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 — after a damning report emerged suggesting the gunman left a trail of digital clues the FBI did not previously share with the public.
“Those questions are definitely deserving of answers and I understand why the public wants those answers, and I believe the president does too,” Leavitt recently told Miranda Devine on Pod Force One.
“It’s a good question, and it’s one I’d like to see the answer to — and I think all Americans would,” she added.
Leavitt’s comments came as Devine dropped a bombshell report in The Post 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.
Crooks’ motive is just one of the major questions that remain unanswered in the 16 months since the attempt on Trump’s life, which left one beloved firefighter dead and two other Trump supporters critically wounded.
Among the other unanswered questions are:
- Whether Crooks acted alone, or had contact with agents of a foreign government
- Why the FBI never noticed or investigated Crooks’ violent rhetoric online
- Whether the FBI turned over all evidence it had to congressional investigators
- Did FBI investigators find all of Crooks’ online activity — or was some of it overlooked?
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
Leavitt’s comments came after sources revealed a trove of alarming posts Crooks is believed to have made across social media for years.
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On several occasions, he openly called for political assassinations and violence, according to posts under his name on YouTube.
“IMO 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,” Crooks wrote in one post Aug. 5, 2020.
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.
But the FBI previously said Crooks – who was 20 when Secret Service counter-snipers killed him at the rally — was largely a ghost online and left behind no clues about his mindset or politics.
Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray also testified to Congress that Crooks was never on the bureau’s radar before the shooting.
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.
FBI Director Kash Patel previously denied the findings in the report, insisting in a Nov. 14 X post that Crooks’ online footprint was negligible.
Nevertheless, a pattern of Crooks’ alarming behavior appears to have been there – and Leavitt suggested Trump himself still had lingering questions about what really happened the day he was almost killed.
“I don’t 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,” Leavitt said.
“And it was earlier in the administration where he asked them, ‘I want an updated briefing on what happened. Do we know any more than when I was briefed immediately following the days after Butler?’ ” she added.
“[Trump has] been briefed by his own people on the matter, and whether he’s satisfied, that’s only a question he can answer. I can’t answer it for him.”
The explosive report used Crooks’ 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.
Crooks appeared to be an ardent Trump supporter at the time, turning his internet wrath on the president’s opponents.
“I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who don’t deserve anything this country has given them,” he wrote in one 2019 Post, and months later, “MURDER THE DEMOCRATS” in another.
But by 2020 – with the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding — Crooks appeared to have made an about-face and become a Trump opponent.
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.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) — chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — 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 “stonewalled” by the Bureau.
