The father of Thomas Crooks has revealed chilling details about his life before he tried to assassinate President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The revelations by Matthew Crooks were reported in FBI interview summaries and other documents exclusively reviewed by the New York Post. They were from the congressional investigation into the shooting.
'Thomas did not like the welfare state and was against the "woke" ideology but never really espoused the Republican ideology.'
The father said that he never really had any strong father-son bond with Thomas, who was stoic and hard to read.
"When Thomas was born he did not scream, and he was always quiet from that point on," said the father.
Crooks said his son had a troubled childhood but that he was very intelligent. Thomas damaged school property in elementary school out of boredom, and his parents thought he had ADHD or had fallen in with a bad group of friends in middle school.
His father said he even "pushed" Thomas in hopes of prompting some kind of emotional response, and Thomas did begin to cry.
He became even quieter in high school and had trouble speaking with his teachers, according to Matthew Crooks. His son also started talking to himself, a habit that "became more noticeable over the years."
Thomas was able to score a 1400 on the SAT without studying, according to the father, and then scored a near perfect 1500 on a second try.
Thomas denied being gay many times over the years, as his parents noted that he didn't seem to have an interest in girls.
Matthew Crooks said his son developed a great interest in guns and asked if he needed to pass a background check to purchase his father's Glock. He asked if he could have his grandfather's guns but did not appear to care about hunting as a sport.
Although Thomas Crooks was a terrible marksman at first, his father says his son got far better after several years of practice. He showed off his range targets to his father, explaining that "he wanted to see how far he could shoot with rudimentary sights."
In fact, Matthew Crooks admitted he handed Thomas a Panther A-15 rifle the morning of the shooting, believing that his son was going to the shooting range, according to the Post, citing federal records.
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Matthew Crooks said Thomas was registered as a Republican, but the father believed he did so only because of his father's Republican registration. His son had a general interest in politics but was not terribly passionate about the topic.
"Thomas called himself a Republican. Thomas did not like the welfare state and was against the ‘woke’ ideology but never really espoused the Republican ideology," Matthew Crooks said.
He said his son was shocked at the events of Jan. 6 and did not think the 2020 election had been rigged. Thomas donated $15 to a progressive Democratic group in 2021.
Thomas Crooks liked rap and country music, said Matthew, who sometimes found his son dancing alone in his room.
Thomas "never showed any signs indicating something was wrong," Matthew said to investigators.
Thomas did begin buying things on Amazon, including "parts, tools, and items to increase the capacity of his rifle," eventually adopting the pseudonym "Bob Dole" for his delivery address to thwart potential hackers, his dad said.
The family is "racking" their brains trying to understand why Thomas tried to kill the president.
Trump was shot in the ear on July 13, 2024, and three rally attendees were shot behind him, one of whom died. Crooks was almost immediately shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.
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FBI Director Kash Patel is facing some tough questions in the aftermath of yet another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump.
Trump and members of his Cabinet were targeted Saturday night at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner after a gunman rushed past a security checkpoint and opened fire in the Washington Hilton lobby. The suspect, later identified as 31-year-old Cole Allen, was staying at the hotel and was armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives.
'It was a total failure.'
Before he was apprehended and taken into custody, the gunman shot a Secret Serviceman who was wearing a bulletproof vest.
Allen's alleged manifesto was later made public, revealing anti-Trump and anti-Christian motivations that may have fueled the attack.
Although the Secret Service successfully stopped the third assassination attempt, several questions remain about the efficacy of the security measures in place since the shooter was able to get that far.
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"They did a great job on the ground," "Fox & Friends" host Lawrence Jones said of the Secret Service. "But they remain reactive. The proactive approach is still under great scrutiny. The president of the United States is averaging an assassination attempt once a year."
"So who’s going to do the investigating of the procedures?" Jones asked Patel. "Secret Service can’t investigate themselves because there are still people in leadership at the Secret Service that were responsible for Butler. How does that happen? It was a failure."
Patel acknowledged the failures that took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, but deferred to the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Markwayne Mullin's leadership. Patel did not detail which procedures or protocols would be improved or changed but indicated that some sort of reform would take place.
"I can’t speak to Butler, and I agree it was a total failure. Absolutely," Patel responded. "But I have full confidence in Secretary Markwayne Mullin. He oversees the United States Secret Service. I've talked to him repeatedly over the weekend ... and said, 'Whatever you need from the FBI, whatever we can assist in, and however we can better prepare to protect our protectees going forward, with the U.S. Secret Service, this FBI stands ready to do.' And we’re going to improve that process under Markwayne’s leadership and oversight of the Secret Service."
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Patel was also pressed about the suspect's proximity to the event. He had checked into the Washington Hilton the day before. Although the Hilton hosts the dinner, only a portion of the hotel is secured despite the dozens of dignitaries in attendance.
"This was a matter that needs to be heavily scrutinized, because it almost took the lives of dozens if not hundreds of people," Patel said.
"We're going to be talking about how we improve the security, not just for this event but for all events going forward," Patel added. "We’re going to learn from this one, and we’re going to utilize President Trump’s leadership and backing of the blue and law enforcement and work with DHS to ensure our Cabinet, our protectees, and the American civilian population is as best protected as possible.”
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Judicial Watch obtained heavily redacted documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showing that law enforcement broadcast radio warnings about an "unknown male acting suspiciously" prior to the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The FBI was forced to release the first records after President Donald Trump's assassination attempt on July 13, 2024, following Judicial Watch's lawsuit against the bureau. A year and a half after the shooting, very little is known about the assassination attempt, the failures leading up to it, and the shooter himself.
'It shouldn't have taken years and a federal lawsuit to get this basic FBI material.'
In the lawsuit, Judicial Watch asked for all records and communications related to Trump's would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, after the FBI failed to comply with a July 2024 FOIA request.
As a result, the FBI was forced to release 37 heavily redacted pages revealing the extent to which law enforcement was aware of "suspicious" activity leading up to the deadly shooting.
RELATED: Damning social media footprint suggests Thomas Crooks was another 'they/them' radical
One investigative report found that law enforcement flagged a suspicious male wearing a gray T-shirt with "Demolition Ranch" written on the front like the one Crooks was wearing. The same report found an unknown male scouting out a law enforcement sniper position, leading several officials to communicate about his activity.
Another report released portions of an interview done on July 16 where a member of the Saxonburg Police Department noted that sniper teams called out and sent photos of a "suspicious person" with a range finder. The same officer later said that a call came out over the radio of a "long gun on the roof" moments before shots rang out.
Several similar interviews the FBI was forced to release corroborated these details, including the apparent sightings of Crooks and his suspicious activity prior to the assassination attempt.
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"These documents raise troubling new questions about Secret Service failures to protect President Trump," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement obtained by Blaze News. "And it shouldn't have taken years and a federal lawsuit to get this basic FBI material about the near assassination of President Trump."
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On November 14, Tucker Carlson released an investigative video, exposing new details about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who nearly succeeded in assassinating President Donald Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13, 2024.
In the 34-minute video, Carlson made three bombshell claims:
1. The FBI spent months falsely claiming Crooks had no online footprint while hiding a years-long digital trail of extremist posts across multiple platforms, including Discord, Snapchat, and YouTube, as well as an extensive search history in the days leading up to the assassination attempt.
2. Crooks began as a pro-Trump, far-right teen advocating dictatorship and racial violence, then dramatically flipped in 2020 to virulent anti-Trump rhetoric and explicit threats of assassination, decapitations, and terrorism-style bombings.
3. Crooks was groomed online by a neo-Nazi handler linked to a U.S.-designated terrorist group, yet the FBI — under both Christopher Wray and now Trump appointee Kash Patel — continues to cover up Crooks’ full history, motive, and evidence, including physically scrubbing the crime scene.
After these revelations, Glenn Beck says there are six critical questions the American public must demand answers to.
For starters, Glenn is highly skeptical about the FBI’s dismissal of Crooks’ disturbing online activity.
During his pro-Trump era, Crooks directed violent comments almost exclusively toward Democrat officials — overtly calling for their gruesome deaths. This was happening under Joe Biden’s FBI — “a period when the U.S. government … was monitoring social media more aggressively than any other point in U.S. history,” says Glenn.
“People were arrested for memes at this time, but Crooks? Nothing … not a warning, not a knock on the door, not one single action,” he says.
Sometime in 2020, Crooks’ digital footprint, per Carlson’s documentary, reveals an abrupt ideological flip. His comments were just as violent, but suddenly, they were directed at Trump and his supporters. He began mocking Trump's handling of COVID-19, anti-lockdown protests, and conservative media figures, including Carlson himself, for downplaying the virus.
The FBI in its post-assassination attempt report, however, revealed only half of Crooks’ political leanings, omitting the anti-Trump part.
Around the same time Crooks’ political leanings reversed, a shadowy online figure under the alias Willy Tepes, whom Carlson posits is a neo-Nazi Discord groomer affiliated with the U.S.-designated terrorist group Nordic Resistance Movement, began interacting with Crooks. According to the exposé, Tepes encouraged Crooks’ violent rhetoric, openly approving of his barbaric ideations aimed at government officials.
“So now you have our state department” and “our intelligence community that is monitoring people online, especially Nazis in the rest of the world and Nazis here, and yet there's nothing. Not a single red flag is triggered, not a single investigation, no monitoring, no intervention,” says Glenn, noting that this same FBI was monitoring “Catholic churches and priests.”
Further, in the days leading up to the assassination attempt, Crooks, Carlson alleged, searched Trump’s name hundreds of times, as well as Jack Ruby, bomb-making, car and sniper attacks, successful assassinations, and how to evade police gunfire.
“All of these things should ring every NSA alarm bell. Nothing — again,” says Glenn.
“They didn't stop him. They didn't prevent or try to prevent. They didn't warn anyone. Instead, as soon as he was shot, they rushed out a narrative — a very specific narrative — and then they shut down anything that conflicted with it.”
Perhaps the most head-scratching revelation in Carlson’s exposé is that Trump’s own FBI has continued to keep Crooks’ shocking history under wraps.
“I understand it when it's Biden's FBI, but now Trump's FBI? Now, why didn't Trump's FBI immediately come out [with this information]?” asks Glenn, noting that Dan Bongino is on record reiterating the narrative that Crooks had virtually no digital footprint.
He uses the metaphor of an iceberg for the FBI. “You see an iceberg, and you just see just the top of it. Two-thirds of that is under the water, so we're seeing the tops change,” he says.
“I'm questioning: Does anyone know how deep this goes? Because I don't think it matters who's running it.”
The FBI also approved and coordinated the release of Crooks’ body for cremation just 10 days after the shooting.
“You don't do that in a presidential assassination attempt. You don't do that in a local homicide case unless you want something gone,” says Glenn.
1. Why did the FBI push the narrative that Crooks had a minimal digital footprint when quite the opposite is true?
2. Why did the FBI present only half of Crooks’ political history, hiding his era of Trump hatred? Who exactly was involved in the decision?
3. After the election and the appointment of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, why did the FBI continue to uphold the original narrative? Who made that decision?
4. Given that the government constantly monitors potentially dangerous online activity, why did Crooks’ violent comments, suspicious search history, and consorting with a known Swedish Nazi group go ignored?
5. Why did the FBI clean the scene prematurely by allowing Crooks to be cremated shortly after the crime?
6. Why is it that every time our FBI and government make a mistake, it seems to point in the direction of “ignorance, negligence, hiding inconvenient data, shaping a political narrative”?
“There's something very wrong. The official story is impossible to believe,” says Glenn, calling these questions not partisan but “self-preservation” inquiries.
“You can feel the republic slipping through your fingers. If we do not correct these things, we do not have a government of, by, and for the people.”
To hear more of Glenn’s commentary and analysis, watch the video above.
To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
In these wild political and cultural times, maybe we can allow ourselves a moment to “have some fun just for the fun of it.” Let’s take an off-beat look at Donald Trump’s 2024 comeback through the lens of Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist who turned everyday tasks into ridiculous, roundabout contraptions.
Goldberg, born July 4, 1883, became famous for illustrating convoluted chain reactions: a ball drops, a lever tilts, a cat jumps, and eventually, the napkin wipes your chin. His crazy spirit seems to have animated the past four years of American politics.
Take the self-operating napkin:
From the waning days of 2020 through November 2024, Democrats and their allies in the media and deep state plotted a simple game. They thought they could topple Trump like dominoes. Line up the indictments, knock over the first tile, and watch the rest fall neatly into place: Trump would give up, his supporters would grow weary, and one or more cases would stick, leaving him ineligible for office and likely even in prison.
Democrats trusted in dominoes. Reality looked more like a Goldberg machine — and divine providence.
The Democrats’ gambit did not pay off.
Instead of dominoes falling in precise order — A into B into C into D — events spun out in unpredictable ways. As I wrote in my 2023 book, “Obvious”:
Instead of things falling domino-style in precise order — A into B into C into D, and so on — life is more like A hitting G falling into C popping up H accelerating M ... all the way to Z. We take an action, start the ball rolling, and through many unseen and sometimes quirky circumstances, incredible results materialize.
That’s what happened. Democrats didn’t set off dominoes. They set loose a Rube Goldberg machine.
One of the strangest, and most powerful, moments came in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 2024. An assassin’s bullet nearly took Trump’s life. Instead, Trump sprang up and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight!” That image electrified the nation.
Add to that miraculous scene a wave through a McDonald’s drive-through window, a campaign dump truck plastered with Trump signs, even headlines about people “eating cats and dogs,” and you begin to see the Rube Goldberg contraption click along — until it delivered not chaos but victory.
Courtroom dramas fizzled. Character assassination failed. Even physical assassination attempts backfired. What Democrats had hoped would be Trump’s undoing became the very chain of events that returned him to power.
Rube Goldberg is spinning in his grave (perhaps literally).
Through another lens, the lesson is simpler: “All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). What looks chaotic to us is under His direction. He arranges the pieces, sets events in motion, and brings about His will.
Democrats trusted in dominoes. Reality looked more like a Goldberg machine — and divine providence.
The game is not over. More events lie ahead, more unexpected turns in the chain reaction. The real question is not whether the machinery keeps moving but whether we will find ourselves on the winning side when the final result arrives.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at American Thinker.
The House Ethics Committee released a 23-page report on Friday detailing the investigation into Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania over allegations of insider trading. Although the report largely cleared Kelly of these allegations, the committee found "substantial evidence" that he violated the Code of Official Conduct.
Kelly was first subject to investigation in July 2021 over allegations that his wife purchased a steel company's stock "based on confidential or material nonpublic information" the lawmaker learned during his "official job duties."
'My family and I look forward to putting this distraction behind us.'
After four years of investigation, the Office of Congressional Conduct found that there was "substantial reason to believe" the stock purchase was made based on the confidential information Kelly would have learned in his official capacity. However, the report also noted that the OCC "cannot definitively say what Representative Kelly and his wife knew about these developments and when they knew them" due to the "lack of cooperation" from Kelly, his wife, and his then-chief of staff.
"The Committee is particularly concerned with Representative Kelly's actions during the Committee's investigation — most notably the fact that his wife made an additional purchase of stock in the same company during the pendency of the investigation, Representative Kelly did not timely disclose that purchase, and he failed to respond to Committee questions regarding the purchase," the report reads.
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"As discussed further below, the Committee determined that Representative Kelly (and his wife) should divest of any stock in the company before Representative Kelly takes any further official actions directly related to that company," the report continues. "Additionally, the Committee found that Representative Kelly's failure to acknowledge the seriousness of the alleged misconduct and the Committee's investigation violated clause 1 of the Code of Official Conduct."
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In a statement obtained by Blaze News, Kelly insisted the investigation was just a "distraction."
"This investigation has unnecessarily lasted for nearly five years," Kelly said in the statement. "In the years since this investigation began, the Cleveland-Cliffs Butler Works plant faced an uncertain future due to the Biden administration's reckless energy policies. Throughout this process, I have fought for the 1,400 workers at the plant, I've spoken with these workers, and they appreciate the hard work we have done to fight for those jobs and for Butler."
"My family and I look forward to putting this distraction behind us."
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Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has consistently fought for transparency and answers for the American people. Johnson shared his latest push for transparency with Steve Deace on the "Steve Deace Show" Tuesday as he and many others across the country are still hungry for answers.
Over a year has passed since Thomas Matthew Crooks fired shots at former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, nearly assassinating the incoming leader of the free world. Despite the time that has elapsed, the American people still know little about the assassination attempt or the would-be assassin himself.
Johnson decided to take matters into his own hands.
"An awful lot of what we do know, my investigatory staff, just by calling local law enforcement shortly after Butler ... were able to develop a pretty detailed timeline," Johnson told Deace. "We published a preliminary report, laid out all of the failures of the security plan of the Secret Service in Butler. Then, within two weeks, the FBI pretty well took over the investigation, and everybody clammed up."
"I assumed when President Trump won the election that he would be appointing people that would dig into this, investigate it, and release that to the public," Johnson added. "All of a sudden, the one-year anniversary is upon us, and nothing has really been released."
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Johnson decided to take matters into his own hands by issuing what he called a "friendly subpoena" to FBI Director Kash Patel for all documents related to the Butler assassination attempt.
"I issued what I consider a friendly subpoena to Kash Patel, just basically reminding him, hey, the public has a right to know what happened in Butler," Johnson said. "They have a right to know what happened in West Palm Beach there, in terms of the second assassination attempt. ... There are an awful lot of unanswered questions here that deserve answers."
Johnson's subpoena does not address the second assassination attempt.
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"I understand the challenges," Johnson added. "But all that being said, I would still think this would be the priority of President Trump's administration to get to the bottom of the assassination and make everything they found out public."
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James Copenhaver, who was “wounded while protecting his family” during the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt on Donald Trump, has died, according to the president. Copenhaver died on Wednesday “surrounded by his loved ones,” his family said in a statement to Fox News. “James was a devoted husband, father, and grandfather … His family was the […]
Trump shouldn't reward the journalists who engage in assassination prep by attending a re-do WHCD dinner.
It's impossible to believe Comey, once one of the highest law enforcement officers in the land, was clueless about the meaning of 86.
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