Newly released FBI interview documents paint a detailed picture of Trump rally shooter Thomas Crooks as a quiet, emotionally detached young man who spent years training with firearms and used the alias "Bob Dole" to buy rifle parts, raising fresh questions about what the bureau knew and when.
Matthew Crooks, the father of the 20-year-old who fired eight rounds at President Trump during a July 13, 2024, rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, told FBI agents his son "never showed any signs indicating something was wrong" before the attack. The documents, obtained by the New York Post through Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley's ongoing investigation, describe a young man who barely spoke, had no close friends, and methodically built his shooting skills over four to five years.
Thomas Crooks wounded Trump in the right ear, killed rally attendee Corey Comperatore, and injured two others before a Secret Service sniper shot him dead. Investigators recovered 22 unfired rounds, extra magazines, a ballistic vest, and an undetonated explosive device from his vehicle.
The elder Crooks described a distant relationship with his son, telling agents the two "never really had a father/son bond." He recalled that when Thomas was born, "he did not scream and he was always quiet from that point on." Both parents believed their son may have had ADHD.
Thomas scored 1500 on his SATs "despite not studying," according to the FBI interview records. But academic promise did not translate into social connection. His father told agents Thomas "never identified anyone as a friend throughout middle school and high school," as Breitbart reported. He never showed interest in girls and "repeatedly denied" accusations that he was gay.
At one point, Thomas floated the idea of joining the military to work on nuclear submarines, but his father described it as idle curiosity. "This was more of just an idea as Thomas thought it would be cool," the FBI notes state.
A second person interviewed by investigators, whose name was redacted, called Thomas a "big history buff" with a "nonchalant" interest in politics. That person said Crooks "spoke often about Trump and Biden back when Trump initially got elected" and "repeatedly" brought up Marco Rubio.
Thomas "called himself a Republican," Matthew told agents. He "did not like the welfare state and was against the 'woke' ideology but never really espoused the Republican ideology." He also "did not believe the 2020 presidential election was rigged" and "expressed shock" over the events of January 6, 2021. In 2021, he made a small donation to the Progressive Turnout Project, a Democrat group.
Crooks joined a gun club when the pandemic began and initially "could not hit" paper targets. Over the next four to five years, he practiced steadily and became what his father described as a "solid shooter." He began pushing himself to hit targets at longer distances. Matthew Crooks recalled his son saying, "He wanted to see how far he could shoot with rudimentary sights", and eventually mastered long-range targeting with a prism sight, learning to zero in with precision.
He bought large quantities of "parts, tools and items to increase the capacity of his rifle" through Amazon, using the pseudonym "Bob Dole" to receive shipments. He also built a 3D-printed Glock 19 handgun, fired a single round, then immediately disposed of the weapon because he worried the frame would explode.
Crooks borrowed the AR-15 style rifle used in the attack from his father under the guise of going to the shooting range, the Washington Examiner reported. Crooks was from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, roughly 90 minutes from Butler.
His father told the FBI he found it "odd" that Thomas once asked whether he needed a background check to buy his father's Glock or whether he could have his grandfather's guns. Thomas also pushed the family to use encrypted software, telling them it would make them "less likely to be compromised by outside actors." He used encrypted browsers, VPNs, and privacy-focused email providers to mask his online activity.
For months after the shooting, the FBI told the public and Congress that Crooks had "almost no digital footprint." Shortly after the attack, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told senators during a hearing that investigators found a "general absence of other information to date from social media" tied to Crooks.
That narrative began to crack in November 2025. Tucker Carlson released a documentary titled "Who is Thomas Crooks?" on November 14, presenting what the film described as evidence of Crooks' online presence, material a source reportedly retrieved from Crooks' Google Drive account after many, if not all, of his social media accounts had been wiped from YouTube.
The FBI responded within days. The bureau created an "FBI Rapid Response" account on X and posted a statement insisting, "This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint ever." A community note appended to that post cited Abbate's own Senate testimony about the "general absence" of social media information, a direct contradiction of the bureau's new position.
On November 17, 2025, Kash Patel sat down with Fox News alongside Dan Bongino and a senior FBI official. Patel released a statement describing an investigation into "nearly 500,000 digital files" from "13 seized digital devices" connected to Crooks. The FBI issued a formal statement that same day asserting Crooks acted alone.
But the statement also acknowledged a figure the Carlson documentary had revealed for the first time: an online persona called "Willy Tepes." The FBI admitted Tepes had mentioned Crooks in four YouTube comments. The bureau claimed, however, that Crooks "had never directly communicated with Tepes."
That assertion ran headlong into a YouTube comment dated August 5, 2020, four years before the shooting. In the comment, posted in response to Tepes, 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 and try to assassinate them."
Crooks was 16 years old when he wrote that. The comment directly responded to Tepes, contradicting the FBI's claim that no direct communication between the two had occurred.
An online investigative group called the Citizens Commission dug further into Tepes's background, releasing a video titled "Who is Willy Tepes?" The group tracked Tepes's full digital footprint, infiltrated extremist Telegram channels where he was active, and used an online tracking tool called TGDB to parse roughly 5,000 of his messages across 83 different channels. The earliest message dated to May 16, 2021. The Citizens Commission said many of those messages "explicitly encouraged political violence, including assassinations."
A Citizens Commission spokesman questioned why Tepes had apparently escaped the FBI's notice, or, if he hadn't, why the bureau omitted him from public accounts of the investigation:
"What I don't understand is how this guy is still able to keep posting violent stuff if the investigation into Crooks was thorough. How was this Tepes character missed? Or if they knew about him why did they omit it in speaking about the investigation?"
The spokesman added that "from everything we can tell, it appears Crooks talked about assassination attempts with a foreign terrorist in a YouTube comment section."
FBI Director Christopher Wray later testified before the House Judiciary Committee that Crooks had searched online for "how far away was Oswald from Kennedy" on July 6, roughly a week before the shooting. Crooks visited the Butler rally premises three times, including a 20-minute reconnaissance trip one week before the event. Two hours before the shooting, he flew a drone over the rally area, approximately 200 yards from the stage, National Review reported.
Despite all of this, the drone surveillance, the online comments about assassination, the years of target practice, the pseudonym, the encrypted communications, the FBI has never publicly identified a motive.
Helen Comperatore, widow of Corey Comperatore, the Trump supporter killed shielding his family during the attack, has made clear she does not believe the official story. In an interview with the Daily Mail, she said:
"If you think that kid just got out of bed and went and shot the President and shot my husband, you're bulls*** crazy."
She told the outlet she believes two unnamed "high up" federal officials from the Biden administration who are "still in their positions" bear some responsibility. She did not provide evidence for that claim.
"I will find out what happened to him and I will continue focusing on this until the day I die."
At least three additional attempts on the president's life have occurred since the Butler shooting.
Senator Grassley's Senate Judiciary Committee investigation remains active. The FBI interview documents now flowing to Capitol Hill reveal a pattern the bureau should find uncomfortable: a shooter who left a trail of online extremism, practiced for years, bought equipment under a fake name, encrypted his communications, and surveilled his target with a drone, yet was described by the nation's top law enforcement agency as having virtually no digital footprint.
The gap between what the FBI told Congress in the summer of 2024 and what the public record now shows is not a minor discrepancy. It is a credibility problem for an institution that asked the country to trust its conclusions.
When the people responsible for protecting a president and investigating his attempted murder cannot keep their own story straight, the public has every right to demand answers, and every reason to doubt the ones already given.
