Newly uncovered FBI records about the man who tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at a 2024 Pennsylvania rally have caught Republican investigators off guard, raising fresh doubts about whether federal agencies ever intended to cooperate with Congress.
Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, obtained the documents as part of his ongoing inquiry into the July 13, 2024, shooting in Butler, Pa., where 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire from a rooftop during a Trump campaign rally. A bullet grazed Trump's ear. One attendee was killed shielding his family. Secret Service agents shot Crooks dead on the roof.
The FBI records, reviewed by Fox News Digital, reveal that Crooks' father, Matthew Crooks, searched for ways to prevent his son from accessing firearms in May 2024, roughly two months before the assassination attempt. The records also indicate that Thomas Crooks' actions came as a surprise to his family. His motive remains unknown.
Republican lawmakers who spent months investigating the shooting say they never saw this material. And the congressman who chaired the bipartisan House task force on the attack says federal agencies stonewalled his panel from the start.
Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who led the House task force, told Fox News Digital that federal agencies operated on their own timeline and never delivered on promises to share information.
"During our piece that we were working on, none of the federal agencies were working with us at all. They were going to work on their own, and they told us, 'We're going to do ours, and then we'll get back to you.' So this is two years later. Nobody's gotten back to us."
Kelly placed the blame squarely on the Biden administration, which controlled the executive branch, and the FBI, at the time of both the shooting and the investigation.
"That's under the former administration. So everything that's under the executive branch at that time, under the Biden administration, we had no access to information at that time."
The task force issued its report on December 10, 2024, built largely on what local law enforcement could provide. Kelly described the federal contribution as next to nothing.
"It's awfully strange that all the questions we asked, 'We'll have to get back to you on that.' And we have very limited time, as you know, to actually get to what we wanted to. So when we finished our report, it was basically based on everything that we could gather from local law enforcement, hardly anything from the feds at that time."
Kelly's spokesman added that his office was not aware of federal authorities ever interviewing Crooks' family, a gap that raises its own set of questions about how thoroughly the FBI pursued the case before handing records to Congress.
The FBI documents show that Matthew Crooks was worried enough about his son's access to firearms that he searched for ways to prevent it two months before the attack. That detail alone would be significant. But a source familiar with the task force's work told Fox News Digital that the task force report corroborates something far more troubling: Matthew Crooks handed Thomas the rifle used in the assassination attempt on July 13, 2024.
How a father goes from searching for ways to restrict his son's gun access to physically providing the weapon used in an assassination attempt is a question the FBI documents do not answer. Neither does the House task force report. Thomas Crooks' motive, according to the records turned over to the Senate, remains a mystery.
The security failures surrounding the Butler rally have drawn scrutiny well beyond this single case. The Secret Service has placed officials on leave amid broader concerns about protective operations for Trump and his family.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Fox News Digital he went to Butler days after the shooting and walked the site himself. He described how easily someone could reach the rooftop Crooks used, and how little coordination existed among the law enforcement agencies present that day.
"I think we have got to, I've been saying forever now, we have got to have a full accounting of everything that happened on that day, all of the failures, law enforcement failures that occurred."
Hawley pressed on the question of whether Crooks displayed erratic behavior before the rally and whether anyone flagged it to authorities.
"This gets back to if this guy was out there, if he was, if he was displaying erratic behavior, was that reported?"
The senator did not hold back about the state of the investigation. He said most of what Congress knows came not from the agencies responsible for protecting the president, but from whistleblowers willing to step forward.
"Pretty much everything we know about this is from whistleblowers. You know, we need a full accounting of what really happened on that day."
Threats against President Trump have not stopped since Butler. Israeli intelligence has revealed Iranian assassination plots targeting Trump, and the president himself has acknowledged the danger publicly.
Hawley drew a direct comparison to one of the most consequential unsolved questions in American political history, warning that the Butler shooting could follow the same path if lawmakers fail to demand answers now.
"Listen, otherwise, we run the risk of things like this happening again. And we run the risk of it turning into a, you know, JFK situation where, all of these years later, we still don't really know what happened. We owe it to the American people to figure out what exactly happened and what we need to fix. Clearly, there were massive failures."
Hawley described Grassley's document release as "something that should have happened" but stressed there was still "so much that we don't know about what happened." Senate Judiciary Committee members told Fox News Digital they had yet to see the FBI documents at the time of reporting.
The broader pattern of physical threats against the president extends well beyond Butler. An armed man was arrested at a Trump golf club in California carrying weapons, body armor, and a fake security badge, a reminder that the security environment around the president remains volatile.
And the threat is not limited to domestic actors. Trump himself has warned publicly that Iran wants him dead, telling audiences he is "on every list."
The picture that emerges from the FBI records and the House task force report is incomplete by design, not because the facts do not exist, but because the agencies holding them chose not to share. Kelly's task force asked questions and was told to wait. Two years later, no one has called back. Grassley had to pry the documents loose through his own authority as Judiciary chair.
Meanwhile, the central questions remain open. Why did a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pa., climb onto a rooftop and open fire at a presidential candidate? How did he get there without being stopped? What did the FBI learn from Crooks' family, if anything? And why did Matthew Crooks, a man who searched for ways to keep guns away from his son, end up handing him the very rifle used in the attack?
None of these questions have answers yet. The agencies that should have provided them years ago are still playing keep-away with Congress. And the lawmakers who were supposed to investigate the worst security failure at a presidential event in decades had to draft their report with one hand tied behind their back.
When the people charged with protecting a president and accounting for a near-assassination treat congressional oversight as an inconvenience, the system is not working. And the longer these answers stay buried, the harder it becomes to believe anyone in charge wants them found.
