7 New Details About Donald Trump s Would-Be Assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks
Mystery surrounds Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old man who tried to assassinate President Donald Trump more than a week ago. As the FBI tries to determine what motivated Crooks to try to kill the former president, new information about him and his actions that day has come to light through briefings with lawmakers. Law&Crime's Angenette Levy talks about the newest details about Crooks with retired FBI agent Bobby Chacon in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.
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00:00He was just quiet. I've never noticed anything off. I mean, he was just a normal kid to me,
00:06walking around the neighborhood. I mean, he was just a bit odd, that's all.
00:10Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old man who tried to shoot and kill former President Trump,
00:15was described as a loner. Now a new report says he actually flew a drone over the rally
00:21where he tried to assassinate the former president.
00:24They see something that said, take a look at what happened.
00:27I look at seven new details about the man who tried to go down in history as an assassin.
00:35Welcome to Crime Fix, I'm Anjanette Levy. It's been more than a week since a 20-year-old man
00:40climbed on top of a building in Butler, Pennsylvania with an AR-15 and a rangefinder
00:46and fired several shots at former President Trump. Sadly, firefighter Corey Comparatore was killed
00:53as he shielded his wife and daughter from the gunfire.
00:56Two other men were wounded and remain in the hospital. Former President Trump was
01:01grazed in the ear and survived. Snipers shot and killed Crooks, who was seen on the roof of
01:06the building well before he fired those shots. There are reports it was as long as 19 minutes
01:12before.
01:26Immediately, the question was asked, who is this man who tried to kill a former president,
01:31a candidate for the highest office in the land, and why? And how was he allowed on the roof of
01:36the building? How was that roof left unguarded? President Trump discussed that unguarded roof
01:42in an interview with Fox News' Jesse Watters. Mistakes were made. They were monitoring this
01:48guy for an hour beforehand. No one told you not to take the stage? No, nobody mentioned it. Nobody
01:54said there was a problem. And I would have waited for 15. They could have said, let's wait for 15
01:59minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes, something. Nobody said, I think that was a mistake. How did
02:04somebody get on that roof? And why wasn't he reported? Because people saw that he was on the
02:09roof. When you had Trumpers screaming, the woman in the red shirt, she was screaming, there's a
02:18man on the roof. And then other people said, there's a man on the roof who's got a gun.
02:23And that was quite a bit before I walked onto the stage. So you would have thought somebody would
02:28have done something about it. I also spoke to a former sniper who's been on a detail for then
02:34vice president Biden about that roof being left open. Jimmy, since you've been on this detail
02:39before, do you feel that there should have been snipers on that roof where Crooks was?
02:45Yeah. The fact that that building wasn't secured to a point where someone could crawl on top of it,
02:51that makes no sense to me. The facility of where I did it, we were also at an airport
02:58and every building had either a deputy or a secret service when I was there.
03:08And this was for vice president Biden at the time. They were mainly with him.
03:16Everything else was secured by local law enforcement. But we had every building had a
03:22deputy standing there, ready to secure the area, ready to respond.
03:27The fact that this guy was able to climb a roof, that is a total failure in my eyes.
03:33There are so many questions that remain more than a week later. Briefings from the FBI would
03:39later reveal that there was no apparent motive being ascribed to Crooks. He was registered as
03:44a Republican but had donated to a progressive cause. He didn't appear to have an allegiance
03:49to either political party. And it would later come to light that he had photos of former
03:53President Trump on his phone. But he also had photos of Joe Biden, House Speaker Mike Johnson,
03:59House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis,
04:04and even Attorney General Merrick Garland. It's also been reported that Crooks searched
04:09for the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention. Crooks had
04:14registered for the Trump rally. And in a stunning development reported by the Wall Street Journal,
04:19Crooks actually flew a drone over the rally site hours before Mr. Trump took the stage at the
04:25Butler Farm showgrounds. The website reported that Crooks flew the drone more than once
04:31as he researched the event. That is stunning. Typically, the airspace above an event involving
04:37a high-ranking dignitary would be kept clear of anything like that. And if anyone should have had
04:43a drone in the air, it should have been local law enforcement or the Secret Service. The security
04:48failure was the subject of a House oversight hearing on Capitol Hill where Secret Service
04:53Director Kimberly Cheadle faced a tough grilling over her agency's handling or mishandling of
04:59security at the event. The assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump on July 13th
05:05is the most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades. And I am keeping him
05:12and his family in my thoughts. Was this a colossal failure? It was a failure. Yes or no? Was it a
05:20colossal failure is the question. Yes or no? I have admitted this is a terrible question. This is a yes or no
05:25series of questions. Was this a colossal failure? Yes or no? Yes. You say leaking your opening
05:32statement to Punchbowl News, Politico's Playbook and Washington Post several hours before you
05:40sent it to this committee as being political. Yes or no? I have no idea how my statement got out.
05:47Well, that's bull. The New York Times reported that Crooks had actually asked his bosses
05:53at the nursing home where he worked to have Saturday, July 13th off because he told them
05:58he had something important to do after Crooks had scoped out the location of the rally.
06:03He returned to the site with his father's gun and homemade bombs that could be set off using
06:08a remote control. Crooks' parents had contacted police in the hours before the shooting. A briefing
06:14by the FBI to lawmakers revealed that Crooks had searched for major depressive disorder online,
06:19but possibly had never been diagnosed. The Daily Beast reported that before Crooks fired the shots,
06:25his last online search was for pornography. Experts say that's not unusual among people
06:31who carry out mass shootings. I'll have more on that later on. Those who knew Crooks from school
06:37or his neighborhood say he kept to himself. He sat by himself, didn't talk to anyone,
06:42like didn't even try to make conversation. So it was just kind of odd. He was an odd kid, but
06:49I didn't like have any issues with him or anything. There have been a lot of reports
06:53that Crooks was bullied, but a Fox News digital story said those claims are not true.
06:58Quoting a former student at Bethel Park High School who told the site, quote,
07:02he didn't talk a lot, but when he was talked to, he would make good conversation.
07:07He was easy to talk to. He would make good conversation. He was very chill,
07:11very humble. Fox quoted the former girlfriend as saying Crooks had friends in class and on the bus.
07:17The people who knew him didn't have negative experiences with him.
07:21It's also been reported that he was studying mechanical engineering and had just completed
07:27an associate's degree and was heading to college in the fall. The world is not always a safe place,
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08:22With me to discuss Thomas Crooks is somebody who's been following this case very closely.
08:27He's retired FBI agent Bobby Chacon. He's also an attorney. Bobby, I find this report in the
08:33Wall Street Journal incredibly interesting, the fact that Thomas Crooks was actually able to get
08:38a drone up in the air, according to the Wall Street Journal, to survey this area. It's shocking
08:44to me because I always thought the Secret Service goes in and they kind of shut these areas down,
08:49they do an assessment, and they make sure that nobody is doing anything like that. So what are
08:55your thoughts on that report? Well, I think my understatement shows I'm a bit shocked that he
09:02was able to get a drone, not that he was able to get a drone, but most 20-year-old young men can
09:07operate drones. It's part of the culture now. But the fact that Secret Service didn't have
09:12that space locked down hours, if not days, in advance of a presidential, a former president,
09:18and now presidential candidate's appearance there. And so I think that they have to start looking
09:25very carefully into how they handle these things in the future. But yeah, it was shocking that
09:30the amount of access he had and the drone, the fact that he was able to kind of gain more
09:35intelligence than they had, apparently, on this overall site. Because I don't know if they ever
09:39had flown a drone over there. Certainly they didn't have one the day of the event,
09:43and I'm not sure they had one in the days leading up to it when they were putting their plan together.
09:48Drones are pretty simple, as you mentioned. Any 20-year-old, I think a lot of 10-year-olds
09:53these days, can operate a drone and get one up in the air. And I actually talked to a law
09:58enforcement officer that I know pretty well who told me, we send a drone up in the air for a
10:03$100 drug deal for surveillance. So how on earth the Secret Service didn't have drones in the air
10:09and how this kid was able to get a drone up in the air is unbelievable. Yeah, I mean, because you
10:15could have used it both to do the planning, like I said, in those now famous aerial shots we've seen
10:20of the site. And you can pick out that roof as one of the most vulnerable points,
10:24just from the air. If you're on the ground, it might look a little different. But certainly
10:28from the air, when you look at it on those aerial shots where the drone would have given them,
10:32you can see that roof as the closest, most dangerous point that an adversary might exploit.
10:39And then, of course, during the operation, that's leading up to it. And during the operation,
10:43if you had a drone up, you would have been able to see him immediately get on that roof, knowing
10:49he's not one of your team, and call for Trump to get off that stage immediately. Instead,
10:55they were relying on people. We've seen now those same famous videos, the woman's yelling,
10:59he's got a gun, he's on the roof, and all these bystanders are trying to notify cops.
11:03Well, there's a lag time. There's a delay in the response there because of that. And so to avoid
11:09that, if you had a drone up, just constantly an eye in the sky watching, the minute that he
11:14breached that roof and was crawling up there, they would have called it out. Trump would have been
11:18rushed off the stage, and the team could have been sent to respond to that threat. Instead,
11:24that did not happen, and we know the consequences. There's another report out from the Daily Beast,
11:28and I found this interesting too. And it said that a law enforcement source told the Daily Beast
11:34that Thomas Crooks' last internet search before this shooting was for pornography. And apparently,
11:40the experts will tell you that that's not incredibly unusual. Even among school shooters
11:46and mass shooters, pornography is apparently a common factor or thread, the viewing of
11:52pornography among these people. Do you have any experience with that? Have you seen this
11:58in the past? And is there a strange kind of maybe a sexual frustration component
12:04with these people who carry out these mass shootings? Yes. I mean, I spoke to, and I have
12:10some very good friends who are FBI profilers, former FBI profilers. They're retired now.
12:14And I spoke to them about this very topic. And, you know, one of their takes was, you know,
12:18there's this incel community that's out there. And then there's kind of varying degrees of people
12:23that fall into that incel category, that involuntarily celibate category. In other words,
12:29these are guys that are, you know, for whatever reason, the niches they were in in middle school
12:33and high school prevented them from developing normal relationships with girls or whatever their
12:39sexual orientation is. And so they are involuntarily celibate. And, you know, that there's
12:44a certain frustration that grows out of that. And the internet has given them a place to kind of
12:49commiserate on that. And they, you know, they can't establish that normal, romantic or physical
12:56relationships with their chosen, you know, gender that they're attracted to. And so they watch
13:03pornography, and that's their outlet for that. And so there were early reports that he might be
13:09an incel or one of these incel type people. And so I'm sure that part of the FBI investigation,
13:16talking to his family, talking to his friends, did he ever have a girlfriend? Did he have a
13:19boyfriend? Did he ever have any relationship, you know, physical or otherwise with another person?
13:25And so I'm sure they're looking into that. But yeah, that that is not an uncommon
13:29category of people that engage in these kind of activities.
13:33Involuntary celibate, obviously means they don't want to be. It's just that they aren't able to
13:39for whatever reason, have a sexual relationship with somebody, whether, you know, it's of the
13:45different sex, same sex, what have you. You know, this guy's been described as a loner. That's not
13:50something uncommon that we hear among people who carry out these types of things. He was described
13:56as somebody in high school. He's only 20 years old when he carries this shooting out. But he is
14:01somebody who was described as in high school as being a loner. He was bullied, things like that.
14:06I mean, this seems like textbook, stereotypical type things for the way that this guy was
14:11described. Yeah, absolutely. And what that does, how that impacts an individual like this is that
14:17when you when when when we're when all of us who are not loners say when we have a social circle
14:23or a network of friends or family that we normally talk to on a regular basis, it tends to moderate
14:28us a little bit. And if we're going down an emotional or an intellectual highway, that is
14:35not good for us or that is not based in reason. There's somebody there to kind of moderate that
14:40there's somebody to kind of get us back on the road and talk to you, kind of makes you think
14:44differently. But if you're a loner, and you go down one of these dark places, one of these roads,
14:49and there's nobody there in your social circle, your family circle, because you're a loner to
14:54moderate you and to moderate those views and to kind of, you know, maybe get you to think about
14:59things in a different way, then you continue down that dark path. And without that network,
15:06without that social support, these loner types then tend to, you know, viciously go down and
15:13down and down and down that rabbit hole. And there's no one there to kind of moderate those
15:19views or to get them to think about things a little differently. Do you think we'll ever know
15:23what motivated this guy? I mean, he had pictures of famous people. It wasn't just Trump.
15:27He had photos of Biden reportedly on his phone, Princess Kate, Fannie Willis, all kinds of
15:34different people. Yeah, and he also did searches for Biden and DNC and things like that. So,
15:41you know, I don't know this to be true yet. They haven't made it public. I think that it could be
15:46one of those things where he was going to kill whoever was famous, closest to him in those days
15:50when he chose to take out this attack, because he wanted to be famous. One of these kill someone
15:54famous to become famous type things, you know, like maybe like Mark David Chapman who killed
15:58John Lennon, and things like that. So yeah, it could be that unfortunately, because he's deceased,
16:04his true motivations 100% we'll never know. But we are going to be able to
16:08handle the information off which I'm sure they're doing now to our profilers and who will kind of
16:13come up with a most likely motive. We'll never know for sure. But I think they will be able to
16:19come up with a most likely motive. And the reason that's important is because you want to maybe keep
16:25an eye on similarly situated or similarly thinking individuals, so that you know, maybe people he may
16:31have commiserated with on the on the internet, so that they may be talked to they may be kind of
16:38veered off of that path that no one veered him off of. So I think we'll have a most likely motive
16:44based on a whole totality of circumstances situation. But I don't know if we'll ever
16:51truly know, without a doubt 100%. Because like I said, he's deceased. He took that with him.
16:56And it doesn't seem like he had anybody that he was regularly talking to about these things.
17:02Thank you, Bobby.
17:04You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
17:06And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me.
17:10I'll see you back here next time.