PrintWho is Thomas Matthew Crooks? Not much is known at this time but a disturbing picture is starting to emerge
Late Saturday, the FBI identified the shooter – the attempted assassin – of President Donald Trump as Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks was also allegedly the one who shot and killed a man who attended Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania and critically injured two others.
According to Newsweek:
CBS News reported that Crooks had a rifle and had fired on the former President from a position a couple of hundred feet away from the venue in Butler, [PA] citing anonymous law enforcement sources. The shooter was identified through his DNA, as he was not carrying any identification at the time, the FBI said.
Crooks, 20 years old, according to the government was a resident of Bethel Park, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh about 40 miles south of the Trump rally’s location in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Reuters reported that Crooks was a registered Republican according to state voter records, and that he had donated $15 to a left wing Democrat progressive group, The Progressive Turnout Project, in 2021, through the ActBlue Democrat donation platform. Interestingly, Crooks’ contribution to the leftist group was dated Jan. 20, 2021, the date of Biden’s inauguration, while he registered to vote as a Republican eight months later in September 2021.
Other information about Crooks online, of a more incendiary political and social nature, could not be confirmed at press time.
Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School in 2022. A two-hour-long official video on YouTube of the high school’s 2022 commencement shows Crooks accepting his diploma at this point in the video.
According to the Bethel Park Journal on June 22, 2022, Crooks was one of two dozen graduates of Bethel Park High School who received $500 for a National Math & Science Initiative Star Awards.
Photos have emerged of Crooks after he was shot dead by Secret Service snipers on the roof of the shooter’s perch where he got off multiple rounds from an AR-15. James O’Keefe posted on his X/Twitter account a photo he confirmed is Crooks after he was neutralized.
Interviewed on FOX News this morning at 3:30 AM ET, retired FBI agent Bobby Chacon commented about Crooks:
If we look at this as a suicide mission – he knew that he was going to be a martyr. . . So what makes him so radicalized that he wants to become this martyr and kill Donald Trump? In my mind, the constant drum beat of comparing Trump to somebody like Adolf Hitler, when Hitler was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, would be something that would radicalize a young person. If any of us had the opportunity to go back to the 1930s and assassinate Adolf Hitler, we might do it.
Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who has covered national politics and other topics for over five decades. His most recent interview on BBC Radio in the U.K. can be listened to here. His web page with links to his work and a bio is http://peter.media. Peter’s extensive American Thinker archive: http://tinyurl.com/pcathinker. His Twitter account is @pchowka.
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