Newly released FBI interview records paint a disturbing portrait of the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and raise fresh questions about who paid to have his body quietly cremated.
An unnamed donor covered the cost of cremating Thomas Crooks after the July 13, 2024 shooting that wounded the former president and killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore, Just The News reported, citing FBI documents provided to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley. The detail, buried in a trove of bureau interview notes with Crooks' father Matthew, has drawn scrutiny from investigators and outside researchers who want to know why the donor's identity remains hidden, and what, if anything, the FBI has done to find out.
The documents, first obtained by the New York Post, landed on Grassley's desk as part of the Iowa Republican's ongoing inquiry into the Butler attack. They offer the most detailed public account yet of Crooks' upbringing, his years-long firearms training, his use of aliases and encryption tools, and a 2020 YouTube comment in which he openly discussed assassinating politicians.
Matthew Crooks described his son as emotionally flat from infancy. Thomas rarely laughed, rarely showed strong feelings, and was "very difficult to read," his father told agents. The elder Crooks said the boy "did not scream and he was always quiet from that point on" after an unspecified early incident. Matthew and his wife Mary suspected Thomas may have had ADHD, though no formal diagnosis appeared in the documents.
Father and son "never really had a father/son bond," Matthew admitted. He told the FBI his work schedule kept him away, and that Thomas grew more withdrawn as he aged. In elementary school, Thomas acted out because "he was bored", wrecking a school desk and briefly falling in with a group his father considered "bad." By high school, Thomas had retreated further, talking to himself and struggling to speak with teachers.
A former classmate, Jason Kohler, told the Associated Press that Crooks "was bullied almost every day" and was "just an outcast." His father told the FBI that Thomas "never identified anyone as a friend throughout middle school and high school."
Thomas scored 1,500 on his SATs without studying. He "put a lot of pressure on himself" over college applications. He idolized Iron Man, watched war films like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Full Metal Jacket," and listened to both rap and country music. He "hated" fishing and wanted nothing to do with hunting.
Yet the same young man who avoided the outdoors spent four to five years training at a gun club he joined when the pandemic began. By the end, his father said, Thomas had become a "solid shooter." The gap between the shy loner his family described and the methodical gunman who exploited catastrophic Secret Service failures to fire eight rounds at a president remains one of the case's central puzzles.
The FBI documents detail a pattern of secretive weapons procurement that stretched over years. Crooks began buying large quantities of "parts, tools and items to increase the capacity of his rifle" through Amazon, shipping them under the pseudonym "Bob Dole." He used privacy software including CyberGhost VPN, the Brave browser, and encrypted email providers GMX and Mailfence, tools he told his father made them "less likely to be compromised by outside actors."
At one point, Thomas asked Matthew whether he needed a background check to buy his father's Glock and whether he could have his grandfather's firearms. Matthew called both questions "odd." Federal records confirmed that Crooks borrowed the AR-style rifle used in the attack from his father, telling him he was going to the shooting range.
Crooks also built a Glock 19 from scratch using a 3D printer, carbon fiber plastic, a dryer, and a toaster oven. He fired one round, then immediately disposed of the weapon, worried the frame would explode. The episode suggests a young man testing capabilities, not collecting trophies.
Investigators later found 22 unfired rounds, extra magazines, a ballistic vest, and an undetonated explosive device with a remote detonation receiver, set to the off position, inside Crooks' vehicle near the rally site. FBI Director Christopher Wray later testified before the House Judiciary Committee that Crooks had searched "how far away was Oswald from Kennedy" on July 6, 2024, one week before the attack. Crooks also flew a drone over the rally area two hours before the shooting to livestream footage of the stage, and he had visited the site three times before the event, including a 20-minute reconnaissance trip.
On August 5, 2020, a YouTube comment attributed to Thomas Crooks stated:
"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. Four years later, he carried out the second half of his own prescription.
The comment surfaced publicly through Tucker Carlson's November 14, 2025 documentary, "Who is Thomas Crooks?" Carlson presented what the Daily Mail described as "extensive and authenticated proof" of Crooks' radical online presence, including the existence of an online figure called "Willy Tepes" who had interacted with Crooks in YouTube comment sections.
The FBI's response was swift, and contradictory. Right after Carlson's documentary dropped, Kash Patel released a statement describing the bureau's investigation into "nearly 500,000 digital files" from "13 seized digital devices." The FBI also created an "FBI Rapid Response" account on X, posting: "This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint ever."
But that claim drew an immediate community note on X. Users pointed to testimony from FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, who told senators shortly after the shooting that there was a "general absence of other information to date from social media" connected to Crooks. The bureau appeared to be rewriting its own earlier characterization.
On November 17, 2025, Patel sat down with Fox News alongside Dan Bongino and a senior FBI official to reiterate that Crooks acted alone. The bureau issued an official statement that same day acknowledging "Willy Tepes" had mentioned Crooks in four YouTube comments, but insisting Crooks never communicated directly with Tepes. The August 5, 2020 comment, in which Crooks discussed assassination in a thread where Tepes was active, complicated that assertion.
The Citizens Commission, an online investigative organization, released its own research into Tepes' digital footprint. The group said it infiltrated extremist Telegram channels and used a parsing tool called TGDB to recover approximately 5,000 messages from Tepes across 83 channels, many of them explicitly encouraging political violence, including assassinations. Tepes' first recorded Telegram message dated to May 16, 2021.
A Citizens Commission spokesman questioned how the FBI's investigation could have been thorough enough to miss this:
"What I don't understand is how this guy is still able to keep posting violent stuff if the investigation into Crooks was thorough."
The spokesman added: "How was this Tepes character missed? Or if they knew about him why did they omit it in speaking about the investigation?" The group concluded that "it appears Crooks talked about assassination attempts with a foreign terrorist in a YouTube comment section."
The FBI has not publicly addressed why Tepes, described by the Citizens Commission as active in extremist channels for years, remained undetected or undisclosed until an outside documentary forced the issue. That silence is difficult to square with a bureau that claims to have combed through half a million digital files. Failures in real-time intelligence during the rally itself have already been documented; the Tepes episode suggests the post-shooting investigation may carry its own blind spots.
Matthew Crooks told the FBI his son "called himself a Republican" and "did not like the welfare state" and opposed "woke" ideology, "but never really espoused the Republican ideology." Thomas made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project, a Democratic group, on January 20, 2021, the day Joe Biden was inaugurated. He was registered as a Republican voter in Pennsylvania.
A second FBI interviewee, whose name was redacted, called Thomas a "big history buff" with a "nonchalant" interest in political discussions. Thomas "spoke often about Trump and Biden back when Trump initially got elected" and repeatedly brought up Marco Rubio. He did not believe the 2020 election was rigged and "expressed shock" over the January 6, 2021 Capitol breach. His father said he was more critical of Trump than Thomas was.
None of it adds up to a clear ideological motive. Wray testified that the FBI found no manifesto and no single piece of evidence explaining why Crooks targeted Trump. The mixed political signals make the anonymous cremation payment and the Tepes connection harder to dismiss as irrelevant details. Someone paid to destroy the physical remains of a would-be presidential assassin. The public still does not know who or why.
Threats against the president have only intensified since Butler. The Secret Service has warned that threat levels have hit record highs, and at least three attempts on the president's life have occurred since July 2024.
Helen Comperatore, the widow of Corey Comperatore, the rallygoer killed shielding his family, told the Daily Mail she does not accept the official narrative. She said two people "high up" at the federal level during the Biden administration who remain in their positions bear some responsibility.
"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 added: "I will find out what happened to him and I will continue focusing on this until the day I die."
Her skepticism may not amount to proof of a conspiracy. But it reflects a reasonable frustration shared by millions of Americans watching an investigation that has produced half a million digital files, shifting public statements, and an anonymous cremation, yet still no motive, no accountability for the security collapse, and no answer to the simplest question: who paid to make Thomas Crooks' body disappear?
Separate security incidents, including an armed man arrested near a Trump golf course with body armor and a weapons cache at home, underscore how persistent the danger remains, and how little margin for error the agencies responsible for presidential protection can afford.
When the government can't explain why a 20-year-old shot at a president, and someone else quietly erases the evidence of his existence, the public has every right to keep asking questions, and every reason to doubt the answers.