President Donald Trump called for consequences after new details emerged about the man who attempted to assassinate him during a 2024 campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Trump said that former FBI Director Christopher Wray should “pay a price” for the way he handled the investigation into 20-year-old Thomas Crooks. Crooks opened fire on Trump during the rally in July 2024, striking the president in the ear and killing one of his supporters.
More information on Crooks was revealed Monday after the New York Post obtained notes on the FBI’s interview with the would-be assassin’s father in the days after the attack. The documents were first obtained from the FBI by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
The notes reveal that Crooks disguised his identity online by using the name of former Kansas Senator Bob Dole, rarely expressed emotion, and had a fascination with guns.
“Everybody knows the Crooked Joe Biden FBI didn’t do what they should have with respect to the Lunatic who shot me in Butler, PA. By the time I got into Office, on January 20th, most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “New info was just found! Why wasn’t it seen long ago?”
“This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed. Dirty Cop Christopher Wray should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt, and certainly for the things he said,” Trump added.
Trump has long clashed with Wray who he accused of handling the bureau in a politically biased way. After Trump cleared out the top leadership of the FBI under President Joe Biden, the bureau continued to look into the attempted assassination.
In November 2025, FBI Director Kash Patel and then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino said that a review of the evidence revealed that Crooks acted alone and that Trump was satisfied with their findings.
“Dan and I have been on this since we got here eight months ago,” Patel said of the investigation. “We fully briefed the president, as a victim of this case, at the White House, providing him with all of the details of our investigation, and the president was satisfied with the results and where we left it.”
The notes obtained by the Post showed that Matthew Crooks told the FBI that he saw his son in their garage cleaning his gun while waving his “arms going up and down … frantically talking and not making any sense,” six days before the shooting.
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