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The latest tranche of FBI documents about Thomas Crooks reads like a cover-up dressed up as transparency — pages and pages blacked out, answers kept behind bureaucratic smoke and mirrors while the American people are left to fill in the blanks. We deserve to know what our agencies knew, when they knew it, and why so much of the record is being hidden under FOIA exemptions rather than released in full for public scrutiny.
Make no mistake about the facts: on July 13, 2024 a young man named Thomas Crooks climbed onto a roof at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally and opened fire, grazing President Trump’s ear, killing a spectator and wounding others in a scene that should have shocked every American to the core. Congressional testimony and the FBI’s own materials lay out the timeline and the physical evidence — the rifle, the drone activity, and the paths Crooks took in the days before the rally. Our leaders must stop pretending this was purely a local failure and reckon with the national security consequences.
Yet when the Bureau posts “updates” and journalists pry loose a few photos, the rest of the story vanishes into redaction after redaction, and watchdogs like Judicial Watch report being stonewalled by the FBI under FOIA exemption 7(A). That isn’t oversight — it’s obstruction of the public’s right to know, and it fuels the very conspiracy theories the establishment claims to despise. If the Bureau wants to restore trust, the answer is simple: release the records without political shielding.
Republicans in Congress and conservative investigators have every reason to be skeptical when the official timeline is stitched together with missing pages and withheld interviews, and when the Secret Service’s coordination failures are only grudgingly acknowledged in committee hearings. Americans watched live as security lines broke down and critical information was siloed; this isn’t an abstract bureaucratic error, it’s a failure that nearly cost lives and deserves accountability at the highest levels.
Even more troubling are the contradictions between what federal officials initially told the public and what independent reporters later uncovered about Crooks’ online footprint and pre-attack behavior. Conservative outlets and investigative journalists have documented material the FBI either missed or declined to share with Congress, and those gaps demand a full audit of the probe and disclosure protocols — not more platitudes from career bureaucrats. The American people can and will connect dots that the FBI refuses to show them.
The politicization of intelligence and selective disclosure by agencies long trusted to protect us is a grave threat to liberty. When documents are lobbed out in drips with vast swaths redacted, it looks less like careful protection of sources and more like partisan triage designed to shape a narrative. We need congressional oversight with teeth, transparent FOIA compliance, and independent review of how sensitive material is handled when a political figure is nearly murdered on American soil.
Patriots who love this country must demand the truth — not because we crave drama, but because the right to assemble, the integrity of our security services, and the safety of public officials depend on it. Release the files, un-redact the records where safe and lawful to do so, and let the American people see the full picture so that reforms can be implemented and justice can be served. Anything less is a betrayal of the public trust.
