President Donald Trump may well have won his reelection effort in one fateful moment in Butler, Pennsylvania. It will doubtless prove to be one of those "remember where you were when..." moments, and his reaction to being grazed by an assassin's bullet, leaping back to his feet, shaking his fist and shouting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" was (as I've written repeatedly) probably the most powerful image in American politics since Ronald Reagan's Brandenburg Gate speech.
As for the attempted assassin himself, he was quickly dispatched by law enforcement - and a lot of questions remain around him. Who was Thomas Crook? What was his motivation to try to kill a former President of the United States - and then-presidential candidate?
The New York Post's Dana Kennedy, in an exclusive report, has some interesting information from a team of private investigators looking into the incident - very interesting indeed.
Sources told The Post the FBI has obstructed efforts to solve the mystery of why Thomas Matthew Crooks, who left no manifesto, did what he did. It’s left local law enforcement as well as Crooks’ former friends, classmates and teachers frustrated.
Those who may know, Crooks’ parents Matthew and Mary, have refused all interviews and remain in their small, three-bedroom home here, sealed off from the world like hermits. Neighbors say they only leave the house at 3 am to buy groceries.
We can scarcely blame Crook's parents for this; they are facing a lot of attention they didn't ask for. There's no evidence, none that has been released, at any rate, that they had any idea what their son was planning.
Here's the onion:
A veteran private investigator from Erie, Penn., who was hired shortly after the fateful July 13 event at Butler Farm to look into Crooks by a private client, told The Post he believes a “criminal network” was operating with him at the time of the assassination attempt, is still in existence and still wants to kill President Trump.
Doug Hagmann, whose team of six other investigators have been working the case for months and have interviewed more than 100 people, said they also conducted extensive geofencing analysis of cell phones and tablets not belonging to Crooks that were found with him at his home, at the rifle range where he took target practice, at the rally and at Bethel Park High School where he graduated in 2022.
“We don’t think he acted alone,” Hagmann told The Post. “This took a lot of coordination. In my view, Crooks was handled by more than one individual and he was used for this [assassination attempt]. And I wouldn’t preclude the possibility that there were people at the rally itself helping him.”
This is troubling, if true - but did Hagmann and his team get that solely from the geofencing of Crook's electronics? How did they establish the presence or involvement of any other individuals? There's a strong "grassy knoll" vibe to all this. Hagmann's argument about the need for "a lot of coordination" appears to be mere assertion; he has no evidence, or, at least, none he presents in the account.
A member of the House of Representatives, Clay Higgins (R-LA), is conducting his own investigation:
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) — part of a bipartisan task force looking into Crooks’ actions and his death — found that it although a Secret Service sniper took him down with the kill shot, it was a local SWAT officer who made the shot that initially took him down — something the FBI did not report at the time.
Higgins, who has also been investigating Crooks’ assassination attempt for months, has not seen Hagmann’s geofencing data but downplayed its significance. He told The Post he believes Crooks acted alone and there was no conspiracy. However, he also said the FBI continually obstructed his investigation.
It's becoming apparent that, out of this case, we're going to get anything and everything but straight answers. That said, Rep. Higgins does not believe Crooks had accomplices, which he included in his 2024 report:
His report into what he calls “J13” was published Dec. 5 as part of the bipartisan task force on the attempted assassination.
But Higgins admitted even after months of his boots-on-the-ground granular research — including exhaustive ballistics examinations, trips to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, and lengthy conversations with the high-profile Pittsburgh law firm representing Crooks’ parents — he has only one theory.
He thinks Crooks must have been on some sort of prescription drug that made him, in Higgins’ words, “go crazy.”
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Of course, it's difficult for the saner among us to comprehend what might set off someone like this. As the late, great Paul Harvey used to say when describing the acts of some criminal goblin, "If you could understand it, we'd have to worry about you."
And that's the puzzler. One would think an attempt on a political figure's life, especially one that came within - literally - a fraction of an inch of succeeding, would require a cold, calculated, cunning, and determined approach. At the same time, we look at someone like Thomas Crook and see, candidly, a nut. Was he drawn by some perverted idea of getting his name in the history books? Was he driven to distraction by Trump Derangement Syndrome? Was he really acting alone, or did he have help? If he did, where are his co-conspirators now, and what are they doing?
To paraphrase Mr. Harvey again, we may never know "the rest of the story."