I don’t know what you’re currently accustomed to or what the feature/workflow differences would be, but I’ve had some music folks I know be successful with Ardour and Reaper. Have you checked to see if those would let you do your thing? The other problem I’ve had is audio interface support in Linux, but that seems to have improved a lot. I’ve got an old Axe I/O Solo that didn’t work at all a few years ago but now seems to have full support.
I’m not adopting the conspiracy here, but if they can’t find the shooter with the whole country getting behind him, then they would want the optics of finding the shooter. Which could backfire, of course. It would be very telling, for example, if the cops got real confident about it and then the real shooter made some kind of public display with the false shooter in custody.