Government silence has fueled a tsunami of conspiracy theories about the Trump shooting

My latest New York Times opinion piece

I am very glad to have joined my friend and colleague, Mark Zaid, a Washington D.C.-based attorney specializing in national security matters, on this New York Times opinion piece about why the government’s silence over the Trump shooting is allowing conspiracy theories to flourish. It is similar to what had happened in the JFK and MLK assassinations.

Here it is in full:

“Those of us who have studied modern assassinations, including those of President John F. Kennedy and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., hoped the government had learned a lesson from its dismal public responses.

The government’s repeated failure to address what it knew quickly fed suspicions that the silence itself was evidence of a conspiracy. The federal government sealed files for decades and refused to disclose information — often to protect the reputation of agencies and their officials — which only added fuel to conspiracy theories.

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we are see…