Staff Reports
On July 13, 2024, a young man identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing former President Donald Trump and killing and wounding bystanders in a shocking attack that the FBI and Secret Service called an assassination attempt. That night exposed security failures and left millions of Americans asking how a plot like that could get so far before being stopped.
This week’s forced document release — the 48 pages Judicial Watch says it extracted from the FBI through a FOIA lawsuit — revealed heavily redacted FBI notes showing a Butler County deputy reported two email communications from Crooks, though the redactions hide the substance and timing of those exchanges. The headline-grabbing interpretation that Crooks was secretly emailing local law enforcement spread fast, but one conservative outlet that initially amplified that angle later retracted a specific claim, saying the messages in question were actually to a college professor about a math assignment.
Whether those emails are innocuous or damning, the real disgrace is the blanket redactions and the Bureau’s slow-roll approach — Americans deserve facts, not fragments. The release confirms what many of us feared: key pieces of the record have been withheld or sanitized, and the agencies in charge of keeping the country safe have answered with opacity instead of accountability.
Judicial Watch’s summary also notes that investigators recovered a “gray remote device with numerical push buttons and an antenna” along with a cellphone from Crooks’ person, a detail that raises serious questions about the broader plan and who, if anyone, else may have been involved. The combination of a suspicious device, unexplained redactions, and the quick cleanup of the scene that critics have described should make every American demand answers about whether evidence was suppressed or mishandled.
We already know from bodycam video, public reporting, and committee findings that law-enforcement coordination around the Butler rally was chaotic and, in places, plainly deficient — mistakes that put the President and everyday patriots at risk. These are not partisan talking points; they are the documented failures that followed an attack on American soil, and they must be treated as such by lawmakers sworn to protect the republic.
Patriots should be clear-eyed: whether the Crooks emails prove negligence, incompetence, or something darker, the FBI and Secret Service have to stop hiding behind redactions and start producing the full, unexpurgated record. Congress should subpoena the originals, declassify what can be declassified, and hold a public, no-excuses hearing so the families of the victims and the American people can finally learn the truth.
