Because news cycles are now on hyper-speed, it’s quite possible that you may not immediately remember who Thomas Crooks was. He’s the would-be assassin whose bullet grazed then-candidate Donald Trump’s head at that rally in Butler County, Pa., on July 13, 2024. You may remember that Secret Service snipers took Crooks out moments later, but not fast enough for most who’ve followed the story.
On Monday, our Victoria Taft detailed some new ‘bombshell’ revelations that came to light on Crooks via Tucker Carlson and Miranda Devine of the New York Post:
On Friday, independent reporter Tucker Carlson released a detailed video showing the violent online rantings of 20-year-old Thomas Crooks. On Monday, the New York Post's Miranda Devine followed up with yet more insight into the young man who went from adoring Donald Trump and wishing death upon his detractors to completely pivoting in 2020 into a post-COVID, rabid Trump hater.
The FBI line has always been that Crooks had no online presence and that he went completely under investigators' – and everyone's – radar. But the intel the anonymous whistleblower has uncovered showed that Crooks had a robust online presence and left plenty of bread crumbs, almost a manifesto, of the political motivation for his crimes.
Far from having no discernible online presence, Carlson reported that the gun-loving Crooks left behind quite an online trail of his presence brought to his attention by "a source" who was easily able to track down Crooks' online footprint after finding Crooks' phone number in legal filings.
Keep in mind, this comes not only after the FBI and Secret Service have done their own investigations surrounding the incident, but also after the quickly formed Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump (TFTA) conducted and completed its own.
The task force described its mandate as “to understand what went wrong… to ensure accountability, and to prevent such an agency failure from ever happening again.”
Seven Republicans and six Democrats comprised the task force, which was led by Butler’s own Mike Kelly, who represents Pennsylvania’s 16th District in the House of Representatives.
Shortly after the election, the task force issued its final report on Dec. 10, 2024, putting a bow on Congress’s curiosity over the entire matter.
Given the time and resources Congress devoted to the issue, the task force did a fair job of detailing what it cited as the most problematic operational, if not motivational, issues at play: failures in planning; failures in execution; failures in leadership; the aftermath; the related FBI Investigation; and certain findings and recommendations related to Trump’s vulnerabilities at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla.
If you followed the story much after Trump was shot but before that final report, nothing in it would have surprised you. Most of the results from the almost five-month investigation had already been revealed in news coverage.
The task force conducted a lot of interviews and took testimony. But even if you know all of this, you may be surprised to learn that Kelly’s hometown newspaper, the Butler Eagle, has reported that Crooks’ disturbing social media history was news to the head of the task force.
“Maybe (investigators) thought there was some reason these shouldn’t be public. I’m not casting judgment. I’m just saying we didn’t have access to it. I’m just learning about it now for the first time,” Kelly told the Butler Eagle.
In fairness to Kelly and the Republican members of the task force, the vast majority of their work was conducted during the Biden administration, which only made it more difficult to get cooperation from federal agencies and answers to critical questions.
“Anytime we'd tried to get answers from the FBI or the Secret Service or any of the federal agencies, they were really reluctant to talk to us. In fact, they didn’t talk to us. They said they were doing their own investigations.”
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Kelly was present on the day Trump was shot. If you were to drive down Route 8 in Butler County towards the town of Butler, you’d see a big outdoor billboard with that famous photo of Trump, bloody, with fist in the air, and the words, “Fight, Fight, Fight.” This is Kelly’s billboard.
As a Republican, as a representative of Butler, and as a conservative, Kelly has had every incentive to get answers, and now we’re learning that his task force may have only scratched the surface.
At the moment, the FBI is operating under the Trump administration. Trump’s own pick to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, is no doubt sitting on a trove of vital information. Information that would shed more light on Crooks and the entire assassination attempt on Trump. It’s time to revisit this – all of it.
Kelly has said he can’t see any reason why there could not be further investigations.
“I think the fallacy here is the idea that somehow, the American people can’t handle the truth.… But what they can’t handle are the lies,” he told the Butler Eagle.
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