When a 22-year-old allegedly assembles a rifle on a rooftop and fells a high-profile political figure with a single shot, the public expects answers. But in the case of Charlie Kirk’s shocking murder, the answers have been replaced by a deafening, unsettling silence.

For Andrew Bustamante, a former covert CIA intelligence officer and US Air Force combat veteran, this silence isn’t just a procedural delay. It’s a massive red flag.

“It doesn’t make sense to me completely,” Bustamante stated in a recent interview, his voice calm but firm. “The fact that there’s really no significant new information since about September 19th, that’s… weird, man.”

Bustamante, who now leverages his spy-craft insights for a massive online audience, is trained to see the world not in black-and-white certainties, but through a “lens of probability.” And from where he’s sitting, the official story of the Charlie Kirk assassination just isn’t probable.

“Anything is a possibility,” he explained, “but what are the probabilities that it played out the way that we’re being told?”

The questions pile up relentlessly. How does a 22-year-old with no reported military training pull off such a “clinical” assassination? How does he assemble a bolt-action rifle, fire one fatal shot, disassemble it, and escape, all with the precision of a trained operative?

“Is it possible that he prepared to the extent that he needed to prepare to run such an effective operation? Yeah, it’s possible,” Bustamante conceded. “But is it probable that he did it alone? It’s not really probable that one 22-year-old would be able to figure all of that out and to fire one shot and be successful in your mission.”

Even the shooter’s “amateur” elements, like the fatal but likely mis-aimed shot, are complicated by the sheer efficiency of the rest of the operation. He notes that even a highly trained Navy SEAL like Rob O’Neill, the man who killed Osama bin Laden, had questions about the timeline, doubting he himself could assemble and disassemble the weapon in the time allotted.

Then there’s the information vacuum. “We still don’t know what the motive was,” Bustamante said, highlighting the bizarre lack of progress. “We’re having people like the transgender roommate lover disappear and nobody’s talking to him and there doesn’t seem to be a large manhunt. I don’t think we’ve had an autopsy report yet… this is information that doesn’t seem unreasonable to share and yet it’s not being shared. So, the question becomes why?”

For Bustamante, this case immediately triggers a chilling parallel: the 2020 attempted assassination of then-President Donald Trump.

“When I started to research the elements that made up the Charlie Kirk assassination, I immediately was triggered to look back at Thomas Krooks,” Bustamante revealed. Krooks, the young man who tried to kill Trump from a similar roof at a similar distance, remains a ghost.

“The parallels are very, very powerful, very humbling,” he continued. “You’re talking about similar age groups. You’re talking about high levels of intelligence. You’re talking about a level of emotional IQ that made them actually well-liked in their community… And even now, when you research Thomas Krooks, there’s still no motive… there’s still no public information.”

The most disturbing link? The digital void. “This kid had no digital footprint, nothing,” Bustamante said of Krooks. “From a CIA point of view, when you encounter that… for a young person to have no digital footprint whatsoever, that to me is very, very odd. There’s hidden information there without a doubt.”

This pattern of disappearing facts and convenient silences around national traumas is, in Bustamante’s experience, a feature, not a bug, of government operations. When pressed on whether the public will ever get the full truth, be it about Kirk, Krooks, or even JFK, his answer was bleak.

“In my experience, when there’s something that is damaging to the idea of the American government, the idea of the structure that we have… we’ll never know,” he stated. “Because it’s not in the government’s best interest to actually be transparent… It’s in the government’s best interest to tailor and cultivate what’s released.”

Bustamante knows this fight firsthand. His new book, Shadow Cell, a New York Times bestseller detailing his time as a covert officer, was almost buried by the agency he once served.

“The entire manuscript was finished in 2021,” he explained. But as global tensions with China and Russia escalated, “CIA deemed the entire book a classified document from beginning to end… They wanted none of it released.”

He and his wife, also a former CIA officer, knew the book contained no verbatim classified material. They fought for three years, finally winning only after threatening a First Amendment lawsuit. This experience shatters the common refrain that “there’s no such thing as former CIA.”

“CIA is not my friend. They are very publicly not my friend,” he clarified. “I get letters from them all the time reminding me to get off screen… and threatening me with legal action.” He is loyal to the mission, he says, but he is certainly not controlled by the agency.

His insider perspective extends far beyond domestic secrets. When analyzing the catastrophic failure of Israeli intelligence on October 7th, he draws another parallel to an American tragedy.

“In my experience, it’s very, very akin to 9/11,” he said. While Mossad may be the “most effective” spy agency due to its narrow focus, it fell victim to the same bureaucratic rot that plagues all large intelligence bodies. “It was avoidable. It was preventable. But for whatever reason, the different groups that were involved—you had the Mossad… Shin Bet managing internal security, and then you had the actual military… All three of them most likely report in different channels.”

It was, he argues, a “bureaucratic kerfuffle” that a more nimble enemy like Hamas could exploit.

But the most profound threat Bustamante sees isn’t an external one. It’s the one eating America from the inside out. He warns that the United States is an empire in decline, not unlike the fall of Rome, but with a modern, economic twist.

“We are the world’s only superpower. So, if we decline financially, it changes everything,” he warned. “Our enemies are increasing. China is on the rise. So now not only are we decreasing in speed, but they are increasing in speed, which closes the gap.”

This, he says, is the real danger. “When two countries reach par, when they reach equality, that’s the worst situation for everybody… when parity is reached, conflict is inevitable.”

How to fix it? Bustamante’s answer may surprise some. He sees strategic value in Donald Trump’s aggressive economic tactics. “We need to slow down China’s ability to create a modern technological economy,” he stated, supporting tariffs as a way to “bury them in their own problems.”

Conversely, he slammed the Biden administration for freezing Russian assets during the Ukraine conflict. “All that did was send a message to all foreign countries to get their money… out of US banks… That was a major mistake.”

This internal decline is more than just a geopolitical theory for Bustamante. It’s personal. It’s why he is planning to take his family and “disappear” from the United States entirely by the spring of 2027.

“The United States is going through what I call its own adolescence. It’s puberty,” he said. “It’s deciding what it wants to be when it grows up… My children are eight and 12… in the United States where everybody’s politicized, they can’t go to school without having people parroting propaganda at them from one of the two extremes.”

This unique ability to see the world through a lens of strategy, deception, and human behavior is precisely what makes his insights so riveting. In a fascinating demonstration, he broke down an interview with actor Armie Hammer, identifying precisely when and how he lied about his “cannibalism” claims.

He pointed to Hammer’s “closing body posture,” his “nervous energy” causing him to swivel in his chair, and his “fiddling” with a water bottle as subconscious indicators of discomfort. The biggest tell? When asked a direct question, Hammer responded with a question of his own. “It’s an escape technique,” Bustamante explained. When asked a “feelings-based question,” Hammer’s long pause before answering was the window into his creative, rather than reactive, brain at work.

From analyzing a celebrity’s lie to deciphering the official narrative of an assassination, Bustamante’s message is clear: the truth is rarely what you’re told. It’s in the silences, the inconsistencies, and the details that just don’t feel probable. And as he prepares to leave the country he once risked his life for, his parting observations serve as a stark warning that the biggest threats may not be the ones we’re being told to watch.