Report: Man Who Tried to Assassinate Trump Might Have had Accomplice

Report: Man Who Tried to Assassinate Trump Might Have had Accomplice

A private investigator told The New York Post that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who tried to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, PA, might have had an accomplice.

A private client hired Doug Hagmann to investigate the assassination attempt after it happened. From The New York Post:

A veteran private investigator from Erie, Pa., who was hired shortly after the fateful July 13 event at the Butler rally to look into Crooks by a private client, told The Post he believes a “criminal network” was operating with him at the time of the assassination attempt, is still in existence and still wants to kill President Trump.

Doug Hagmann, whose team of six other investigators have been working the case for months and have interviewed more than 100 people, said they also conducted extensive geofencing analysis of cellphones and tablets not belonging to Crooks that were found with him at his home, at the rifle range where he took target practice, at the rally and at Bethel Park High School, where he graduated in 2022.

“We don’t think he acted alone,” Hagmann told The Post. “This took a lot of coordination. In my view, Crooks was handled by more than one individual and he was used for this [assassination attempt]. And I wouldn’t preclude the possibility that there were people at the rally itself helping him.”

Hagmann said one of the electronic devices geolocated with Crooks at several different places at the time of the shooting is still pinging today — at Bethel Park High School.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), the chairman of the Congressional group investigating the assassination attempt on Trump, “has not seen Hagmann’s geofencing data but downplayed their significance.”

Higgins admitted the FBI keeps obstructing his investigation:

His report into what he calls “J13” was published Dec. 5 as part of the bipartisan task force on the attempted assassination.

But Higgins admitted that even after months of his granular, boots-on-the-ground research — including exhaustive ballistics examinations, trips to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, and lengthy conversations with the high-profile Pittsburgh law firm representing Crooks’ parents — he has only one theory.

He thinks Crooks must have been on some sort of prescription drug that made him, in Higgins’ words, “go crazy.”

Unfortunately, the prescription drug theory won’t go anywhere because the medical examiner did not perform toxicology tests for those types of drugs.

If the examiner performed the tests, he did not put them in the autopsy report.

Then officials gave Crook’s body to his parents eight days after the shooting without alerting most of the officials investigating the assassination attempt.

Crooks’ parents cremated his body.

Higgins continued:

“Thomas Crooks was a brilliant engineering student who was on a path to success,” Higgins said, noting that Crooks had been accepted and was given a scholarship to Robert Morris University, where he would be starting in the fall of 2024.

“Something happened to make him go crazy and that’s why I think it might have been pharmaceuticals. He performed an attempted assassination and he was committed all the way through — to death. He was not acting erratic but he was a wild lunatic at the same time, incredibly calculating and incredibly smart.”

However, Crooks’ classmates, teachers, neighbors, and friends would not use “wild lunatic” and “incredibly calculating” to describe him.

They described him differently to the New York Post right after the attempt on Trump’s life:

“He was my little buddy,” teacher Xavier Harmon, 48, who had Crooks in his computer technology class at Steel Center for Career and Technical Education for two years, told The Post last week.

“I just didn’t believe it when I heard it. Tom was the quirky, funny little guy who also loved to excel in class. When he was finished, he’d always go back and help his classmates. He was very intelligent.”

Harmon and other teachers both from his high school and at the Community College of Allegheny County, where he graduated in 2024 with an engineering degree, said there was no indication Crooks was on any type of substance — legal or illegal.

Crooks was a gifted student with nearly straight As all through high school and college. He scored a total of 1530 out of a possible 1600 score on his SATs, according to records.

“I don’t think he set out to kill the president,” Harmon said. “My guess is, he messed with the wrong individuals about what they were going to do and it was different from what he thought it was going to be. Anyone planning to do this would leave some sort of breadcrumbs. But there’s nothing — no paperwork, no itinerary, no even [him] going to websites to [research].”

Former Bethel Park High School counselor Jim Knapp said Thomas and his sister Katie never “fit the profile of a troubled kid and their parents didn’t seem strange, either.”

Knapp found Crooks to be “a nice kid.” He admitted Crooks “stuck to himself a lot but he also had friends.”

A neighbor also never thought the family was strange. Kelly Little said Crooks “was nerdy but nice.”

A few floated the idea that radicalization of Crooks happened at the Community College of Allegheny County.

Crooks’ academic advisor Todd Landree does not subscribe to that theory. He found Crooks to be innovative.

Crooks made a 3-D chess project for blind people in one of the classes, which impressed Landress. Crooks’ mother is visually impaired.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that we will never discover the truth.

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