The Daily Mail, a U.K.-based tabloid, has been bashing the FBI over the Trump assassination attempt.
You may recall that Trump held a rally in an open field, a short-staffed Secret Service detail partnered with local cops to provide protection, and errors by law enforcement allowed the shooter to fire several rounds from the roof of a nearby building.
Daily Mail‘s story (here) begins by criticizing law enforcement’s failure to prevent the shooting. Fair enough. The Secret Service, FBI, and police have admitted there were mistakes. Then the story segues into a Republican congressman’s complaints about not being allowed to examine the body. Here’s what Daily Mail wrote about that:
“He said that his effort to examine [the] body on August 5 created ‘quite a stir and revealed a disturbing fact’ … the FBI released the body for cremation 10 days after July 13. … ‘The problem with me not being able to examine the actual body is that I won’t know 100 percent if the coroner’s report and the autopsy report are accurate,’ Higgins wrote. … ‘Yes, we’ll get reports and pictures, etc. but I will not ever be able to say with certainty that those reports and pictures are accurate according to my own examination of the body.'”
Wait a minute. Is Rep. Clay Higgins serious? Is Daily Mail serious? Since when do congressmen get to personally examine dead bodies for the purpose of (check one) [ ] verifying [ ] questioning an official autopsy and coroner’s report?
The Daily Mail article also gives ink to claims about “destruction of evidence.” By way of background, the FBI spent 10 days processing the building for evidence, had the blood washed off, then returned it to the owners. Here’s what Daily Mail wrote about that:
“Higgins further claimed in his report that the FBI ‘cleaned up biological evidence from the crime scene’, which he says is unheard of. ‘Cops don’t do that, ever,’ he said. ‘This pattern of investigative scorched Earth by the FBI is quite troubling.'”
What’s he talking about? Cops don’t keep crime scenes. They conduct a forensic investigation, then release the property to its owner. By the way, Higgins is a former cop, so he knows this. Here’s what the FBI said in response:
“‘The FBI has … followed normal procedures in the handling of the crime scene and evidence. … The crime scene was released to the property owners in phases as we completed our work …. Nothing was rushed and everything was documented as part of the investigation,’ the bureau added.”
Sure, Congress can conduct its own investigation. After all, they have oversight responsibility over federal agencies like the Secret Service and FBI. But I don’t see that extending to a congressman, especially one who isn’t a doctor, conducting his own autopsy. The shooter’s parents probably would object to that, and however you may feel toward them, they have a legal right to keep strangers from pawing their child’s dead body.
This article is bad even for supermarket journalism. No wonder we have a dumbed-down population.