FBI Forced to Release Secret Crooks Files — What They Tried to Hide Will Shock You

More than two years after Thomas Matthew Crooks came within an inch of murdering President Donald Trump on a hot July evening in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI has released yet another tranche of records on the case, and once again the documents raise more questions than they answer. This latest release, the eighth batch of files made public, runs 181 pages and includes interview summaries, invoices, and internal notes. For a Justice Department and FBI leadership that spent the better part of two years stonewalling Congress and independent watchdogs alike, the drip-drip nature of these disclosures continues to look less like transparency and more like damage control.

The newest documents add to a mountain of previously released material that has already exposed serious failures on the part of federal and local law enforcement leading up to the July 13, 2024, rally. Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, opened fire from an unsecured rooftop just outside the rally perimeter, grazing Trump’s ear, critically wounding two rallygoers, and killing volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore, a husband and father who threw himself in front of his family to shield them from the gunfire. Crooks was killed moments later by a Secret Service countersniper.

Among the details drawing scrutiny in the new files is the timeline surrounding a ladder discovered near the building Crooks used to stage his attack. Independent researchers combing through the documents have noted that the FBI appears to have had knowledge of a ladder connected to Crooks roughly a week before then-Director Christopher Wray told Congress that no such ladder had been found. If accurate, that discrepancy would mark yet another instance in which the bureau’s public statements to lawmakers did not match what was sitting in its own case file, a pattern conservatives have hammered since the earliest days of the investigation.

The documents also shed further light on the peculiar circumstance of who was standing near Crooks at a gun store visit prior to the shooting. Investigators reportedly interviewed two men who accompanied him, though their identities and the substance of what they told the FBI remain heavily redacted. For a case the bureau insists was the work of a lone, motiveless actor, the presence of unidentified associates at a firearms retailer is the sort of detail that deserves a full public accounting rather than black bars on a page.

Perhaps the most unsettling revelation to resurface in recent months involves the disposition of Crooks’ body. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican who has pressed the bureau relentlessly on this case, first disclosed in 2024 that the FBI released Crooks’ remains to his family for cremation just ten days after the assassination attempt, all while agents on the ground in Butler were reportedly unaware the body had already been returned. The FBI pushed back on the characterization at the time, but the underlying fact that a would-be presidential assassin’s remains were cremated so quickly, with murky chain-of-custody details, has never been adequately explained to the American people.

Separately, reporting has surfaced questions about an anonymous donor who reportedly covered the costs associated with that cremation. Who paid, and why anyone would step forward to quietly fund the final disposition of a man who tried to kill a former and future president, is exactly the kind of loose thread that a competent, forthcoming federal investigation would have tied off long ago. Instead, it lingers as one more example of the FBI treating basic accountability as optional.

The newest files build on a series of earlier document dumps that have painted an increasingly strange portrait of Crooks himself. Records obtained by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has used his gavel to force sustained pressure on the bureau, detail a young man his own father described as quiet and emotionally withdrawn from birth. Crooks reportedly ordered parts and tools intended to increase the capacity of his rifle and used the alias “Bob Dole,” a nod to the late Kansas senator and 1996 GOP presidential nominee, on packages shipped to his parents’ home.

Federal investigators have identified at least 35 digital accounts tied to Crooks, including foreign-based email addresses registered in Germany and Belgium. The bureau has maintained that despite this expansive digital footprint, it found no evidence of a foreign nexus to the attack, no evidence that any government, organization, or outside individual directed, inspired, or assisted him. Skeptics on the right have long questioned how a 20-year-old with no known combat or tactical training, and apparently limited real-world social interaction, executed a rooftop attack on a former president with the precision he displayed, and how such a sprawling digital trail could yield absolutely no actionable motive.

Crooks’ father told investigators the family was “racking” their brains trying to understand his son’s actions, insisting Thomas “never showed any signs indicating something was wrong.” That may well be true from a grieving parent’s vantage point, but it does not relieve federal investigators of the responsibility to determine, conclusively and publicly, what radicalized a young man to attempt the assassination of a major presidential candidate in broad daylight.

The files also describe Crooks’ technical hobbies in granular, almost bizarre detail. He reportedly built a security camera using a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, acquired a 3D printer, and once attempted to manufacture a functioning firearm, a Glock 19, using carbon fiber plastic melted down with a household dryer and toaster oven. When asked who his son idolized, Crooks’ father suggested it was probably the Marvel character Iron Man. These are the kinds of details that read almost like satire, yet they come from sworn FBI interview summaries about the man who nearly changed the course of American history with a single rifle round.

Earlier this year, a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch forced the release of 48 pages showing that Crooks had exchanged emails with a female deputy from the Butler County Sheriff’s Office before the attack. According to the released interview summary, the deputy said she did not recognize Crooks even after his face flooded national news coverage, and that she only realized the connection after a New York Times reporter contacted her following the shooting. The subject matter of those emails remains redacted, another maddening gap in the public record on a case that should have been fully transparent from day one.

That same Judicial Watch litigation has produced a string of disclosures over the past year that federal officials seemed determined never to volunteer on their own. In February, records forced into the open revealed that law enforcement personnel had broadcast radio warnings about an “unknown male acting suspiciously” well before Crooks opened fire, raising the obvious and still unanswered question of why nobody neutralized the threat sooner. In April, additional documents indicated Crooks had reportedly been involved in an altercation and made hostile comments directed at Trump at the rally site itself, information that, if verified and acted upon, could have stopped the attack before it started.

Conservatives have rightly pointed out that the Secret Service’s own after-action failures compounded whatever intelligence gaps existed. The rooftop Crooks used was left unsecured despite being within easy rifle range of the stage, a lapse so basic that it led to the resignation of then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle amid bipartisan outrage. That the FBI is still, two years later, dribbling out records that shed new light on how such an obvious security failure was allowed to happen only reinforces the sense that Washington’s permanent bureaucracy would rather manage the story than tell the truth about it.

It is worth remembering how close the nation came to catastrophe that evening. Had Trump not turned his head at the exact moment he did to gesture at a chart on a screen, the bullet that grazed his ear would very likely have killed him on a stage in front of thousands of supporters and a national television audience. The randomness of that survival, credited by Trump himself and many supporters to providence, only sharpens the demand for a full and honest reckoning with how the attack was allowed to happen in the first place.

The FBI’s own internal handling of the investigation has drawn criticism independent of the document releases themselves. Under Wray’s leadership, the bureau was accused repeatedly of foot-dragging and selective disclosure to Congress, feeding suspicions that the agency was more concerned with protecting its own institutional reputation than leveling with the American public about what went wrong. Grassley, Higgins, and other Republican investigators have made clear they intend to keep pulling on these threads regardless of how the political winds shift in Washington.

For families like the Comperatores, who lost a husband and father to a security failure that should never have occurred, each new document release reopens a wound that has never properly healed. Corey Comperatore’s widow and daughters deserve a complete accounting, not another partial release with names and details blacked out to protect an institution’s reputation rather than the public’s right to know.