An anonymous donor paid for the cremation of 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, who tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, the New York Post has found.
The publication has reviewed an array of documents provided to the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassle (Republican from Iowa), who is investigating this attempt. From the documents, in particular, it follows that Crooks’ father was not working at that time, and his mother was on vacation, and the family did not have the funds to organize a funeral.
The attacker's father, Matthew Crooks, told investigators that the cremation was paid for by an anonymous donor.
Thomas Crooks opened fire at a rally for Trump (then a presidential candidate) in July 2024, hitting the politician tangentially in the ear. He also killed one of the visitors and wounded two more people, but was himself eliminated by the United States Secret Service (USSS). The incident gave rise to a string of assassination attempts on Trump.
It later turned out that Crooks was Googling information about both Trump and Biden (at that time his opponent in the election race), as well as the conventions of both the Republican and Democratic parties of the United States.
Crooks' cremation took place a few days after the assassination attempt.
On Tuesday, September 15, Trump accused the Democratic Party of hiding the results of the investigation into the assassination attempt. He called former FBI Director Christopher Wray a “dirty cop” and blamed him for the fact that the bureau did not prevent the assassination attempt. For this, Wray “must pay,” the Republican wrote. At the same time, the Democrats tried to use the assassination attempt for their own purposes, Trump said.
“By the time I took office on January 20 [2025 года] most of the information [о покушении] has been lost, tampered with, damaged or disappeared. New information has just been discovered! Why wasn't she noticed a long time ago? It was all a Democratic plot to eliminate me from the election, but it failed,” Trump wrote on the Truth Social social network.
He did not specify what new information he was talking about. On Tuesday, current FBI Director Cash Patel, a Trump appointee, said at a Senate Oversight Committee hearing that the agency only learned about Crooks after the shooting, and the attacker had no contact with anyone other than his parents.
Later, when asked by reporters what new information Trump reported, US Attorney General Todd Blanche vaguely replied that this was data “about the shooter, his past, his biography” and “this is something we didn’t know before.” According to him, Patel made a “herculean effort” to analyze all the documents. He added that the FBI provided information to the Senate in response to a corresponding request from legislators.
“This is new information regarding the President's frustration with the FBI. I was there with him, I experienced it. I mean, it's a situation where it's not entirely clear what the FBI did in the weeks and months leading up to the assassination attempt on President Trump to protect him. This is the same organization that simultaneously tried to put him in prison for life until his death,” Blanche said.
Note that after the assassination attempt in Butler, the main discontent at that time fell not on the FBI, but on the US Secret Service: several employees were sent on administrative leave, and USSS Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned.
After Trump returned to the White House, he appointed Sean Curran as head of the Secret Service, who headed his security for several years, including at the memorable rally in Butler. Note that after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, no sanctions were applied to Curran.
