Somewhere inside a stack of 249 pages of FBI records on Thomas Matthew Crooks — the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally — sit three message threads the Bureau flagged as "pertinent" to their investigation. The contacts on the other end of those messages? Redacted. Every single one.
The FBI knows who Crooks was talking to. They just don't want us to know.
FOIA records reveal three separate message threads, dating back to August 2020, January 2023, and June 2023, were flagged by investigators as relevant to understanding how a twenty-year-old ended up on a rooftop with a rifle aimed at a former president. One contact asked Crooks "whether he had made parts with a 3D printer." Another involved a package marked "HK" — possibly referencing Hong Kong. A third asked about the local area.
We're not talking about Crooks texting his dentist. The FBI itself determined these exchanges mattered enough to flag. A question about 3D-printed parts — in the context of a man who built an explosive device and modified weapons — doesn't land as casual hobbyist curiosity. A mysterious package marked "HK" doesn't land as innocent commerce. These are the threads investigators pulled and labeled significant, which means someone on the other end of those messages said something the Bureau thought was connected to what happened in Butler.
And we're supposed to just move on without knowing who.
Mind you the FBI has only released about 250 pages out of an estimated 75,000 pages of records that are potentially related to this case. That's a third of one percent. The FBI is releasing this material the way you'd empty a swimming pool with an eyedropper — technically complying, practically stalling.
The Bureau had years of Crooks' communications. The earliest flagged thread dates to August 2020 — a full four years before the assassination attempt. They've had time to identify these contacts, investigate them, and either clear them or charge them. Instead, the names stay blacked out and the public gets a carefully curated trickle of pages that raise more questions than they answer.
Consider what we're being asked to accept. The FBI wants credit for a thorough investigation into the worst security failure at a political event in decades. Simultaneously, the FBI won't reveal who was having "pertinent" conversations with the shooter about 3D-printed parts and mystery packages. Those two positions don't coexist. Either the contacts matter — in which case the public has a right to know — or they don't, in which case the FBI wouldn't have flagged them.