Thomas Matthew Crooks exchanged emails with a Butler County Sheriff's deputy before he opened fire on President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, a detail buried in heavily redacted FBI files that the bureau released only after a watchdog group sued to pry them loose.
The documents, first reported by the Daily Caller, emerged through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch. The conservative legal organization forced the FBI to make dozens of records public, records the bureau had, until now, kept from the American public nearly two years after the assassination attempt that left Trump wounded and a rallygoer dead.
Among the released files is an FBI electronic communication dated July 16, 2024, just three days after the shooting, titled "Disc of 5 Deputies of Butler County Sheriff's Office." The document compiles interviews the bureau conducted with five local deputies. One unnamed deputy told FBI agents she had "checked her emails and records and only had two email communications" from Crooks. She said she had no "personal interaction" with him.
The content of those two emails remains unknown. The FBI's heavy redactions stripped most context from the released pages, leaving the public to guess what Crooks wrote to a local law enforcement official before carrying out his attack. Why a 20-year-old would contact a sheriff's deputy by email, what he asked or discussed, and whether anyone flagged the exchange before July 13, all of that sits behind black bars on a government page.
That pattern of secrecy has defined the FBI's handling of the Butler shooting from the start. Judicial Watch had to go to federal court just to get the files released. No docket number or court name has been disclosed publicly, but the organization published the production documents on its website.
The FBI's resistance to transparency on this case fits a broader pattern. The bureau has faced sustained criticism, from Congress, from watchdog groups, and from its own current director, Kash Patel, over its willingness to withhold information in politically sensitive matters.
The released documents also describe what first responders found on Crooks' body after he was shot dead on the roof of the building he had used as a firing position. A first responder told the FBI that a Washington County SWAT officer searched Crooks' right pocket and recovered two items: a cell phone and a gray remote device with "numerical push buttons and an antenna."
What that remote device controlled, or was intended to control, is not explained in the released files. The detail raises obvious questions about whether Crooks had planted an explosive or other secondary device near the rally site.
That concern is reinforced by another detail in the same batch of documents. The first responder told the FBI she remembered being informed of a "canine hit on the building beneath" the structure Crooks had fired from. A canine hit typically indicates that a bomb-detection dog alerted to the possible presence of explosives. The documents do not say what, if anything, was found as a result.
Meanwhile, people were evacuated from the area while Crooks' body remained on the roof, a grim scene that underscored the chaos and confusion of the day.
The threat landscape around Trump has remained a persistent concern. A federal contractor was later charged with threatening to kill Trump after searching assassination attempts on a government computer, one of several cases that have kept the issue in public view.
Nine days after the shooting, on July 22, 2024, then, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testified before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. During that hearing, Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Maryland Democrat, gestured to a photograph of the building where Crooks had fired on Trump. Cheatle, described at the time as the "beleaguered leader" of the agency, pledged cooperation with all investigations into the Secret Service's failures that day.
That promise of cooperation did not extend to the FBI's own document trail, which required a federal lawsuit to surface. The fact that it took Judicial Watch, not Congress, not the inspector general, not the FBI itself, to drag these records into public view says something about the bureau's instincts when accountability is on the line.
The broader fight over compelled FBI disclosures and declassification has become a recurring theme in Washington. In case after case, the bureau has treated transparency as a threat rather than an obligation, and outside groups have had to use the courts to enforce what should be routine public accountability.
The released documents raise more questions than they answer. The identity of the deputy who received Crooks' emails has not been disclosed. The substance of those emails remains redacted. The purpose of the gray remote device found in Crooks' pocket is unexplained. The result of the canine alert beneath his firing position is unaddressed.
Each of those gaps matters. If Crooks contacted a local law enforcement official before the attack, the public deserves to know whether that contact contained any warning signs, and whether anyone failed to act on them. If a bomb-detection dog alerted near the rally site, the public deserves to know what was found and what was done about it.
Political violence directed at public officials is not an abstraction. It has real victims, from the rallygoer killed in Butler to Trump supporters targeted in their own communities. The least the federal government owes the public is a full and honest accounting of how the Butler attack happened and what was missed.
Instead, almost two years later, the FBI is still being dragged into court to release pages covered in black ink. The bureau had dozens of documents about the worst assassination attempt on an American president in decades. It chose to sit on them until a watchdog sued. That is not the behavior of an institution that wants the truth out. It is the behavior of an institution protecting itself.
When the government fights harder to keep its own files secret than it fought to keep a shooter off that roof, the American public is right to wonder whose side the bureaucracy is on.
