The Crooked Story Around Thomas Crooks

The attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, remains one of the most consequential security failures in recent political history. It deserves, and still lacks, a full public accounting. For months, legitimate questions have lingered about the background of the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, and the lapses that allowed a 20-year-old with a rifle to reach an unsecured rooftop less than 200 yards from a former President and then current front-runner for the nation’s top job.

But the leap from unanswered questions to sweeping conspiratorial conclusions is a chasm worth avoiding. In recent days Tucker Carlson has encouraged precisely that leap. Rather than pressing for serious transparency, he has mixed factual gaps with political suspicion to construct a theory of concealed motives and hidden hands. The public deserves better than that, and so does the pursuit of truth.

Let’s start with what remains troubling. Federal investigators initially described Crooks as a quiet, socially isolated young man with a limited online presence. Yet Carlson, in a video posted on X on Friday, November 14, showcased material he claimed came from Crooks’ Google Drive and from social media accounts on YouTube, Snapchat, Quora, and Venmo. The content, he contended, suggested a trajectory of threats and firearms practice inconsistent with the FBI’s portrait.

 The FBI has not publicly explained why these accounts were not part of its early description of Crooks’ digital activity. The haste to cremate the shooter and scrub his apartment, the rapid disappearance of his online postings, and the absence of a detailed biographical narrative have only fueled suspicion about the thoroughness of the FBI’s investigation. Americans can reasonably ask how a major assassination attempt generated to date so little public information about the perpetrator.

As I document in my 1993 book Case Closed, after he shot President John F. Kennedy, the FBI and the CIA quickly complied a detailed account of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, in some cases what he was up to by the day, hour, and even minute in the months and even years leading up to the assassination. All of that was available to the public a year after the assassination when the Warren Report was published. And yet, over a year after Crooks’ attempted assassination of Donald Trump—and murder of Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter and former fire chief who was in the audience—we know next to nothing about this shooter. How did he get on the roof of the adjacent building without anyone noticing? Why did no one in the Secret Service respond to the numerous verbal warnings by spectators at the rally (that can be heard on cell phone footage) that they saw a man with a rifle on the roof? And despite apparently not seeing Crooks on the roof, how did the Secret Service shoot and kill him within seconds of his opening fire on Trump?

A democratic society should not have to rely on private individuals to surface essential details about an attack on a national political figure.

Those questions merit full answers. A democratic society should not have to rely on private individuals to surface essential details about an attack on a national political figure. If intelligence agencies do their job the country should not need to rely on podcasters for accurate and relevant information about important national events. 

But Carlson’s speculation overshoots the available facts. His error is not raising questions but in constructing a sprawling narrative of deliberate concealment. He suggests the FBI suppressed Crooks’ online footprint and implies a broader conspiracy behind the attack. His confidence in the authenticity of the accounts he identified is not investigative rigor; it is assumption presented as certainty. Even if Carlson’s files are authentic, nothing yet proves the FBI saw them and chose to hide them. It is plausible that Carlson’s source identified material investigators had not verified or did not view as conclusive. 

The FBI’s Rapid Response account stated last week that the agency never claimed Crooks had “no online footprint.” FBI Director Kash Patel has emphasized the scope of the inquiry: more than 1,000 interviews; thousands of public tips; data from 13 digital devices; nearly half a million files reviewed; and financial activity across 10 accounts analyzed. Patel maintains investigators found no evidence Crooks worked with anyone or shared his intent.

This does not close the matter. Federal agencies have a long history of releasing information too slowly and too narrowly. But it also does not substantiate Carlson’s suggestion of a suppressed plot or a rogue bureau determined to hide the truth.

The deeper issue is this: By framing unanswered questions as proof of a coordinated deep-state conspiracy, Carlson undermines the very process required to get real answers. He transforms factual uncertainty into political advantage. This style of commentary turns national tragedies into narrative battlegrounds, where ambiguity becomes opportunity.

Prepackaged conspiracy narratives corrode the public’s ability to assess facts when they ultimately emerge. The Kennedy assassination offers a reminder: early opacity, mixed with political distrust, created a vacuum that conspiracy theories quickly filled. The result is an event still debated six decades later, long after credible evidence should have settled the matter. 

Something similar is now taking shape. Gaps in public information about Crooks have fostered speculation. By framing those gaps as evidence of intent in some nebulous deep state plot, Carlson makes it harder for legitimate investigators—in Congress, in the press, and within federal agencies—to do their work without being accused of participating in a cover-up the moment an answer proves incomplete.

Transparency by the FBI is the only way to reassure the public that its conclusions rest on verified evidence.

Americans deserve a clearer record of Crooks’ ideology, his online activity, and his movements before the shooting. Congress should press for more information about the security breakdowns that allowed the attack. The FBI should release as much documentation as possible. Transparency by the FBI is the only way to reassure the public that its conclusions rest on verified evidence, not institutional defensiveness or a coverup for an inadequate investigation.

Transparency does not require accepting Carlson’s conclusions. It requires accepting that the public has a right to know more than it does today and insisting that institutions meet that obligation.

Carlson is right about one thing: the story of Thomas Matthew Crooks is incomplete. But incompleteness is not proof of conspiracy. It is proof that work remains to be done. The path to clarity is careful inquiry, not sensational extrapolation. If the goal is truth rather than clicks, the method matters as much as the questions.

The Butler attack demands answers. It does not demand a conspiracy theory.