From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Mariane Angela

Former State Department official Mike Benz raised serious concerns on Fox News Monday about the events surrounding the shooting in Butler, Pa., asking whether federal law enforcement played a more significant role than originally reported.

It’s been a year since the shooting of President Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, and while investigations have shed light on the incident, several critical questions remain unanswered. During an appearance on “The Will Cain Show,” Benz said he believes the lack of transparency in the case has led to many critical questions remaining unanswered.

“So the question is, if Crooks was cultivated or if he was being monitored or potentially interacted with by federal law enforcement agents who put him onto that? And I think that the total lack of transparency, it’s sort of defying the laws of surveillance state physics,” Benz said. “I think most people believe that if federal law enforcement were to get ahold of their phone, that pretty much everything could be scraped from it. You don’t know if, for example, in this case, he was communicating with a foreign government.”

Benz then raised concerns that the investigation into the Butler shooting could extend beyond the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), suggesting that agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) might be involved in cracking encrypted communications.

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“This, to me, may go beyond, you know, FBI, DHS. We know that the NSA is able to crack these sorts of things. And so it’s all very strange to me,” Benz said. “But, again, there’s another whistleblower report that I believe Josh Hawley’s whistleblower mentioned, which was that HSI [Homeland Security Investigation] agents kind of mysteriously replaced a fair number of Secret Service agents that day because Secret Service was said to be split between the NATO summit and Jill Biden being away.”

Benz referred to what he called a troubling series of events leading up to the Butler shooting.

“And that Secret Service had denied, I think, about 10 requests for additional security from the Trump campaign prior to the shooting. And so it is just a strange confluence of variables that just do not sit well for the American public,” Benz said. “And I think that there should be a sort of transparency task force so that these specific questions about HSI and the potential recruiting as an informant about the contents of the phone and the like can be answered.”

A report released Sept. 2024 uncovered whistleblower allegations about the Secret Service’s security failures during the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler. The office of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri published the whistleblower report and revealed previously undisclosed claims about the DHS and Secret Service committing multiple failures.

Whistleblowers allege that the agent in charge of the Butler rally failed a key examination during federal training and was considered “low-caliber.” The report also said that the Secret Service’s intelligence units were absent from the rally, which contributed to communication failures between law enforcement agencies.

Senior U.S. Secret Service officials were aware of a “classified threat” to Trump’s life 10 days before the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt but failed to inform the agents protecting him. A report from the Government Accountability Office said Sunday that the intelligence, presented to Secret Service leadership, never reached the field team due to a “siloed practice for sharing classified information.”

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News)

By Gwyn Morgan

Mark Carney was supposed to be the adult in the room. After nearly a decade of runaway spending under Justin Trudeau, the former central banker was presented to Canadians as a steady hand – someone who could responsibly manage the economy and restore fiscal discipline.

Instead, Carney has taken Trudeau’s recklessness and dialled it up. His government’s recently released spending plan shows an increase of 8.5 percent this fiscal year to $437.8 billion. Add in “non-budgetary spending” such as EI payouts, plus at least $49 billion just to service the burgeoning national debt and total spending in Carney’s first year in office will hit $554.5 billion.

Even if tax revenues were to remain level with last year – and they almost certainly won’t given the tariff wars ravaging Canadian industry – we are hurtling toward a deficit that could easily exceed 3 percent of GDP, and thus dwarf our meagre annual economic growth. It will only get worse. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates debt interest alone will consume $70 billion annually by 2029. Fitch Ratings recently warned of Canada’s “rapid and steep fiscal deterioration”, noting that if the Liberal program is implemented total federal, provincial and local debt would rise to 90 percent of GDP.

This was already a fiscal powder keg. But then Carney casually tossed in a lit match. At June’s NATO summit, he pledged to raise defence spending to 2 percent of GDP this fiscal year – to roughly $62 billion. Days later, he stunned even his own caucus by promising to match NATO’s new 5 percent target. If he and his Liberal colleagues follow through, Canada’s defence spending will balloon to the current annual equivalent of $155 billion per year. There is no plan to pay for this. It will all go on the national credit card.

This is not “responsible government.” It is economic madness.

And it’s happening amid broader economic decline. Business investment per worker – a key driver of productivity and living standards – has been shrinking since 2015. The C.D. Howe Institute warns that Canadian workers are increasingly “underequipped compared to their peers abroad,” making us less competitive and less prosperous.

The problem isn’t a lack of money; it’s a lack of discipline and vision. We’ve created a business climate that punishes investment: high taxes, sluggish regulatory processes, and politically motivated uncertainty. Carney has done nothing to reverse this. If anything, he’s making the situation worse.

Recall the 2008 global financial meltdown. Carney loves to highlight his role as Bank of Canada Governor during that time but the true credit for steering the country through the crisis belongs to then-prime minister Stephen Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty. Facing the pressures of a minority Parliament, they made the tough decisions that safeguarded Canada’s fiscal foundation. Their disciplined governance is something Carney would do well to emulate.

Instead, he’s tearing down that legacy. His recent $4.3 billion aid pledge to Ukraine, made without parliamentary approval, exemplifies his careless approach. And his self-proclaimed image as the experienced technocrat who could go eyeball-to-eyeball against Trump is starting to crack. Instead of respecting Carney, Trump is almost toying with him, announcing in June, for example that the U.S. would pull out of the much-ballyhooed bilateral trade talks launched at the G7 Summit less than two weeks earlier.

Ordinary Canadians will foot the bill for Carney’s fiscal mess. The dollar has weakened. Young Canadians – already priced out of the housing market – will inherit a mountain of debt. This is not stewardship. It’s generational theft.

Some still believe Carney will pivot – that he will eventually govern sensibly. But nothing in his actions supports that hope. A leader serious about economic renewal would cancel wasteful Trudeau-era programs, streamline approvals for energy and resource projects, and offer incentives for capital investment. Instead, we’re getting more borrowing and ideological showmanship.

It’s no longer credible to say Carney is better than Trudeau. He’s worse. Trudeau at least pretended deficits were temporary. Carney has made them permanent – and more dangerous.

This is a betrayal of the fiscal stability Canadians were promised. If we care about our credit rating, our standard of living, or the future we are leaving our children, we must change course.

That begins by removing a government unwilling – or unable – to do the job.

Canada once set an economic example for others. Those days are gone. The warning signs – soaring debt, declining productivity, and diminished global standing – are everywhere. Carney’s defenders may still hope he can grow into the job. Canada cannot afford to wait and find out.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.