President Trump on Tuesday morning went off on former FBI Director Christopher Wray after new records revealed an anonymous donor paid for attempted assassin Thomas Crooks’ cremation.
An anonymous donor paid to cremate Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who climbed a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, and tried to murder Donald Trump, just ten days after the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt.
Thomas Crooks was able to climb on the roof of the AGR building, put President Trump in his scope from an elevated position, and fire his weapon at Trump.
A countersniper killed Crooks.
President Trump was shot in the ear, and firefighter Corey Comperatore was fatally shot.
2024 Butler Pennsylvania campaign rally changed the course of human history. There will never be another president like Trump. pic.twitter.com/zqDYkOr8GP
On Tuesday, President Trump said by the time he got into office in January 2025, the Thomas Crooks records were missing, altered or corrupted.
Full statement from President Trump:
Everybody knows the Crooked Joe Biden FBI didn’t do what they should have with respect to the Lunatic who shot me in Butler, PA.
By the time I got into Office, on January 20th, most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone.
New info was just found! Why wasn’t it seen long ago?
This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed. Dirty Cop Christopher Wray should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt, and certainly for the things he said. GOD BLESS AMERICA — MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
The FBI last year concluded that Thomas Crooks acted alone.
The so-called ‘security lapses’ and circumstances surrounding the assassination attempt against Trump raise questions about how Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to pull everything off by himself.
Thomas Crooks flew a drone over the Butler fairgrounds at least twice on the day of the Trump rally.
He flew his drone at approximately 3:50 – 4:05 pm that day – during the time the Secret Service was having connectivity issues.
A photo of Thomas Crooks was taken shortly before he somehow managed to get up onto the roof of the building.
At 5:14 pm, just one hour before the assassination attempt of Trump, a member of the Beaver County sniper team took a photo of Crooks checking his cell phone.
Thomas Matthew Crooks in a school photo. (@itscarterhughes / X)
Stunning new details have emerged regarding Thomas Crooks, President Trump’s would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania, two years ago.
On Tuesday, Fox News reviewed federal records turned over to the Senate, which will raise questions about why such information regarding Crooks has not come out before.
For instance, Thomas Crooks’s father, Matthew Crooks, then took an early retirement shortly after the shooting, while his mother, Mary Crooks, went on leave from work to “process the situation.”
This did not seem to be a family with significant financial means, especially since they could not afford a funeral for their son. So, something appears to be missing.
The New York Post also reviewed records which show Crooks adopted the pseudonym “Bob Dole” while ordering large numbers of Amazon packages, including “parts, tools, and items to increase the capacity of his rifle.”
He started doing this due to paranoia he picked up after his father’s Citizens Bank checking account was hacked and multiple fraudulent BetMGM charges were made on his account. It’s unclear why Thomas Crooks chose “Bob Dole” as his go-to online disguise.
Thomas Crooks also ignored his dad’s warning that simply using a pseudonym would not necessarily protect the buyer from being hacked. The charge, after all, is still being made to a bank account under his name.
Thomas dismissed his dad’s logic and continued using pseudonyms to make his online purchases, believing he was shielding his accounts from being compromised.
He also coached Matthew how to use identity-obscuring software like CyberGhost VPN and the Bravenet Browser — which Thomas would argue made them “less likely to be compromised by outside actors.”
Matthew further recalled Thomas using multiple different, privacy-focused encrypted email providers, including GMX and Mailfence.
Documents also show that Thomas Crooks’s father told interviewers that his son was a loner with no friends, never showed interest in girls, and frequently talked to himself. He also gained an obsession with guns during his teenage years.
He was also emotionless since birth.
Still, none of this raised red flags with family members.
While these documents certainly shine new light on Thomas Crooks, we still do not have a motive for why he tried to take out Trump.
Until this is revealed, pertinent questions and allegations of a cover-up will remain.
The Netherlands woke to transport chaos Tuesday after suspected coordinated sabotage crippled major railway routes, exposing just how easily critical infrastructure can be thrown into disarray while Dutch and European leaders increasingly focus their attention on threats from abroad.
According to reports from the Dutch media, objects deliberately fastened to railway tracks triggered safety systems across central and northern Netherlands, bringing trains to a standstill and leaving commuters stranded. ProRail, which manages the country’s rail infrastructure, said the evidence left little doubt that somebody had intentionally interfered with the network.
Workers began discovering sections of pipe attached to rails at around 5:30 a.m. Reports initially identified roughly 20 affected locations, while later accounts said security systems had been disrupted at more than 30 points.
The method wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but the consequences were enormous. By fooling track circuits into detecting trains where none existed, the objects automatically turned signals red and shut affected sections of railway.
Near Steenwijk, the situation became more dangerous when a train actually struck one of the pipes. Nobody was injured, according to ProRail, but deliberately putting material onto active railway lines clearly carried risks extending far beyond delayed commuters.
“We have been to these places and carried out investigations and found materials that were intentionally put there,” ProRail spokeswoman Joke van der Cruysen told NOS. “So we can say the railway has been sabotaged.”
A major coordinated sabotage attack was just carried out against railway infrastructure in at more than 20 locations in the Netherlands.
Large 2 meter-long metal pipes were deliberately attached to the tracks, triggering track-circuit and safety system failures by tricking the… pic.twitter.com/WFmjDkJPOP
More troubling still, the operation apparently didn’t end after railway crews arrived. ProRail reported discovering new pipes in some areas where workers had already cleared earlier objects, suggesting that the interference was continuing while authorities scrambled to regain control.
The result was a commuter nightmare. Services on the Amersfoort-Zwolle, Utrecht-Arnhem, Arnhem-Zutphen and Zwolle-Leeuwarden corridors took some of the heaviest hits, while disruption around Amersfoort, Deventer and Zwolle sent delays cascading through the wider network.
Even motorists couldn’t entirely escape the fallout. Malfunctioning safety systems left some level-crossing barriers stuck down, pushing the railway chaos onto surrounding roads.
NS told passengers to consult its journey planner before setting out — only for the Reisplanner itself to suffer problems during the morning rush. Replacement buses weren’t a realistic answer either, with the disruption simply too widespread.
And then came the obvious question: who did it? Police opened an investigation, while the AIVD intelligence service joined efforts to determine where the operation originated, but authorities had publicly identified neither perpetrators nor motive.
That absence of evidence matters, particularly in today’s European political climate. Governments and EU officials increasingly describe infrastructure incidents through the language of “hybrid warfare,” with Russia frequently occupying center stage in the continent’s wider security debate.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently warned of an “escalating campaign of threats” intended to divide Europe. Yet, whatever broader geopolitical dangers Europe faces, authorities had presented no evidence tying Tuesday’s Dutch railway sabotage to Russia or another foreign state.
In other words, the facts should come before the war rhetoric. An unidentified saboteur doesn’t become a Kremlin operation simply because Europe remains locked in confrontation with Moscow over Ukraine.
There were, meanwhile, possible domestic angles demanding investigation. The attack coincided with Prinsjesdag, the Netherlands’ annual Budget Day, when the government unveils its spending plans and King Willem-Alexander formally opens the parliamentary year.
Suspicion consequently turned toward the long-running confrontation between the Dutch state and farmers over nitrogen regulations. Farmers have spent years protesting policies that could force agricultural businesses to cut livestock numbers, reduce emissions or accept government-backed buyouts.
Farmers Defence Force had warned that independent protest actions could take place over the government’s nitrogen agenda. The organization denied orchestrating the railway sabotage, however, and no evidence disclosed by investigators established that farmers were responsible.
Later in the day, hay bales burned on the A2, A7 and A28 motorways, echoing tactics used during previous agricultural protests. The incidents added another piece to the puzzle, but circumstantial similarities aren’t proof that the same people targeted the railway.
Environmental activists weren’t spared scrutiny either. Extinction Rebellion denied involvement with the rail sabotage, although seven people associated with the movement were arrested after red paint was sprayed along the royal procession route during the opening of parliament.
State Secretary for Infrastructure Annet Bertram called the deliberate railway interference “extremely concerning” and demanded a thorough investigation. For the government, however, identifying the perpetrators is only half the problem: the scale of the disruption raises an uncomfortable question about how vulnerable essential Dutch infrastructure remains in the first place.
The episode also follows serious railway disruption around Schiphol during last year’s NATO summit in The Hague, when a cable fire caused major delays. No arrest followed that incident, and without evidence linking the two cases, treating them as parts of one foreign campaign would be speculation rather than reporting.
