Thomas Crooks nearly killed the once and future president of the United States, and as far as the media, the FBI, and the Secret Service were concerned, the assassination attempt, murder, and attempted murders were as random as a lightning strike.

And until now, there was very little to give anyone an indication of motive. FBI Director Christopher Wray said they found nothing regarding Thomas Crooks. The Secret Service was embroiled in their own incompetence. The media did little to no digging into Crooks’ background beyond the fact that he was a 20 year old who lived with his parents.

New York Post opinion columnist Miranda Devine (recently blamed by Hunter Biden for all of his life’s problems) remained unconvinced that the Gen Z aged Thomas Crooks had left behind no “digital footprint” at all. So she went investigating. What she found, via an in-depth online search by a source, was what the FBI really didn’t want to discuss.

Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper, but not before he killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore, 50, and seriously wounded David Dutch, 58, and James Copenhaver, 75, who were sitting in the bleachers behind Trump.

There is something very wrong with the official story and that invites conspiracy theories.

Then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress after the July 13, 2024, attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history that pointed to a motive or political ideology.

A week later, Wray’s deputy Paul Abbate told Congress that comments posted on one of Crooks’ social media accounts “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”

Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.

Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.

The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.

“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”

To make a long story short, Thomas Crooks became obsessed with mass shooters, called himself “they/them” and was hanging out online on a known “furry” website.

Between 2019 and 2020, he made searches for Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, the Oklahoma bombing, and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, among other attacks.

He also searched how to fire an AR-15 “as fast as possible,” as well as how to make a fertilizer bomb and a Molotov cocktail.

Crooks had two possible accounts on DeviantArt, a site that hosts fan art and has become notorious for its community of furries — people who identify as anthropomorphized animal characters and/or are sexually attracted to them.

One of the DeviantArt accounts linked to Crooks shared just one post, a repost of a towering, muscular female bodybuilder and a slight man in his underwear.

Multiple searches for muscular women and female bodybuilders were found on Crooks’ supposed YouTube search history.

The profile for the DeviantArt also lists pronouns as They/Them — though it’s not clear whether Crooks identified as transgender.

A trawl of Crooks’ digital footprint, dating back almost a decade before he tried to kill Trump on July 13, 2024, at an election rally in Butler, Pa., shows an increasing obsession with violence and increasingly radical comments and artwork that seemingly arose during COVID, according to the sources.

Devine just interviewed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on her podcast, where they discussed the questions surrounding Thomas Crooks and the investigation.

“Those questions are definitely deserving of answers and I understand why the public wants those answers, and I believe the president does too,” Leavitt recently told Miranda Devine on Pod Force One.

“It’s a good question, and it’s one I’d like to see the answer to — and I think all Americans would,” she added.

Crooks’ motive is just one of the major questions that remain unanswered in the 16 months since the attempt on Trump’s life, which left one beloved firefighter dead and two other Trump supporters critically wounded.

Among the other unanswered questions are:

– Whether Crooks acted alone, or had contact with agents of a foreign government
– Why the FBI never noticed or investigated Crooks’ violent rhetoric online
– Whether the FBI turned over all evidence it had to congressional investigators
– Did FBI investigators find all of Crooks’ online activity — or was some of it overlooked?

Spurred by Miranda Devine’s report, the New York Post editorial board is calling for a full and “fresh” investigation, including into the failures of the former and current leaders of the FBI and their inability to be forthcoming with the public about Crooks and what happened.

To a certain extent, the American public can accept that President Trump survived the assassination attempt due to Divine Providence. But the fact remains that Thomas Crooks committed murder and attempted murder that day in Butler, and just because he didn’t kill his intended target doesn’t make him less of a murderer. The victims – all of them – deserve to know about the man who pulled the trigger.

Now, Thomas Crooks was only 20 years old, and it does seem that he intentionally stayed off social media for a good period of time before the assassination attempt. But if a private, non-government linked investigation can dig up this kind of expansive online presence that is typical of Gen Z, then there is no excuse for the FBI to miss it. Which leads to the question, was that “miss” an act of omission (incompetence) or commission (intentional misleading)? Yes, we are talking about the digital footprint of a teenager – but Crooks was killed at age 20. This is all that there is to work with. And just because we are discussing the rantings of a 15 to 17 year old doesn’t make them less disturbing. Crooks was the right age to have Covid lockdowns completely disrupt his life, and make the online world his only outlet. I have children of the same age range, and I can tell you with certainty that we have not yet scratched the surface of all the damage that was done to teenagers during Covid lockdowns, and that society at large will be dealing with the fallout for years to come.

Donald Trump survived the attempt by Thomas Crooks on his life, but the American public deserves to have a full reckoning about who this guy was, and what drove him to commit murder. It could be a perfect storm of incompetence, ignorance, and extremism – but with this new evidence, there should be, however uncomfortable and embarrassing, a more complete investigation into the 20 year old who pulled the trigger.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click