Five years ago, a sociopathic killer murdered 58 people in Las Vegas. It’s one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, and it’s also one of the least understood. Journalist Victoria Taft explores that frustrating reality.

It has been five years since [a mad man] stashed an arsenal of weapons in his Las Vegas hotel room and began spraying outdoor concertgoers with more than a thousand rounds of rifle fire, killing 58 people and wounding 869. Since the Oct. 1, 2017, massacre, there’s been neither an official nor satisfactory explanation for why [the assailant] took his assorted rifles and shot those country music fans. But now, an FBI whistleblower believes he has the motive.

Las Vegas Police issued a 138-page report on the shooting yet kicked over to the FBI and their experts the job of coming up with the motive.

Nevertheless, Taft notes, a 2019 FBI report shrugging over an undetermined motive is really odd given the January 6 persecutions over “white nationalism” and such. “And it seems especially odd, considering the FBI fancies its role as more of an intelligence agency than law enforcement these days, according to an FBI whistleblower.”

She goes on to recount the “several new cellphones” purchased by the “long-time gun enthusiast” killer.

The independently wealthy man appears to have staked out several different places to commit a mass shooting. He looked at La Jolla, California beaches, the Lollapalooza Festival at Chicago’s Grant Park, and even positioned some of his guns in a Vegas condo with a view of the “Life Is Beautiful” outdoor music festival. Indeed, [he] had overlapping reservations at the condo building and the Mandalay Bay resort while he apparently figured out which concert to attack.

Taft says it was a well-planned attack, though relatives, friends, and the FBI were all mystified regarding a motive.

The authorities say he kept his ideas to himself, and his girlfriend said that in the year leading up to the mass killing, their love life had disintegrated, and theirs became more like an employer/employee relationship.

Sure, [he] was objectively out of his mind. But no one thought so when he was alive. They just thought he was a self-centered, eccentric jerk who always thought he was the smartest person in the room.

So, then, why? Taft turns to former FBI special agent John Guandolo, who said “there’s a 90% certainty that the Las Vegas attack was a jihadi operation and [the killer] was the conduit through which the terrorist organization attacked America.”

In the interview, Guandolo said, “When you look at what actually transpired and put it together from a counter-espionage attack and counter-espionage look, the probability that was an ISIS attack is well over 90%.”

He said the special agent in charge of the Las Vegas FBI field office “got angry and dismissed it, and when presented with the information, FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., dismissed it out of hand.”

Guandolo said he’d been asked to brief “a couple of people; members of Congress and others.”

He said, “The FBI both in Washington, LA, and Las Vegas that participated in that investigation can’t even begin to think of it as a jihadi attack, because number one, they still don’t understand what that actually means.” He continued, “they don’t understand what actually happens and they have no desire to understand what happened. So their knee-jerk reaction in these cases is always to dismiss that and point in a different direction, because they’ve been conditioned to do so.” He concludes, “I mean, it only points to an ISIS attack. It does not point anywhere else. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack five times. They said that guy, he’s our guy. We hail him, he’s a martyr.” …

Guandolo concludes, “Right now there’s no other option on the table. All the evidence points to that. That’s all we’re saying. We’re saying, the fact the FBI hasn’t investigated it is unprofessional.”

Is that definitive proof? Not really. But for her part, Taft concludes, “It makes more sense than what we’ve heard so far.”

Read the whole thing here.