The FBI has now released its eighth tranche of files on Thomas Matthew Crooks — the 20-year-old who came within an inch of killing Donald Trump in Butler, Penn. Like the earlier drops, this one is 181 pages of interview summaries, invoices, evidence logs, and internal communications from FBI Pittsburgh. It’s heavily redacted, and 95 pages are withheld outright. In June I went through the fifth tranche, and found that the redactions said more than the visible text. What survives the redactors is still stranger than most of what you’ve heard about this case on television. Here’s what stood out to me.

1. The FBI had the ladder a week before Wray said it wasn’t found

On July 24, 2024, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Judiciary Committee: “We did not find the ladder at the scene.” He added that the Bureau did not believe Crooks used one to reach the roof.

A 302 in this release, dated July 17 — a full week before that testimony — records that a private citizen found a ladder and a long-gun bag “just inside the wooded area” of an empty lot beside the Village Square Mall in Bethel Park, along with two empty 20-round ammunition boxes. Inside the bag was Crooks’ Clairton Sportsmen’s Club membership badge, ID number 1133 [1927–1929].

So Wray’s statement was accurate in the narrowest possible sense: the ladder was not at the scene in Butler. It was 40 miles away in a wood lot — and already in FBI custody — when he chose those words. Nobody on the committee asked the follow-up, because nobody knew to.

The recovery itself is weird. The citizen didn’t leave the items where he found them. He loaded the ladder and the bag into his pickup and drove them to the parking lot of a Crowne Plaza hotel, where the Evidence Response Team photographed and collected them. As they finished, a “slim piece of black plastic, with potentially a button on one side” fell out of the tailgate. The citizen said it wasn’t his. Agents bagged it as evidence. The file doesn’t say what it was. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1928 — ladder and long-gun bag collected at the Crowne Plaza

2. The FBI was looking for a second phone

Four days later, on July 21, a special agent and a supervisor walked a linear search pattern across that same area — coordinates given to six decimal places — and rummaged through a dumpster “for a phone believed to be associated with Thomas CROOKS” [1920–1922].

They also searched a second location, an apartment complex on Library Road, because its coordinates were “saved on CROOKS’ phone,” and reviewed a funeral home’s security cameras covering the road outside it for the morning of July 13.

They found nothing. But the search only makes sense if investigators believed a device existed that they did not have. Crooks’ primary Samsung was recovered from his body. Elsewhere in the file, evidence item 1B40 is a separate Samsung containing a year of texts and calls ending in July 2023 — so the Bureau had at least two of his phones and was, a week after the shooting, hunting for a third. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1920 — dumpster search for a phone associated with Crooks

3. Someone who looked like Crooks walked into a gun store 120 miles away — with two men

Every witness in this file, family included, says the same thing: Crooks did everything alone. He went to the range alone, bought ammunition alone, had “no friends in general.”

Then there is Keystone Armory in Edinboro, Penn., two hours north of Bethel Park. The store called FBI Pittsburgh itself to report that on May 25, 2024, a “person of interest who resembles the shooter” spent about an hour browsing the store “accompanied by a white male believed to be around his mid 30’s and another older white male with a gray beard.” The lookalike bought 20 rounds of 7.62x54R — Mosin-Nagant ammunition — with a MasterCard at 12:41 PM [1933–1936].

The timing is plausible. Crooks was booked into a 5 PM carbine class in Mars, Penn., that same day; Edinboro to Mars is a comfortable drive. The store handed over its surveillance video. The release contains no follow-up 302 confirming or ruling out the identification, and no indication anyone identified the two men. Either it wasn’t him, in which case the file should say so — or it was, in which case the “lone wolf with no friends” story has a hole in it. The Bureau hasn’t felt obliged to tell us which. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1933 — Keystone Armory tip, Edinboro (lookalike + two men)

4. A stranger on the range the day before

On July 12, the afternoon before the shooting, Crooks was at the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club rifle range. He signed the log at 2:45 PM; the cameras show him arriving at 12:45. The club’s officers told agents the footage “shows CROOKS talking with another, unknown club member on the range. This member was the only other person on the rifle range” [1851].

He shot two guns that day: his AR and “an older military style rifle” — which, if you’re keeping score at home, is the kind of gun that fires 7.62x54R.

Agents photographed the unknown man and his vehicle off the club official’s phone, then ran DMV checks on every name on the sign-in sheet. Whatever came of it is not in this release. FBI(25-cv-2216)-1851 — Clairton range; unknown club member with Crooks

5. The contents of the gun bag

Alongside the sling, gloves, earmuffs, and safety glasses you’d expect in a rifle bag, agents inventoried a Stanley 12-foot tape measure, a red Sharpie, a Hyper Tough stapler, and a box of light-duty staples [1928]. Make of that what you will; the agents didn’t.

6. Four encrypted Belgian email accounts, and two foreign governments

An analyst reviewing Crooks’ phone found it had repeatedly accessed Mailfence — described in the file as “an encrypted email service hosted in Belgium” — between April 15 and July 8, 2024, across what appear to be four separate account IDs [1947–1948]. On July 15, two days after the shooting, FBI Counterterrorism sent formal “Foreign Dissemination Requests” to two governments, names redacted, asking for “any and all records” on accounts found on the device [1972–1982]. Rep. Mike Waltz later said the accounts traced to Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany. What those governments sent back, if anything, is not here.

7. The Deputy Attorney General personally authorized something

A five-page 302 dated July 19 opens: “per authorization by the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, as conveyed by the Office of the United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania,” two FBI officials “accessed the [redacted]” pertaining to Crooks [1896]. The rest of the five pages is black. Thirteen further pages were pulled from this release as “Referral/Consult” — bureaucratic shorthand for records that belong to a different agency. Which agency is not stated.

Whatever DAG-level sign-off was required to look at, it wasn’t a Samsung or a gun-club sign-in sheet. Those didn’t need one.

8. The father’s account

The interview with Crooks’ father gives us more of an idea who his son was. Thomas, according to his father’s FBI interview, talked to himself constantly, and more so after community college — “moving his hands and speaking to himself.” At night his parents heard what “sounded like he was dancing and whispering.” Two or three times a week he paced the house. His father joked with him about hearing voices; Thomas answered, without anger, that there were no voices, he was just talking to himself. He had recently bought a chest rig and ceramic plates. He bought ammunition online “going from website to website until he found a site that would sell to him.” And, perhaps most relevant: “THOMAS not known to write, and no writings or manifestos were found.”

The father learned his son was the shooter from two CNN reporters, who called him before the police did. A neighbor was contacted by a New York Times reporter before the FBI knocked [1795]. The press beat the Bureau to Bethel Park.

9. The anti-Trump story falls apart

A classmate had told a task-force officer that Crooks made anti-Trump statements. Her lab partner, interviewed a week later, said “she couldn’t have gotten it more wrong,” that he was “very upset” the claim had been passed along, and that Crooks never once discussed anything personal [1938]. Another classmate described him as the smartest person in the room, unable to tolerate small talk, and — on seeing the news — thought it was “analogous to having a course with Lee Harvey Oswald” [1894].

10. Somebody else paid for the cremation

This one isn’t in the FBI file; it landed the same day I was finishing this piece. The New York Post reports that Crooks’ cremation was paid for by an “anonymous donor.” The source is a note at the end of an FBI summary of an interview with Crooks’ father — part of a trove of records the Bureau handed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley for his own Butler inquiry, which the Post obtained. The information, the document says, appears to have come from the family’s lawyer. An addendum notes the father was “retired” and the mother on leave from work, which the Post reads as the family being unable to cover the cost; elsewhere in the same records the father describes himself as “unemployed” at the time of the shooting. The Post couldn’t reach him.

I flagged the cremation itself in June. The FBI released Crooks’ body to his family on July 23, 2024, ten days after the shooting, and the family had it cremated. Nobody told the Butler County coroner, nobody told local law enforcement, and when Rep. Clay Higgins showed up on August 5 to examine the remains on behalf of the House task force, he found that “on J23, Crooks was gone.” The Bureau’s response at the time was that releasing a body to next of kin is routine, which is true, but beside the point: it is not routine to do so while a congressional investigation into that body’s final afternoon is under way.

What’s new is that the family didn’t pay for it. Someone else did, and that someone doesn’t want to be named. Perhaps it was simple charity for a family in the worst week of its life; the father was out of work, the mother on leave, and there are worse things to spend money on than sparing them a bill. That would be a kind thing to do, and an easy thing to say. It would also be easy for the Bureau, which wrote the note, to say who it was. It hasn’t. One correction to the record

Crooks’ last ammunition purchase at Allegheny Arms was not in the morning, as widely reported. Store video shows him entering at 1:32 PM on a system the store admits runs 17 minutes slow — real time roughly 1:50 PM, minutes after his father says he left the house at 1:45 [1862]. He asked for five- and ten-round magazines. The store had none.

For the record: what the fifth tranche already told us

This release doesn’t stand alone. When I went through the fifth tranche in June, the striking thing wasn’t anything the FBI said; but rather everything unsaid. Roughly 150 pages in a single release were withheld not under any FOIA exemption but as “Sealed Pursuant to Court Order” — a seal the Department of Justice has never identified by court, proceeding, or party, in a case with a dead shooter and no charged co-conspirator. Two witnesses were interviewed at the Cranberry Marriott the evening after the shooting, and every substantive line of both 302s was blacked out “per ICE,” which is not an agency that asserts exemptions over ordinary domestic witnesses. A rally-goer described to agents two unidentified men on the AGR perimeter in the hour before the shooting — one screaming at spectators from a red Chevy pickup, the other in fatigue pants with a camera bag walking into the AGR building — and the file showed no sign either was ever identified. And four days in, the Counterterrorism Division had already pivoted from investigating the shooter to monitoring the public’s reaction to him under the “domestic violent extremist” framing, tool name redacted.

Put the two tranches together and the same question keeps asking itself. The fifth release had two unidentified men on Meridian Drive; the eighth has two unidentified men in a gun store in Edinboro and an unidentified man on the range in Clairton. The fifth had 150 pages under an unexplained seal; the eighth has a five-page memo that required the Deputy Attorney General’s sign-off and is entirely black. Each tranche adds a detail that doesn’t fit the lone-wolf account, and each tranche is missing the pages that would explain it. What this adds up to

None of this proves a conspiracy, and I’m not claiming it does. What it proves is that the public account of this case has been shaped as much by what officials chose not to mention as by what they said. The ladder existed and was in evidence when the Director said it wasn’t found. Investigators were hunting for a phone they never disclosed. A store two hours away reported the shooter with two companions, and the file goes silent. A five-page memo needed the Deputy Attorney General’s permission and is entirely blacked out.

Two years on, the FBI has still not explained any of it. The documents suggest it could. Whether it will depends on whether anyone with subpoena power reads them.

Tom Elliott