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We are all owed a better explanation from the FBI and Secret Service about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump 16 months ago at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
The president himself remains unsatisfied with the answers he’s been given about the circumstances leading to 20-year-old Thomas Crooks climbing on a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle and firing eight times at Trump, narrowly missing his head but hitting his ear.
Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper, but not before he killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore, 50, and seriously wounded David Dutch, 58, and James Copenhaver, 75, who were sitting in the bleachers behind Trump.
There is something very wrong with the official story and that invites conspiracy theories.
The president demanded answers months ago. A man was murdered. What is going on?
Then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress after the July 13, 2024, attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history that pointed to a motive or political ideology.
A week later, Wray’s deputy Paul Abbate told Congress that comments posted on one of Crooks’ social media accounts “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”
Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.
The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.
“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”
The official narrative claimed he acted alone and without a clear motive, ideology or digital footprint.
Yet the source found reams of information that shows Crooks “was not simply some unknowable lone actor … He left a digital trail of violent threats, extremist ideology and admiration for mass violence. He spoke openly of political assassination, posted under his real name and was even flagged by other users who mentioned law enforcement in their replies. Despite this, his account remained active for more than five years — and was only removed the day after the shooting.
“None of this online activity was referenced in the final congressional report released in December 2024, making this even more troubling,” the source said.
Starting with Crooks’ phone number, the source used tools available to private investigators and web archives to uncover the assassin’s very visible online persona.
Crooks’ most prolific activity was on YouTube, with 737 public comments. The account “Tomcrooks2178” (visible to other users as Tom Crooks) was created on Jan. 14, 2019, and suspended on July 14, 2024, the day after the Butler attack, for violating YouTube’s policy on violent criminal organizations.
Political 180
Crooks’ trajectory from pro- to anti-Trump is evident. He referred to Trump as “the literal definition of Patriotism” in a comment at 1:17 a.m. July 20, 2019.
He also issued several targeted threats against the Democratic congressional representatives in “the Squad.”
“I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who don’t deserve anything this country [sic] has given them,” he wrote at 8:18 a.m. July 20, 2019.
“MURDER THE DEMOCRATS,” he wrote in all caps on Dec. 12, 2019.
But in early 2020, Crooks’ online behavior flipped 180 degrees and he became very critical of Trump, Fox News and Republican complaints about mail-in voting.
The first time he criticized Trump was on Jan. 23, 2020, when he commented on a video of law professor Jonathan Turley talking about Trump’s first impeachment.
“Keep in mind the only reason we may know about any of this is because of Trump’s stupidity,” Crooks wrote.
He started describing Trump supporters as a cult: “How can you people call others sheep, but you are do [too] brainwashed to realize how dumb you are,” he wrote on Feb. 26, 2020. “I mean literally you guys sound like a cult at times.”
The same day he described Trump as “racist.”
By April 2020, Crooks was constantly criticizing Trump’s pandemic response, saying he was “too slow and everything he’s doing now should have been done.”
Through the summer of 2020, Crooks’ online rhetoric became increasingly radical and violent.
On Aug. 5, 2020, Crooks wrote: “IMO the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building and set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to assassinate them.
“Any sort of head-to-head fight is suicide and even ambush/surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well. A large portion of the war will also be propaganda/information wars — both sides will want people to join them, and a big deciding factor in wars is often which side has more popular support for them,” he wrote.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source, only one, on PayPal, was operated under an alias: “Rod Swanson.”
Rod Swanson is a former senior FBI agent who was the chief of investigations for the state of Nevada during the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.
He also previously served on FBI Director Robert Mueller’s protective detail and as a firearms instructor in Pennsylvania.
Contacted by phone over the weekend, Swanson said he was surprised his name was connected to Crooks.
“I don’t know anything about that kid or his family,” he said. “I don’t even use PayPal. I don’t even know how to set up a PayPal account.”
He said he retired from the FBI in Vegas in 2016 and went to work for the Nevada attorney general from September 2015 to March 2020. He now works in the oil and gas business in Houston.
Furry fetish?
When told of Crooks’ online threats, he said there was no way the FBI would not be aware of the teenager.
“No matter how ridiculous the allegation, no matter if it’s COVID or not, somebody is going to knock on somebody’s door,” Swanson said. “If they investigated that kid there’s a record of it and there’s an assessment that some leader made that this was not a threat or it rose to a level and they did something else.”
He also said that “if the FBI had that information [about his name on the PayPal account], I can’t even imagine they would not have reached out to me right away.”
Given Crooks’ pattern of tracking high-profile mass shootings and violent events, the source believes it is plausible that he adopted Swanson’s name as a private joke.
Like alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, Crooks appears to have been interested in “furries” and exploring gender identity.
He described himself with the pronouns “they/them” on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for “furry” art and the “furry” community. (A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish.)
Two accounts linked to Crooks’ primary email were found on DeviantArt, under usernames “epicmicrowave” and “theepicmicrowave.” The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.
Pals with neo-Nazis
One of the people Crooks interacted with online was “Willy Tepes,” a member of Norwegian neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.
Tepes encouraged violence and Crooks’ extremism, using a Maoist phrase, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” which Crooks repeated several times.
In one comment on Oct. 5, 2025, more than a year after Butler, Tepes commented to another user that he had been contacted by both Russian and American intelligence.
“People who ask you to contact them when they just as easily could contact you, are Feds. This is how they avoid entrapment. Both American and Russian intelligence does this. I have chatted to both,” he claimed.
Shortly after his interactions with Tepes, Crooks disappeared offline.
Did his brush with the Norwegian and his own violent rhetoric win him a visit from the FBI or the Secret Service?
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If not, why not? If so, why has it not been disclosed?
The FBI refused to comment when asked on Sunday whether Crooks was ever investigated, visited or in some way brought to the attention of the agency before he tried to assassinate Trump, or whether there was an FBI file on Crooks before Butler.
The FBI also refused to comment on why it has not been forthcoming on congressional oversight requests.
Wray told Congress on July 24 2024, 11 days after the shooting, that the bureau “did not have any [prior] information about the shooter” and that “he was not in our holdings before the shooting.” He said the FBI ran a search for Crooks through its databases, and he was not found.
Susan Crabtree, an investigative reporter for RealClearPolitics who has broken multiple stories about the failures at Butler, says her key Secret Service source from the 2020 time period “told me that Crooks was not a person of record at the USSS in 2020 — and wasn’t known to USSS until Butler.”
Something doesn’t add up.
Classified knowledge
Wray had been heavily criticized after the Parkland school shooting because the FBI failed to act after being repeatedly warned about the shooter, Nicholas Cruz — that he had guns, had threatened people, exhibited erratic behavior and might carry out a school shooting.
Was Wray trying to avoid being blamed for another atrocity on his watch? Is that why he downplayed Trump’s injury when he testified to Congress a week after Butler and falsely suggested the now-president had not been struck by a bullet but by shrapnel from his podium?
If the Secret Service had become aware of Crooks’ anti-Trump rhetoric in 2020 during Trump’s presidency, protocol is that it would have determined if he was a threat and offloaded to the FBI to take over the investigation.
We don’t know what happened because the Secret Service after-action report is classified. The only bodies that could look at it are the intelligence committees in Congress, which so far have shown little curiosity.
A criminal investigation of a presidential assassination or attempted assassination falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Therefore, any comments on the subject matter would come from the bureau.
Requests for information from the FBI by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have been rebuffed — including under Director Kash Patel.
Johnson had to issue a subpoena in July on the first anniversary of the Butler attack and complained that he had been “stonewalled” by the FBI and the Secret Service in his efforts to request security camera footage, forensic reports and other documents related to the Crooks case.
Trump and those close to him are skeptical about the official story and question how the impoverished parents of Crooks, who had to ask for money from neighbors to pay for their son’s funeral, could afford to hire a white-shoe law firm, Quinn Logue out of Pittsburgh.
It is hard to believe the FBI and/or Secret Service missed Crooks. The question is, what did they do about him?