During Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024—months before the election he ultimately won—the then-presidential candidate was targeted by a 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks.
Trump survived with a non–life-threatening injury after a bullet grazed his ear. Tragically, a volunteer fire chief was killed, and two others were wounded when Crooks fired eight rounds from an AR-15-style rifle from the roof of a nearby building.
“For 15 seconds, time stood still,” Trump told the crowd. “This vicious monster unleashed evil. The villain did not succeed in his goal.”
At the time, a spokesperson confirmed that Trump was “fine and being checked out at a local medical facility.”
During his inauguration speech, Trump reflected on the incident, saying, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
In the days following the shooting, the FBI stated they had little information about Crooks, who was quickly taken into custody. Yet questions have continued to swirl, with some suggesting that the bureau withheld key details about the attacker and the circumstances surrounding the incident.
Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas told The National News Desk that the congressional task force he chaired was denied access to critical information, despite being tasked with examining the attempted assassination.
“We definitely got stonewalled,” Fallon said. “When we finally got answers we believed were complete, now it seems like they weren’t.”
The task force ultimately concluded that the attack could—and should—have been prevented.
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| Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images |
During a 2024 briefing, former FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said investigators uncovered more than 700 online comments believed to be written by Crooks between 2019 and 2020, many expressing antisemitic and anti-immigrant sentiments. Fallon, however, claims none of this information was shared with the task force.
“They didn’t share any of the information with us,” he told CBS Austin. “It was either deliberate or incompetence.”
Fallon also said he plans to speak with Chairman James Comer about calling Abbate back before the committee.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently suggested that officials are concealing what they knew about Crooks. On X, he wrote that he can “prove” the FBI misled the public by examining the shooter’s online activity. Carlson also criticized FBI Director Kash Patel along with former officials Christopher Wray and Dan Bongino, pointing to Crooks’ digital footprint and questioning how the would-be assassin evaded detection.
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| U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon/ Samuel Corum/Getty Images |
Patel, however, maintained that the FBI conducted a comprehensive investigation, citing the scale of the evidence review: more than 1,000 interviews, 2,000 tips, 13 devices, 500,000 digital files, hundreds of hours of video, 10 bank accounts, and data from 25 online profiles.
Former FBI Special Agent in Charge Jody Weis believes the bureau failed in its responsibility to identify the danger before the shooting occurred.
“For them to say we just didn’t see much there, that we couldn’t identify a motive—I can’t understand why,” Weis said.
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