Yesterday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stepped up to the podium to give a straightforward criminal investigation update on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting — the kind of routine law enforcement briefing that happens after any high-profile incident. And then he explained that investigators had been unable to recover all the physical evidence from the scene because, when weapons are fired inside a hotel, evidence recovery is “not an exact science” and “sometimes you find the bullet, and sometimes it just disappears.”
It just disappears.
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Now, to be fair: we are a society that has badly over-indexed on forensic procedurals. Gil Grissom is not walking through that door. Real crime scenes are messy, chain of custody is complicated, and the CSI effect has been warping jury expectations in ways that have driven defense attorneys crazy for 20 years. Bullets do sometimes end up in unexpected places. All of that is true.
But holding a press conference where the Acting Attorney General shrugs and says the bullet kind of just vanished is Keystone Cops-level shit. Not because it isn’t technically possible. But because you have already handed the conspiracy theorists the keys to the car, and “sometimes it just disappears” is them finding the gas pedal.
We said it before and we will say it again: there is no credible evidence this was a false flag. The suspect sent his family an apology note 10 minutes before the attack. The evidence points to exactly what it looks like. But false flag theories do not run on evidence. They run on the appearance of suspicious incompetence, and the DOJ is currently providing that in quantities that would satisfy even the most demanding conspiracy theorist.
The sequence of events the online crowd is now working with: shooting occurs at event Trump chose to attend and chose not to designate as a high-security event; DOJ sends letter to opposing counsel demanding ballroom lawsuit be dropped within hours; DOJ holds press conference and confirms it cannot account for all the physical evidence because bullets sometimes just disappear. The DOJ did not plan any of this as a coherent narrative. It is just what happened. But it is really something as a coherent narrative.
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There is also the small matter of Blanche’s words now living permanently in the record. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States, on camera, stating that evidence recovery is not an exact science and that bullets fired inside buildings sometimes just vanish. Defense attorneys in federal cases from coast to coast are already reaching for their screenshot buttons. Expect “as the Acting Attorney General himself acknowledged” to appear in suppression motions for years. The DOJ handed every defendant challenging forensic evidence a pull quote, and he doesn’t even seem to realize his blunder.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1