Thomas Matthew Crooks sent a series of cryptic messages in the months before he tried to assassinate President Donald Trump. The FBI had them. They released a portion of them this week. So far 249 pages from the investigation were released, out of an estimated 75,000-page file. The FBI says it will release about 500 pages a month to the public.
At that pace, the full picture arrives in 12 years.
Aside from the obvious gaslighting by the FBI, what's inside the 249 pages released so far raises the kind of questions the Bureau clearly hoped nobody would ask for another decade. Chat threads from May 2023 through January 2024 — seven months of exchanges that end six months before Crooks opened fire at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally on July 13, 2024, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore and grazing President Trump's ear.
The messages are strange. Not the ramblings of an obvious lunatic — the deliberate, purposeful communications of someone acquiring capability. A February 2023 conversation about 3D-printing. Records of a DHL shipment from Hong Kong. The Bureau's own file describes a 3D-printed carbon-fiber Glock-style firearm among the evidence.
Then there's the drone work.
The 249 pages reveal that Crooks used a drone to photograph locations in the Pittsburgh area — 40 images across 8 flight logs. Among the targets: PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium. Two major public venues in a city that regularly hosts large-scale events. The drone photographs are dated February 2024 — five months before Butler.
So here's what the FBI's own records show: a 20-year-old was 3D-printing weapon components, receiving international shipments, flying drones over stadiums, and sending messages for months before he showed up on a rooftop with a rifle. The Bureau's file contains all of this. The Bureau released none of it voluntarily.
The FBI has always asserted that Crooks was a lone actor who appeared out of nowhere. Their own evidence file suggests otherwise. Chat threads don't appear out of nowhere. Drone surveillance of stadiums doesn't appear out of nowhere. International shipments of 3D-printing components don't appear out of nowhere. The word "lone" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a file that's 75,000 pages long.
Two hundred forty-nine pages down. Seventy-four thousand seven hundred fifty-one to go.
