{"id":43728,"date":"2025-11-18T16:05:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/43728\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T16:05:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:05:17","slug":"exclusive-americans-deserve-answers-about-thomas-crooks-trump-assassination-attempt-leavitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/43728\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive | Americans deserve answers about Thomas Crooks’ Trump assassination attempt: Leavitt"},"content":{"rendered":"

The American people deserve answers about what drove Thomas Crooks to attempt to assassinate President Trump, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Post \u2014 after a damning report emerged suggesting the gunman left a trail of digital clues<\/a> the FBI did not previously share with the public.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose questions are definitely deserving of answers and I understand why the public wants those answers, and I believe the president does too,\u201d Leavitt recently told Miranda Devine on Pod Force One.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a good question, and it\u2019s one I\u2019d like to see the answer to \u2014 and I think all Americans would,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Post\u2019s Miranda Devine on \u201cPod Force One\u201d that the American people deserve answers on why Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate President Trump in 2024. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

Crooks seen at the Butler, Pa. Trump rally on July 13, 2024 before the shooting. Iron-Clad-USA.com via Storyful<\/p>\n

Leavitt\u2019s comments came as Devine dropped a bombshell report in The Post<\/a> Monday about newly unearthed social media posts that appear to show Crooks openly supporting political assassinations, ranting against Trump and using they\/them pronouns online. <\/p>\n

Crooks\u2019 motive is just one of the major questions that remain unanswered in the 16 months since the attempt on Trump\u2019s life, which left one beloved firefighter dead and two other Trump supporters critically wounded.<\/p>\n

Among the other unanswered questions are:<\/p>\n

Whether Crooks acted alone, or had contact with agents of a foreign government<\/p>\n

Why the FBI never noticed or investigated Crooks\u2019 violent rhetoric online<\/p>\n

Whether the FBI turned over all evidence it had<\/a> to congressional investigators<\/p>\n

Did FBI investigators find all of Crooks\u2019 online activity \u2014 or was some of it overlooked?<\/p>\n

Crooks seen on the roof of a nearby building before shooting at Trump. James Copenhaver<\/p>\n

Trump raising his fist in the air after getting shot on stage in Butler. AP Photo\/Evan Vucci<\/p>\n

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment Monday.<\/p>\n

Leavitt\u2019s comments came after sources revealed a trove of alarming posts Crooks is believed to have made across social media for years.<\/p>\n

Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here!<\/a><\/p>\n

On several occasions, he openly called for political assassinations and violence, according to posts under his name on YouTube.<\/p>\n

\u201cIMO the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building and set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people\/politicians\/military leaders etc and try to assassinate them,\u201d Crooks wrote in one post Aug. 5, 2020.<\/p>\n

The post was made four years before he fired eight shots at then-presumptive Republican presidential nominee Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Penn., on July 13, 2024.<\/p>\n

Violent artwork shared on a Deviant Art account believed to belong to Crooks. Obtained by the NY Post<\/p>\n

Crooks seen aiming a gun in his bedroom in a video.<\/p>\n

But the FBI previously said Crooks \u2013 who was 20 when Secret Service counter-snipers killed him at the rally \u2014 was largely a ghost online and left behind no clues about his mindset or politics.<\/p>\n

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray also testified to Congress that Crooks was never on the bureau\u2019s radar<\/a> before the shooting.<\/p>\n

A congressional report on its investigation into the assassination also made no mention of any of the digital posts recently uncovered, the newly surfaced report noted.<\/p>\n

FBI Director Kash Patel previously denied the findings in the report, insisting in a Nov. 14 X post<\/a> that Crooks\u2019 online footprint was negligible.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, a pattern of Crooks\u2019 alarming behavior appears to have been there \u2013 and Leavitt suggested Trump himself still had lingering questions about what really happened the day he was almost killed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to speak for him on that because it is such a personal thing, but I do know that he has inquired with the Secret Service and the FBI,\u201d Leavitt said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it was earlier in the administration where he asked them, \u2018I want an updated briefing on what happened. Do we know any more than when I was briefed immediately following the days after Butler?\u2019 \u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Leavitt suggested to The Post that President Trump himself may have some lingering questions on the assassination attempt. Tamara Beckwith\/NY Post<\/p>\n

\u201c[Trump has] been briefed by his own people on the matter, and whether he\u2019s satisfied, that\u2019s only a question he can answer. I can\u2019t answer it for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

The explosive report used Crooks\u2019 phone number and commonly available internet scraping tools to dig up a trove of online activity going back to when he was 15 years old.<\/p>\n

Crooks appeared to be an ardent Trump supporter at the time, turning his internet wrath on the president\u2019s opponents.<\/p>\n

The Post\u2019s cover on the revelations about Crooks\u2019 social media posts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who don\u2019t deserve anything this country has given them,\u201d he wrote in one 2019 Post, and months later, \u201cMURDER THE DEMOCRATS\u201d in another.<\/p>\n

But by 2020 \u2013 with the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding \u2014 Crooks appeared to have made an about-face and become a Trump opponent.<\/p>\n

He began prattling about the need for violence to effect real change in politics, with the posts being made in widely accessible YouTube comment sections and Discord channels across at least 17 different accounts Crooks operated.<\/p>\n

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) \u2014 chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee \u2014 has said he previously tried to obtain information from the FBI, and was forced to issue a subpoena in July to obtain reports and evidence after he said he was \u201cstonewalled\u201d by the Bureau.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The American people deserve answers about what drove Thomas Crooks to attempt to assassinate President Trump, White House…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[153,9,11,10,3909,14121,87,25154,24845,58,5561],"class_list":{"0":"post-43728","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-pennsylvania","13":"tag-pod-force-one","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-thomas-matthew-crooks","16":"tag-trump-rally-shooting","17":"tag-us-news","18":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}