This dropped on Friday, and it has far more questions than answers. But what it presents is something with a great deal of clarity; namely, that the FBI clearly sought to cover up the motive and history of Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old would-be assassin who shot President Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13 of last year.

And this cover-up continues even with Trump’s handpicked leaders at the top of the FBI and Department of Justice pyramid.

That the FBI hasn’t come clean about the multiple social media and online accounts Crooks possessed, including his YouTube account which was possibly the most frequent place at which he was posting violent threats and revolutionary messages, and in fact cherry-picked things Crooks said to make him look like a radical right-winger – when sometime in early 2020 he had done a 180-degree turn in his politics.

None of it smells right. We are as lacking in answers on Crooks as we are on lots of other high-profile assassins and mass shooters, and the more questions go unanswered the more apparent it becomes that something much more was going on with Crooks than simply a crazed Zoomer with a desire for attention.

The New York Post’s Miranda Devine also gained access to Crooks’ social media posts…

Like alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, Crooks appears to have been interested in “furries” and exploring gender identity.

He described himself with the pronouns “they/them” on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for “furry” art and the “furry” community. (A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish.)

Two accounts linked to Crooks’ primary email were found on DeviantArt, under usernames “epicmicrowave” and “theepicmicrowave.” The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.

And as Carlson picks up on in his documentary, Devine thinks that this “Willy Tepes” individual Crooks interacted with before disappearing offline appears to be significant…

One of the people Crooks interacted with online was “Willy Tepes,” a member of Norwegian neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.

Tepes encouraged violence and Crooks’ extremism, using a Maoist phrase, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” which Crooks repeated several times.

In one comment on Oct. 5, 2025, more than a year after Butler, Tepes commented to another user that he had been contacted by both Russian and American intelligence.

“People who ask you to contact them when they just as easily could contact you, are Feds. This is how they avoid entrapment. Both American and Russian intelligence does this. I have chatted to both,” he claimed.

Shortly after his interactions with Tepes, Crooks disappeared offline.

Did his brush with the Norwegian and his own violent rhetoric win him a visit from the FBI or the Secret Service?

If not, why not? If so, why has it not been disclosed?

The FBI refused to comment when asked on Sunday whether Crooks was ever investigated, visited or in some way brought to the attention of the agency before he tried to assassinate Trump, or whether there was an FBI file on Crooks before Butler.

The FBI also refused to comment on why it has not been forthcoming on congressional oversight requests.

Wray told Congress on July 24 2024, 11 days after the shooting, that the bureau “did not have any [prior] information about the shooter” and that “he was not in our holdings before the shooting.” He said the FBI ran a search for Crooks through its databases, and he was not found.

Susan Crabtree, an investigative reporter for RealClearPolitics who has broken multiple stories about the failures at Butler, says her key Secret Service source from the 2020 time period “told me that Crooks was not a person of record at the USSS in 2020 — and wasn’t known to USSS until Butler.”

We aren’t going to speculate as to who “Willy Tepes” really is, or what influence he gained on Crooks. Obviously that’s a very fertile playground for theorizing.

But something accounts for Crooks’ political 180. And given that he was a loser with no particular prospects for a real future, polluted with sexually deviant fantasies and obsessed with radical politics, he was a perfect candidate to be used by someone for a nefarious purpose and then dumped aside.

We’ve always been amazed at how Crooks managed to carry a rifle to that shooting position on that building, which was the single most advantageous location in that entire scene, without being stopped – and was unmolested even after having been seen there. And with Crooks in that position Trump was nevertheless allowed to take to that podium?

None of it adds up. It never has added up. It’s obvious Trump and his family are frustrated by the lack of disclosure, and it’s just as obvious that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are very uncomfortable about their inability – or unwillingness – to provide more information.

Perhaps this will come out in the wash and there are developments to come which will make all of this make sense. But almost a year and a half after Butler, we know nothing of significance about why Thomas Crooks attempted to kill the man who would be president.

And that isn’t acceptable.