It’s been more than two years since a lunatic lefty took a shot at President Trump campaigning in Butler, Pa., missing him by the narrowest of margins, clipping an ear, and killing a campaign attendee. And yet, we still don’t have all of the information about the shooter, Thomas Crooks. Until now.
FBI Director Kash Patel needs to be cracking heads and threatening jobs. The latest batch of FBI records on Crooks did not arrive because the Bureau decided the public deserved to know. It arrived because Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley kept asking. That is the whole story of Butler in a sentence: everything the American people have learned about the man who came within a fraction an inch of assassinating Trump has had to be extracted, subpoena by subpoena, from agencies whose first instinct after July 13, 2024 was to close ranks.
What Grassley shook loose this time is not a smoking gun. It’s worse in its own way. Crooks, we now learn, spent the run-up to the rally ordering ammunition and rifle components online under the name “Bob Dole,” routing them through a VPN, and having them shipped to the house where he lived with his parents. Boxes arrived. His father noticed enough to have an argument with him about the pseudonym — not about why a twenty-year-old was stockpiling, but about whether the fake name actually defeated hackers.
Two days after his son killed a volunteer fire chief and shot the Republican nominee for president, Matthew Crooks sat down with the FBI and described a boy he had never bonded with, who showed almost no emotion, who broke things when he got bored, and who once asked whether buying a handgun would require a background check — a question the father found odd and, apparently, left there. On the morning of the rally, that same father handed his son the rifle.
WATCH:
New FBI documents are revealing what Thomas Crooks' own father told investigators about the son he struggled to read long before the Butler assassination attempt.
Crooks' father described him as quiet, emotionally difficult to read and sometimes destructive when he got bored. As… pic.twitter.com/iFuVTJhLfW
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 15, 2026
The family’s line is that no one saw it coming. Read the interview and tell me what else there was to see. This was not a subtle case. This was a young man assembling a capability in plain view of the adults responsible for him, and the adults have settled on bewilderment as a permanent posture.
Then there is the Bureau’s own performance. Investigators told Congress that Crooks maintained something like thirty-five online accounts, including email addresses hosted in Germany and Belgium. The FBI got into them and concluded there was no foreign hand. Fine — but notice how long it took for the public to hear that number at all, and notice that after more than two years and unlimited resources, the official answer on motive remains a shrug. The Bureau says the attack was meticulously planned. The Bureau also says it cannot tell you why. Both of those cannot be comfortable conclusions, and the institution has been remarkably comfortable.
None of this exists in a vacuum. The Secret Service left a rooftop with a clear line to the stage unsecured inside a protective perimeter, then produced explanations so weak they became a national punchline. Nobody has been criminally charged. The reforms have been announced more often than they have been audited. And a firefighter named Corey Comperatore, who died shielding his family, has largely vanished from the coverage — replaced, this week, by the news that an anonymous donor paid to cremate his killer.
Here is the part that ought to bother people regardless of party. A government that cannot tell you why a young man tried to kill a presidential candidate, cannot explain how he got a rooftop, and cannot volunteer basic records without a senator’s letterhead behind them is a government asking for trust it has not earned. Every month the file stays half-closed, the vacuum fills with theories — some plausible, most not — and the agencies then complain about public cynicism they manufactured themselves. Transparency was the cure available at the start. It still is. Grassley shouldn’t have to keep pulling.
Release the file. All of it. Let the country read the interviews, the timelines, the account records, the internal after-action documents. If the answer really is that a disturbed loner slipped through a father’s indifference and a protective detail’s negligence, then say so with the documents on the table. The families in that crowd, and the widow in Sarver, are owed at least that much.
