GOP lawmakers blindsided by new revelations about Trump Butler shooter: 'Awfully strange'
Republican lawmakers were apparently blindsided this week by new documents about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump and was subsequently shot dead.
Crooks opened fire on Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., in July 2024. A bullet grazed the then-candidate’s ear, while a rally attendee was killed as he attempted to shield his family.
"During our piece that we were working on, none of the federal agencies were working with us at all. They were going to work on their own, and they told us, ‘We're going to do ours, and then we'll get back to you.’ So this is two years later. Nobody's gotten back to us," Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who chaired a bipartisan House task force aimed at investigating the shooting, told Fox News.
"That's under the former administration. So everything that's under the executive branch at that time, under the Biden administration, we had no access to information at that time," he said.
Kelly also said the House task force's Dec. 10, 2024, report was written largely with input from local authorities and little from the federal level.
"It's awfully strange that all the questions we asked, 'We'll have to get back to you on that.' And we have very limited time, as you know, to actually get to what we wanted to. So when we finished our report, it was basically based on everything that we could gather from local law enforcement, hardly anything from the feds at that time," Kelly said.
Fox News Digital reviewed the documents in question and found that Crooks’ father, Matthew Crooks, had searched for ways to prevent his son from accessing firearms in May 2024, roughly two months before he clambered up a rooftop in his attempt to assassinate Trump.
A source familiar with the task force’s work told Fox News Digital that the May 2024 search by Matthew Crooks was not known to House lawmakers during their investigation.
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"The Task Force report corroborates that Matthew Crooks handed Thomas Crooks the rifle used in the assassination attempt on July 13, 2024," the source said.
Kelly’s spokesman told Fox News Digital that his office was not aware of federal authorities interviewing Crooks’ family.
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The records were obtained by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, as part of his ongoing inquiry into the Butler assassination attempt. So far, the records turned over to the Senate show Thomas’ actions were a surprise to his family, and his motive is still a mystery.
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee told Fox News Digital that they had yet to see the FBI documents, but argued that it was reason enough that the full details of that day in July 2024 needed to be brought to light.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a member of the panel, told Fox News Digital that the documents dump is "something that should have happened," but there was still "so much that we don't know about what happened."
"I think we have got to, I've been saying forever now, we have got to have a full accounting of everything that happened on that day, all of the failures, law enforcement failures that occurred," Hawley said.
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When asked about Crooks’ father trying to stop him from getting access to guns, Hawley said, "This gets back to if this guy was out there, if he was, if he was displaying erratic behavior, was that reported?"
He recalled being on the ground days after the attempt. Hawley described how easily he could’ve gotten onto the rooftop from where Crooks fired off rounds toward the stage and charged that there was "no coordination" among the several local and federal law enforcement agencies present that day.
"I mean, this is just wild. And I still don't think we've gotten a full accounting," Hawley said. "Pretty much everything we know about this is from whistleblowers. You know, we need a full accounting of what really happened on that day."
"Listen, otherwise, we run the risk of things like this happening again. And we run the risk of it turning into a, you know, JFK situation where, all of these years later, we still don't really know what happened," he continued. "We owe it to the American people to figure out what exactly happened and what we need to fix. Clearly, there were massive failures."