00:00The New York Post got exclusive access to federal documents provided to Senate Judiciary Committee
00:06Chairman Chuck Grassley as part of his ongoing inquiry into the Butler assassination attempt
00:11against President Trump. Several of these documents showed accounts of interviews that
00:18Matthew Crooks had given to the FBI. Matthew Crooks, of course, the father of the attempted
00:23Trump assassin Thomas Crooks. These documents show different details about the family life of
00:31Thomas Crooks and about him in the final years before the attempted assassination of the 45th
00:38president. The Post, when reviewing the documents, found five key takeaways about Thomas Crooks.
00:44Thomas Crooks, for instance, according to his father, did not cry when he was born and he was
00:49always quiet from that point on in one of the most eerie quotes provided to FBI investigators.
00:55He frequently had issues speaking to his teachers and talked rarely with his father about politics
01:02or much other than guns in the final years of his life. Thomas also exhibited odd behaviors his father
01:10told the FBI during one of his interviews, saying that he began talking to himself in a habit that
01:16would pick up with more frequency amid the pandemic. Just days before Thomas attempted to take the life
01:23of President Trump, his father observed him on surveillance camera in the garage, pacing back and forth
01:29while cleaning one of his guns, with his arms going up and down, frantically talking and not making any
01:35sense. A second key takeaway from the interviews was that Thomas Crooks became a gun nut amid the pandemic
01:42and was even able to print his own Glock 19 with a 3D printer that he had purchased. The Glock
01:51was made
01:51out of carbon fiber plastic, a dryer and a toaster oven and was apparently so poorly made that after
01:57his father, Matthew Crooks, fired it once, he did not allow his son to fire it again. Thomas Crooks was
02:03a
02:03quote, terrible shot, according to his father, when he first developed an interest in guns and couldn't
02:08even hit the paper target, but over time became a much better shot and was even using rudimentary
02:14sites at the range. A third key takeaway was that while Thomas Crooks's father believed that his son
02:19had no clear political leanings, another interviewer with the ATF said that Thomas actually did discuss
02:26politics and spoke often about Trump and Biden during the pandemic years. Oddly, Thomas also used a
02:34political pseudonym in an attempt to shield some of his Amazon purchases. The pseudonym he used was Bob
02:40Dole, which is the name of the former Kansas senator and 1996 Republican presidential nominee. It's unclear
02:47why he used this. It's also unclear why he discussed other political figures such as Marco Rubio, but there is
02:53no clear indication of party loyalty and his father assumed that his son was likely a Republican voter, though
03:01couldn't be sure. Perhaps the strangest and the fourth takeaway from these documents is that an anonymous
03:07donor paid for the cremation of Thomas Crooks's body. We still don't know any information about this
03:15donor. We don't even know if this donor's identity is known by the FBI. And finally, our fifth takeaway
03:21is that Thomas Crooks, considered joining the military, apparently spoke about this with his father,
03:27expressing a desire to spend time in a submarine, perhaps even a nuclear submarine in some sort of
03:34specialty capacity. It's unclear if this was connected to his growing obsession with guns during the
03:40pandemic, but it was clearly something that his father and he discussed more than once while he was
03:45living at the family home in Butler.
Comments