More than two years after Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a new release of FBI records is revealing previously undisclosed details about the gunman’s contacts and the early investigation.
As reported on Wednesday’s AM Update, the FBI published its eighth batch of files on Crooks, including interview summaries, evidence records and internal communications collected after the July 2024 assassination attempt. Journalist Tom Elliott reviewed the files and highlighted several encounters that, as he argued on his Substack, complicate the portrait of Crooks as a loner who did virtually everything by himself. The most notable involved a gun store roughly 120 miles from Crooks’ home.
Possible Encounters
According to an FBI interview record cited by Elliott, Keystone Armory in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, contacted investigators after the shooting to report that a man resembling Crooks had visited the store on May 25, 2024.
Employees reportedly described the customer as spending roughly an hour inside accompanied by one man believed to be in his thirties and another older man with a gray beard. The man purchased 20 rounds of ammunition, though not the same type Crooks used in the assassination attempt.
After the Butler shooting–which killed volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore and injured Trump and two attendees–the store contacted the FBI and supplied investigators with its surveillance video. Elliott noted Crooks was scheduled to attend a firearms class elsewhere in Pennsylvania later that May afternoon making the timeline possible, though not conclusive.
A separate FBI interview summary documented another interaction one day before the assassination attempt. Officials at the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club telling investigators that surveillance video showed Crooks speaking with another man while the two were alone on the rifle range July 12.
Agents reportedly photographed the unidentified man and his vehicle from images held by a club official and then checked the names listed in the range’s sign-in records. The document release offers no public account of what investigators ultimately learned about that encounter.
Another Device?
Other records revealed agents were searching for a third cell phone believed to be connected to Crooks. On July 21, agents reportedly conducted a coordinated search of the wooded area and a nearby dumpster for what the document calls “a phone believed to be associated with Thomas Crooks.” Investigators also searched an apartment complex matching coordinates that had been stored on one of Crooks’ devices.
By that point, investigators had already recovered Crooks’ primary Samsung phone from his body. The evidence log also listed a second Samsung device containing a year of calls and messages ending in July 2023. Elliott noted the separate search in the wooded area indicates agents believed Crooks had possessed a third device, though he reports they found nothing.
Crooks’ Father Speaks
The latest tranche of documents also included eerie details about the would-be assassin investigators learned through interviews with his father, Matthew Crooks, in the aftermath of the shooting. Matthew, who revealed he “never really had a father/son bond” with the gunman, told the FBI his son did not often express strong emotions, hardly ever laughed, and was very difficult to read.
The New York Post published a detailed report of those FBI interviews, which Megyn took a closer look at on Tuesday’s Megyn Kelly Show. Watch:
The ‘Anonymous Donor’
The New York Post also reported that federal records reveal an “anonymous donor” paid for the cremation of Crook’s’ body days after the shooting. The information seems to have been gleaned from a lawyer representing the Crooks family, according to the document.
Megyn reacted to that revelation and how it plays into concerns many have expressed about whether Crooks was in any way influenced to carry out the assassination shooting. Watch:
The FBI has maintained that Crooks acted alone, saying its investigation included more than one thousand interviews, roughly two thousand public tips, one hundred subpoenas, and the examination of 13 electronic devices.
You can get all the day’s headlines by tuning into the AM Update with Megyn Kelly on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch AM Update on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111).