On July 13, 2024, a 20-year-old named Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto a rooftop at the Butler County fairgrounds and nearly killed Donald Trump.
More than a year later, Americans still don’t have a clear picture of who he was, what drove him, or who might have helped him.
Tucker Carlson says that gap in knowledge isn’t an accident.
In his new documentary Who Is Thomas Crooks?, Carlson argues the FBI has “worked hard” to keep critical information about Crooks out of public view. He opens by showing videos pulled from Crooks’ own Google Drive, including footage of the would-be assassin dry-firing a handgun at paper targets in his bedroom.
Carlson frames one main question: if a journalist and a private source could track down Crooks’ digital life, why did the FBI tell the public he had virtually none?
Tucker Carlson Says the FBI Hid Crooks’ Online Trail
Carlson explains that in late September his team received a tip from a source who used standard investigative tools, starting with Crooks’ phone number, to unlock his online accounts.
That phone number, first published in documents obtained by America First Legal, led to Crooks’ main email address and then to more than a dozen different accounts, according to Carlson’s narration.
He lists them out: foreign encrypted emails on GMX and Mailfence, Snapchat, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com, and multiple Quora accounts. Carlson’s point is blunt: this was not an “online ghost.”
The biggest find, he says, was Crooks’ deactivated YouTube account, “tomcrooks2178,” which held 737 public comments, search history, watch history, and was linked to a Google Drive archive.
Carlson says his team went to “great lengths” to validate that these comments were real, using metadata, archive sites, and surviving replies from other users. He concludes they were genuinely written by Crooks between 2019 and 2020, when Crooks was still a teenager.
Those comments show a violent mind that evolved over time. Carlson walks viewers through early posts where Crooks sounded like a hardcore Trump supporter, calling Ilhan Omar and other congresswomen “invaders” who should “honestly be killed,” praising Trump as “the literal definition of patriotism,” and fantasizing about chopping off the heads of “Trump-hating Democrats.”
Carlson notes Crooks repeatedly invoked civil war, AR-15s, and Mao’s line about political power coming from “the barrel of a gun.” He posted about killing Democrats, socialists, and “socialist Jews,” and claimed that if Democrats won in 2020, gun-owning Americans would not tolerate it for long.
Then, Carlson Says ‘Something Changed.’
By early 2020, Crooks began calling Trump “stupid,” accusing his supporters of being “a cult,” and mocking the idea of the “deep state.” He defended COVID lockdowns and argued public safety could outweigh personal rights. He also started attacking conservative media, including Carlson himself by name.
By mid-2020, Carlson shows Crooks posting what reads like a mini-manifesto: arguing that the only way to fight the government is through terrorism-style attacks – bombs in essential buildings and targeted assassinations of politicians and military leaders.
Carlson ties this to an online figure using the name “Willie Tepes,” who appears in those final comment threads. According to Carlson, Tepes urged violence, talked about unavoidable war, and is linked through online traces to extremist groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement.
Carlson says Crooks’ online activity abruptly stops after that interaction. He doesn’t claim to know exactly who Tepes is, but he emphasizes that the FBI has never publicly addressed him.
What makes this fascinating is how ordinary the trail sounds in modern digital terms, yet how extreme the content is. A teen leaves hundreds of public threats and searches – things like “best places for mass shooting,” “sniper in Dallas shooting,” “how to make Molotov cocktail,” and “Trump civil war” – and still ends up on a rooftop with a rifle near a former president.
It’s hard not to see why Carlson keeps asking how nobody in law enforcement supposedly saw this coming.
Kash Patel Defends the Bureau’s Massive Investigation
After the documentary dropped, FBI Director Kash Patel issued a detailed statement on X laying out the scope of the Crooks investigation.
Patel wrote that over 480 FBI employees worked the case. He says they conducted more than 1,000 interviews, processed over 2,000 public tips, reviewed nearly 500,000 digital files, and analyzed data from 13 seized devices.
He also says agents examined financial activity from 10 accounts and looked at data from 25 social media or online forum accounts.
Patel’s summary repeats a key conclusion: the Bureau found that Crooks had “limited online and in person interactions,” that he “planned and conducted the attack alone,” and that he “did not leak or share his intent to engage in the attack with anyone.”
That language stands in direct tension with Carlson’s documentary.
Carlson argues the FBI knew about Crooks’ YouTube account from the very beginning yet chose to present him to Congress as a “right-winger” and to the public as almost a blank slate. He points to then-Deputy Director Paul Abbate describing Crooks’ comments as anti-immigration and anti-Semitic, while skipping over Crooks’ later left-leaning posts and his calls for terrorism-style attacks.
Carlson also raises deeper procedural questions. He highlights that Crooks’ YouTube channel was suspended the day after the shooting. He notes that archive traces of his comments disappeared in some places, wonders whether social media companies acted alone, and points out the FBI still has not turned over all digital records to Congress.
He also focuses heavily on the physical evidence. Carlson cites Congressman Clay Higgins, a former officer, who discovered that Crooks’ body was cleared for cremation only ten days after the shooting, with the local coroner saying he would not have done that without FBI approval.
Carlson shows a photo of an FBI agent hosing down the scene where Crooks died, wearing a shirt from the Technical Hazards Response Unit, which usually handles contaminated forensic evidence. He asks why the Bureau was doing its own cleanup instead of using outside contractors, and whether blood and tissue were preserved for future independent analysis.
Those details, combined with Patel’s insistence that there was “nothing there,” are exactly the kind of things that fuel public suspicion. Even if there are benign explanations, the optics are terrible.
Sean Davis Describes a “Black Box” Around Key Evidence
In an earlier interview with Tucker Carlson, Federalist CEO Sean Davis describes the Crooks case as a “total black box.”
Davis says America First Legal had to sue just to get Crooks’ academic records, which showed he was a high-performing student with mostly As and Bs and only a couple of Cs. His parents, Davis notes, didn’t seem to know much about his personal life, even asking basic questions like whether he was gay.
The more disturbing part, in Davis’ view, is the way information has been withheld from Congress. He points to a Senate Homeland Security report and House oversight work that tried to dig into the case.
According to Davis, at the time that Senate report came out, the FBI had provided only 27 pages of material. He adds that internal FBI summaries of interviews—FD-302s—numbered over 1,000, but the House received only 81.
Davis argues that “ongoing investigation” has been used as a made-up excuse, especially when the main suspect is dead and can’t be prosecuted. He reminds viewers that Congress actually created and funds the FBI, yet still gets stonewalled.
Davis also discusses technical details about the attack itself. He notes that investigators found two wired IEDs in Crooks’ car with detonators and remote sensors, but the transmitters in the car were turned off. From his perspective, that makes little sense: someone goes to the trouble of building bombs, brings a remote to the roof, and yet physically can’t set them off.
He calls that “weird” and suggests it’s another piece of the puzzle that has gone unexplained.
Davis also mentions location data gathered by researcher Mike Howell at the Heritage Foundation, showing a device tied to Crooks’ home later pinging near the FBI building in Washington. Davis doesn’t claim this proves anything by itself, but he stresses that nobody in authority has publicly answered basic questions about it.
Listening to Davis, the theme is clear: the technology exists, the Bureau has the capability, and yet the story the public is receiving is shallow and incomplete. That mismatch is where distrust grows.
Clayton Morris Sees a Pattern of Stonewalling
On his YouTube show Redacted, host Clayton Morris takes Tucker Carlson’s documentary and goes even further, accusing the FBI of a “massive cover-up” and calling for Kash Patel to resign.
Morris says the same Bureau that has never solved the January 6 pipe bomb case is now repeating the pattern with Crooks. He points out that for months, officials insisted Crooks had no real online presence, no motive, no trail – only to quietly admit otherwise on X right after Carlson’s film dropped.
Morris notes that the FBI even launched a “rapid response” social media account to push their side of the story once the backlash hit. He quotes New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, asking why it took Tucker Carlson, not the FBI, to expose Crooks’ online life.
According to Morris, whistleblowers like former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin say the Bureau is absolutely hiding information – not just about Crooks but about security failures around the rally.
Morris emphasizes the timing of Crooks’ quick cremation and the reported scrubbing of his apartment. He questions why there was no extended, transparent forensic review of the body and why so much of the crime scene control remained inside FBI hands.
He also flags reports that Crooks’ phone data placed him in Washington, D.C., before the shooting and notes that he spent time at the Butler Gun Club, where federal employees also shoot. None of this, Morris says, lines up with the idea of a “random ghost” with no meaningful connections.
Morris’s tone is openly outraged. He frames the issue as bigger than Trump or any one administration, warning that if the FBI will lie or spin about an attempted presidential assassination, then “what won’t they lie about?”
You don’t have to agree with all of Morris’ conclusions to see why his questions hit a nerve. When official answers are thin, people start filling the gaps themselves.
Big Questions That Still Don’t Have Answers
When you put all four sources together – Carlson’s documentary, Patel’s X statement, Davis’ interview, and Morris’ commentary – you get two sharply different pictures.
Kash Patel says an enormous, professional investigation found a troubled lone actor who kept his final intent to himself.
Tucker Carlson, Sean Davis, and Clayton Morris describe a case where the same FBI that had Crooks’ devices, accounts, and search history has refused to give a full accounting to Congress or the public.
Carlson ends his film with a barrage of unanswered questions: Was Crooks known to federal or local law enforcement before the shooting? Who exactly was “Willie Tepes”? Why hose down the scene and approve cremation so quickly? Why say evidence will be released “after the trial” when the shooter is already dead?
Davis adds practical questions: Who was Crooks talking to online and in person? Where did he go in the months before the attack? Why have lawmakers only seen a fraction of the FBI’s own interview reports?
Morris presses the political angle: Why did the Bureau float an Iran link, then let it fade? Why did it take embarrassment by a journalist before officials admitted Crooks’ online activity existed at all?
What’s striking is how basic these questions are. They are not exotic conspiracy theories. They are the kind of things any citizen might ask after an almost-successful assassination attempt against a former and future president.
The longer they go unanswered, the more this case stops looking like a solved lone-wolf story and starts feeling like an open wound the government doesn’t really want to touch.
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The article New Crooks Documentary Puts FBI on the Defensive first appeared on Survival World.
A former park ranger and wildlife conservationist, Lisa’s passion for survival started with her deep connection to nature. Raised on a small farm in northern Wisconsin, she learned how to grow her own food, raise livestock, and live off the land. Lisa is our dedicated Second Amendment news writer and also focuses on homesteading, natural remedies, and survival strategies. Lisa aims to help others live more sustainably and prepare for the unexpected.
