attacking the voters of the other person, smearing Donald Trump one hoax after another, and then [saying] I don't know where this gunman came from. Come on. Basically it's an admission when you take down your campaign ads because of this horrible event. Then, yeah, you're culpable.

Brian Kruger  

Some of the memes have been wild. 24 hours before, Biden and Pelosi, we can't elect Trump, he's Hitler. 24 hours later, thoughts and prayers to Hitler. [Chuckles.]

Richard Helppie  

Exactly. Right. Imagine that you're calling strategy for the Democratic National Committee right now. How do you back out the smears and the Hitlerizing? And by the way, Brian, this is 10 o'clock in the morning 10:46 Eastern time on Monday, July 15 when we're recording this; the Florida case for records has been dismissed.

Brian Kruger  

That, about 45 minutes ago.

Richard Helppie  

A special prosecutor was unconstitutionally appointed. You see the photos coming out of that, like, all of a sudden, here's a sign that says top secret here, top secret. It reminded me...do you remember during the Iraq invasion? Sadam said, oh, they're bombing a baby milk factory and then there was video of people in blue coveralls that said, in English, "baby milk factory" on the back. That's what it looked like to me, the evidence in the classified documents, it's like Baghdad, Bob, baby milk factory, right here. They were making chemical weapons or something. Then all of the sudden it's top secret stuff, right here, see, here's a sign that says it's top secret. Today we still don't know what allegedly Trump took, if it's any different from any Presidential Records Act case, which has not been fully adjudicated. We still don't know what Joe Biden took as vice president and we don't know whether he gave it back because we don't know what it was. But people have been whipped into this frenzy and into this hysteria and now, potentially, the end result has been an assassination attempt on the probable next President of the United States. Again, I've been harshly critical of Trump, I have been pleading and writing and publishing about can we get better choices. I've done that consistently. My recent column, "Kamala Harris For President" lays it out. Dean Phillips, on our show twice. We have three bad actors in this called the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee and the established media ecosystem. And now people are finding their voice in the background; the WPATH thing that was supposedly the backbone of transgender medicine has been exposed as an idealistic fraud. Gerald Posner has been writing about that, among other ones so that really extreme narrative is just coming unraveled.

Brian Kruger  

I remember you got a ton of hate mail when you came out wondering why everybody was giving prosecutor Hur all the trouble because he had come out and said that Biden had secret documents as well, but they weren't going to prosecute him because President Biden was an old man and he didn't remember anything. You got a ton of hate mail on that.

Richard Helppie  

Right. Well, at the same time, President Biden was hiding the audio tapes of the interviews with Hur, which would have cleaned up the whole thing. But this is it. Look, people around President Biden know he's not firing on all cylinders.

Brian Kruger  

They've known it for three years, right?

Richard Helppie  

Yeah. The people that are supposedly reporting the Fourth Estate, they know it too. (Brian:  That's right.) And all of a sudden, here it is, in unison, they all act like they're surprised. Then they go, well, why don't people have trust in the institution? Why aren't they trusting the media? Oh, I know, if you challenge what we're saying, you're a purveyor of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation. You're a misogynist, racist, transphobic, xenophobic hater. In fact, if you said you didn't like either Trump or Biden, you are "a double hater" (Brian:  That's right.) not a reasonable person saying give me a better choice.

Brian Kruger  

Now they're picking on your Common Bridge. That's a hating bridge, evidently. We won't talk about it.

Richard Helppie  

Exactly. I'm basically saying, look, can we look at the facts here? Alright. The fact is Joe Biden's shelf life is over. He can't do it. George Stephanopoulos, who was eyeball to eyeball with him on what was supposed to be a 90 minute interview - turned out to be 35 - (Brian:  22.) on the street, he says, yeah, Biden can't do a full four years. And then that was oh, my goodness, what a mistake I made. Telling the truth as a so-called journalist is now considered a mistake.

Brian Kruger  

Why did he have to come out as a journalist and apologize for something that he said, like I shouldn't have said that I made a mistake.

Richard Helppie  

Because he's no longer part of that ecosystem that's been covering it up. Now, the really scary thing is where do we go from here? Are the people that are saying let's...what do they call it? Oh, save our democracy by censoring people, attacking our opponents, exercising lawfare, weaponizing the judicial system, they're going to burn it to the ground. It's like in Vietnam; we had to destroy the village in order to save it. It's crazy and people need to call that out. Now, I want to make sure I am clear about this. The Republicans need to get their act together. They need to tell us who they are, what they are, how they're going to govern. And just like the Democrats have muzzled their nuttier people on their fringes, the Republicans have got to muzzle their nuttier fringes. They've got to be able to do that. The sad thing is nobody's talking about how Donald Trump conducted his time when he was in the Oval Office. He is not a guy that gets up and reads his daily briefing. He's not a guy that is thoughtful, it's like whatever pops into his head. That's not what you want as a CEO of anything.

Brian Kruger  

Yeah, the churn of his Oval Office was frightening as well. Okay, I'm going to go back in your show a little bit longer. You talked earlier about having Dean Phillips on twice, he was a great guest, we found him really compelling. In fact, after it was over you and I talked for about 15 minutes off the air about now there's a guy who's CEO of a company, he did it for the right reason, sat across the kitchen table from his daughters and said, hey, I'm not going to sit here and watch this go by, I'm going to run. He was laughed out, not only laughed out of the room by the Democrats, but denied - these are the people that want to protect your democracy - denied their voters, any voter - to choose him, we'd like to see him on the ballot. Now they did not have primaries in Florida, they shut down the primary system. Those are your protectors of democracy right there.

Richard Helppie  

Yeah. Interesting thing going over on X, left wing pundits, they're saying you can't do some of the things that James Carville and others have suggested, like a lightning round celebrity moderated play-off of the six or eight people that might be available to be the president, because that doesn't involve the voters. I spit my coffee out, like you didn't put the voters into your primary system, what are you talking about?

Brian Kruger  

They anointed Biden right off the bat. 

Richard Helppie  

Yeah, exactly right. It's like two people you don't want to be, maybe it's the same person:  the person that thought rigging the primaries was a great idea and the person who thought, hey, let's just go with the nastiest attack ads we can and call the other guy Hitler. I mean, no. By the way, they have a very stoked and very easily manipulated base in the Democratic Party. They have been told now for years, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate Trump and hate everything Republican. They're the people that look at occupy Democrats and the other 98% and some of those notorious disinformation sites, and believe it. They're the people that are getting amped up [about] Project 2025, that's going to kill us - ahhhhh! It's like, oh, my god. I mean, I remember the John Birch Society and their attempts to impact politics. Guess what? I could do this as Biden:  Guess what? Guess what? There's always been far right and far left people putting out policy statements and saying if they get in office they'll do that. You see? That probably wasn't a very good imitation...

Brian Kruger  

That wasn't bad. I liked it. [Chuckle.] So look, we have a convention coming up. We've got to wrap this up.

Richard Helppie  

Alright, so let me let me just rat-a-tat about the convention. (Brian:  Sure.) Biggest change, Nikki Haley has been invited to the convention and given a speaking spot, and the sad but twisted outcome of this weekend, Trump's base is so motivated right now he could do the thing that would give him a landslide, which would be to pick Nikki Haley as his vice president.

Brian Kruger  

She would be great. But I've also heard that there were some official looking vehicles outside of JD Vance's house in Ohio over the weekend that had some speculation. And of course, Rubio is getting some attention too. 

Richard Helppie  

Marco Rubio apparently would have to resign his Senate seat and then declare his residency in Virginia where - I'm guessing, I don't know this for sure - he has a place there to serve in the Senate. Or apparently, according to Kevin McCarthy, he spends a lot of time in Nevada and he declared residency in Nevada.

Brian Kruger  

Right. Didn't McCarthy also say that Trump would just change his residency to his New York place? That gets Trump out of there, but...

Richard Helppie  

New York's not going to let him back in, okay, alright. [Laughter.] Kathy Hochul is on the phone right now, hey DMV, do not get that man a driver's license. [Laughter.]

Brian Kruger  

He could wear a big fake moustache. They won't know who it is.

Richard Helppie  

They're not letting him come back in. You know, so yeah, that's over. Yeah, the smear has failed, the lawfare failed and the Democrats were coming around to saying maybe we need to do this at the ballot box and then there was an attempted assassination. We're living history right now. It's going to be a wild time. And Brian, maybe another time we'll get back to see what's in the mailbag, provided we have an audience after this but [Laughter, cross talk.]

Brian Kruger  

One guy called in, I think you're okay. Your audience has been [inaudible.]

Richard Helppie  

We can have a call in, we can do a live thing one time.

Brian Kruger  

Oh, we should do that. That would be great. I'll hook it up.

Richard Helppie  

All right. All right. Anything else we've got to talk about today?

Brian Kruger  

That's it. I mean, if we get into the mailbag, we're going to get into the mailbag but let's do that a different time because I think the questions are going to be different.

Richard Helppie  

Alright, let me do this. With our producer and today's interviewer, Brian Kruger, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.

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