July 13, 2026, marks the two-year anniversary of the attempted assassination of then candidate Donald Trump at Butler, PA and, after numerous official investigations and no transparency by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the public is none the wiser about who the shooter was.
The U.S. Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Office of the Inspector General of the DHS, the Pennsylvania State Police/Butler County officials including the coroner, the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees, the House of Representatives Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump and the lead investigative body, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), all investigated what happened in Butler, Pa on July 13th.
The problem with all those august institution’s conclusions is that none can, or will, provide basic information about the identity of the alleged shooter, making it extraordinarily difficult to conclude who did what, where and when. The FBI, as the lead investigative body of the alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, has been the least cooperative or transparent.
The FBI began its decent into transparency hell during FBI Director, Christopher Wray’s, tenure when the Congressional Task Force Chairman, PA Representative, Mike Kelly, wrote “the FBI stonewalled” the investigation, refusing to share crucial files that was the result of either “deliberate” obstruction or pure “incompetence.” Without the often-requested transparency from the Biden FBI, all the above investigations were completed, but the lack of transparency from the FBI on the Butler shooting continued into the Trump Administration with Kash Patel.
Remember it was FBI Director Kash Patel who said “I pledge full transparency with Congress. Hundreds of lawmakers’ questions to the FBI have gone unanswered. That will not happen if I am confirmed, and all appropriate requests for information will be responded to expeditiously and fully.” Patel also said, “The American people deserve an FBI that is transparent, accountable, and committed to justice…” Apparently Patel’s promises don’t include any information dealing with the Butler shooting investigation.
Judicial Watch, a conservative investigative group, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in July of 2025, requesting comprehensive investigative files relating to the alleged shooter, Crooks. Judicial Watch was successful in its FOIA request, and the FBI has been supplying the organization with heavily redacted documents for a few months. With an admitted 75 thousand documents on the case, at the rate of current release most people alive today won’t be alive by the time the FBI completes the document dump to Judicial Watch. Worse though is that the few documents being released are so heavily redacted that little information is gained from their release. So, what information has been withheld and what is needed to provide the truth to the American people?
While there are too many questions that need to be answered in this limited space, there are a few that stand out, like, for instance, what physical evidence (DNA, dental or blood-based test) were conducted to identify the alleged shooter? Currently, no information has been provided by any of the released investigations about how the recovered body, lying on the AGR Building roof, was identified and by whom. Oddly, enough, none of the official investigations mention that the alleged shooter’s body lay on the AGR Building roof all night, until 6a.m. the morning after the shooting. How does a thorough investigation miss such an important piece of information, especially when it comes to chain of custody issues?
For that matter, and perhaps more importantly, how is it possible that not one of the official investigations, nor the Allegheny County Medical Examiner (ME), or the Butler County Coroner, make any notes about the eyeglasses that the alleged shooter, Crooks, wore that day.
Photographs posted on social media accounts show no eyeglasses on the deceased body, but worse, it is the Butler County Coroner’s job to list everything that was on the deceased body. According to the data provided by the Allegheny County ME, the only items that were passed on to the ME from the Butler County Coroner was a “clear plastic bag containing medium length brown hair (submitted as evidence)” and zip ties around the deceased wrists. Why was hair put into a plastic bag as evidence when the ME had the body and could have snipped some hair during autopsy? Who put hair into the plastic bag and when was this done? Zero answers. And none of the official investigators thought to ask.
The fact is that the alleged shooter died instantly on the AGR roof by sniper fire so there is no way that the alleged shooter could have removed the eyeglasses. Every publicly available photo of Crooks reveals the boy/man wearing eyeglasses. In fact, just moments before the shooter climbs onto the AGR Building roof, a photo is taken of the alleged shooter wearing eyeglasses while looking at a cellphone. So, is it the body of Thomas Crooks? If it is the body of Crooks, where are the eyeglasses?
Further, little information has been made public about the family of the alleged shooter. Reportedly mother and father are mental health professionals but apparently failed to connect observations of a son experiencing mental difficulties. For example, Crooks’ father told investigators that “he observed Thomas dancing around in his basement bedroom throughout the night, in addition to occasionally talking to himself while waving his hands.”
It must be noted that the father of the alleged shooter noticed the above odd behavior (dancing and waving of hands) of his son, but failed to notice all the bomb making materials in the son’s basement bedroom and the explosive precursors delivered to the family home for six months prior to the shooting? Whether or not the alleged shooter was suffering from a mental illness, as hinted by the father, is still unclear.
Two years later the public is no closer to knowing who shot and wounded Trump and two others and killed Corey Comperatore in Butler, PA. The reason the public is still in the dark is due to state and federal officials purposefully withholding investigative material. Why?
FBI Director Patel promised transparency and yet has failed to release to the public the FBI’s complete, unredacted, investigation of the alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks. With no physical evidence proving that Crooks was the body on the AGR Building roof, the public cannot accept the official version of events.
There is no public documentation about how, or who, identified the body on the AGR Building roof and there is no documentation about where the eyeglasses of the alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, are. That’s physical evidence and even the FBI Director must admit is important and odd that no one mentions it.
Unfortunately, without the release of the FBI Butler investigation, Patel’s promises to “commit to due process and transparency to address the erosion of trust in the department,” rings hollow and doesn’t bode well for changing that “erosion of trust” problem in the FBI.
AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.
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