Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, November 16, 2025 Real World News

Sixteen months after the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump, the lack of curiosity by the press corps and official Washington is stunning if not surprising.

One person who is outraged by the lack of “answers” is Eric Trump who told Miranda Devine on Nov. 5: “We know nothing. In fact, not only am I unsatisfied, I’m wholly pissed off about it, and I remain … pissed off about it.

In the book “Bulletproof: The Truth about the Assassination Attempts on Donald Trump”, authors Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec examined the warning signs and unanswered questions surrounding the July 13. 2024 shooting at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania that have been all but ignored by the legacy media.

See excerpts below.

Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday shared details into Butler would-be assassin Thomas Crooks, after Tucker Carlson alleged Crooks left digital warning signs that he was planning an attack.

The former Fox News host has accused the FBI of lying about Crooks’ “online footprint” and revealed disturbing social media comments Friday purportedly made by the 20-year-old in the years leading up to the Butler shooting – suggesting he may not have been a “lone wolf.”

Patel wrote on X: “The investigation, conducted by over 480 FBI employees, revealed Crooks had limited online and in person interactions, planned and conducted the attack alone, and did not leak or share his intent to engage in the attack with anyone.”

Earlier, the FBI’s new Rapid Response X account dismissed Carlson’s account of the FBI’s findings about the assassination attempt:

This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint. Ever. https://t.co/nJ6S4CWIp0

— FBI Rapid Response (@FBI_Response) November 13, 2025

The following are excerpts from “Bulletproof: The Truth about the Assassination Attempts on Donald Trump”]

DAY TWO, JULY 14, 2024: THE SHOOTER

[Warnings]:

…. Scott Adams, meanwhile, tweeted on September 12, 2023: Half of the so-called “news” this week looks like a coordinated op to jail or kill Trump and Musk. How crazy that idea would sound a few years ago. Democrats will pretend to not understand this post and attack me personally. I feel sorry for them.

Tucker Carlson, speaking on the Adam Carolla Show in August 2023, described how Democratic escalation left them no other choice. The trajectory was clear. If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, now you go to indictment and none of them work. . . . What’s next? Graph it out, man! We are speeding towards assassination obviously, and no one will say that, but I don’t know how you can’t reach that conclusion. They have decided—Permanent Washington, both parties—have decided that there’s something something about Trump that’s so threatening to them, they just can’t have it.

On June 22, 2024, US Air Force veteran Bill Jenkins registered for an intermediate handgun-pistol class at Keystone Shooting Center in Cranberry, Pennsylvania. There was only one other student. In Jenkins’s words: He was quite young. Very quiet. Seemed friendly. Nice kid. So we went into the range and each took our booths. We were right next to each other, and he had already . . . loaded and was firing before I had gotten my gun even loaded . . . [s]o I figured he was experienced. And he ended up doing better than me because on the further distances, he had shot one area so many times that it blew out a hole in the target. Towards the end of the classroom discussion . . . [e]ventually I got into politics. He wasn’t saying anything. He remained quiet. So I was kind of, you know, waiting to see what this guy would do because he was getting a little tense there. And he never said a word. He just sat there, kind of smiled, looked, and didn’t say anything.

Why was Crooks using encrypted messaging accounts on various platforms located in Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany? Why does “a health care aid need encrypted platforms not even based in the United States, but based abroad—where most terrorist organizations know it is harder for our law enforcement to get into?”30 Why? Was he in communication with someone(s) through those accounts, perhaps on the matter of how to build explosives? We don’t know. We the public need to see the sophistication of these bombs.

…. [W]e’ve also learned that additional explosives were found at his place of residence. What kid is like that? …. Speaking of the Crooks home, why was the entire house cleaned like a hospital room, and why was silverware missing? …. If indeed the explosives were built in the Crooks house, why are the shooter’s parents “unlikely to face criminal charges,” at the time of this writing? Especially after school shooter Ethan Crumbley’s parents were both sentenced to ten years in prison because the gun in their home, used in the crime, had not been secured properly.

But there’s more, from CNN:

On his primary cellphone, investigators found an image of the arrest photo of Ethan Crumbley — the student who shot and killed four classmates at a Michigan high school in 2021 — along with information about Crumbley and his parents, who were both found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, the first time parents of a school shooter have been prosecuted.

Perhaps this open loop is why Crooks’s parents hired Quinn Logue, a Pittsburgh-based law firm specializing in both criminal defense and civil suits including wrongful death and personal injury? What did they know and when did they know it? Were they in on it? It is also reported that Crooks looked up info on Ethan Crumbley and his parents, perhaps worried the same would happen to his mother and father. In an interview with Monica Crowley two-and-a-half months after the shooting, President Trump would describe the situation as “suspicious.” To the question, “Does it look increasingly to you like this was a suspicious, maybe even inside job?” Trump replied:

Well, it’s strange. The father hired the most expensive lawyer. He lives in the area, supposedly, not very much money. He hired the most expensive lawyer. Think of this. Who’s paying for this lawyer in Pennsylvania. High end, very, very expensive lawyer, top of the line, right? You know, where does he get the money to hire a lawyer that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars? Is the lawyer doing it for free? I doubt it. Are the Democrats paying for his legal fees? . . . Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not, but who’s paying for this lawyer? . . . There’s so many things going on here, that you do have to wonder. I wasn’t thinking this way 3 weeks ago. But the more you see it, the more you say there could be something else. And that’s really dangerous for the country.”

At the very least, his father, Matthew Crooks, contacted local police to alert them his son and a rifle had gone missing; this was shortly after Trump was hit. Police were then dispatched to the Crooks home. However, US Representative and former Navy SEAL Eli Crane says he has received information that the Crooks home was indeed hospital-like scrubbed (including of that silverware) prior to local investigative units arriving.

A user on X (formerly Twitter), @RPEnheim connected the dots for us:

Basically the insinuation would be that assets scrubbed all DNA evidence that may connect someone outside the family to the home. This would tie into public info claims that several phones’ data are tired to that location. Pointing to someone was in Crooks’ home helping him.

That’s right; we can’t forget about the phones. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project “found the assassin’s connections through . . . in-depth analysis of mobile ad data to track movements of Crooks and his associates. To do this, [the Project] tracked devices that regularly visited both Crooks’s home and place of work and followed them.”

A follow-up post in that thread read, “Someone who regularly visited Crooks home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place. This is in the same vicinity of an FBI office on June 26, 2023. Who’s [sic] device is this?” Whose device indeed. Note that it was Spring 2023 that Crooks had begun making his weapons purchases, so the assassination preparation had likely already begun. ….

With questions come only more questions. There has been a news vacuum around the most dramatic event that has happened in the United States — and its instigator — since September 11, 2001. Consider how left-wing media would have (and have, actually) treated anyone associated with the January 6, 2021 Trump supporter entrapment event at the US Capitol building. What would they do? They would go after them. Knock on doors. Everything on camera. Talk to siblings, cousins, coworkers, classmates. Anyone publicly identifiable as having ever met the January 6 protestor. Journalists would find the name of their grocer. They would find out every single medication and recreational drug he was on. With Crooks, we’ve got a couple of interviews ….

Ultimately, more than ninety minutes passed from the time law enforcement knew of a suspicious person until he was able to fire eight rounds. …. At 6:11 p.m. on July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight rounds at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally, wounding President Donald J. Trump together with two supporters, and killing a third attendee — Corey Comperatore. It defies belief that a twenty-year-old who changes bedpans for a living was able to pull this off. It defies belief to such an extent that it becomes reasonable to presume he had help. Otherwise, the luck involved is extraordinary. Perhaps too extraordinary. ….

Now it gets weird. It came out that Thomas Crooks had used the same shooting range that known federal employees used in his hometown: Clairton Sportsmen’s Club. Consider the profile of Crooks on paper, a young white male without many prospects and no friends, a quiet loner with some technical aptitude and skill with firearms.

We’re reminded of the discontents that the Federal Bureau of Investigation entrapped as part of the fake Governor Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot. “The four men charged with planning to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were swayed by informants and federal agents who targeted them for their anti-government views,” reported the Associated Press. That all began with group chats, too, and escalatory rhetoric. Note that the “foiled plot” narrative likely helped Gov. Whitmer win reelection in 2022. Was that why it happened in the first place? The similarities align. Speculation abounds, albeit educated speculation.

Journalist Julie Kelly went so far as to say of Crooks, “There is no way to convince me Crooks acted alone. I have zero doubt he was in communication with an FBI or DHS asset before July 13.” ….

The most damning question of all … is why was the shooter on law enforcement radar for ninety minutes without a response?

…. sobering bullet points from the Task Force’s preliminary investigative report. [Higgins, Clay. “Preliminary Investigative Report to Chairman Mike Kelly.” House.gov, August 12, 2024. https://clayhiggins.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Preliminary-Investigative-Report-8.12.24.pdf.]

• The FBI released the crime scene after just 3 days, much to everyone’s surprise. I interviewed several First Responders who expressed everything from surprise to dismay to suspicion regarding the fact that the FBI released the crime scene so early after J13. It should be noted that the FBI was fully aware of the fact that Congress would be investigating J13. The FBI does not exist in a vacuum. They had to know that releasing the J13 crime scene would injure the immediate observations of any following investigation.

• The FBI cleaned up biological evidence from the crime scene, which is unheard of. Cops don’t do that, ever.

• My effort to examine Crooks’ body on Monday, August 5, caused quite a stir and revealed a disturbing fact . . . the FBI released the body for cremation 10 days after J13. On J23, Crooks was gone. Nobody knew this until Monday, August 5, including the County Coroner, law enforcement, Sheriff, etc. Yes, Butler County Coroner technically had legal authority over the body, but I spoke with the Coroner, and he would have never released Crooks’ body to the family for cremation or burial without specific permission from the FBI.

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  Book, Tucker Carlson note lack of outrage following Trump assassination attempts; FBI still insists Crooks acted alone