Republican members of Congress say they were never told that Thomas Matthew Crooks’ father had searched in May 2024 for ways to keep firearms away from his son, roughly two months before the 20-year-old climbed onto a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, and opened fire on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Crooks’ shots grazed Trump’s ear during the July 2024 rally and killed a rally attendee who was shielding his family. Crooks was shot dead at the scene.
Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who chaired the bipartisan House task force set up to investigate the shooting, told Fox News that federal agencies refused to cooperate with the panel while it was doing its work.
“During our piece that we were working on, none of the federal agencies were working with us at all. They were going to work on their own, and they told us, ‘We’re going to do ours, and then we’ll get back to you.’ So this is two years later. Nobody’s gotten back to us,” Kelly said.
Kelly said that gap traces back to the change in administration. “That’s under the former administration. So everything that’s under the executive branch at that time, under the Biden administration, we had no access to information at that time,” he said. He added that the task force’s Dec. 10, 2024, report leaned heavily on information from local law enforcement because so little came from federal authorities.
“It’s awfully strange that all the questions we asked, ‘We’ll have to get back to you on that.’ And we have very limited time, as you know, to actually get to what we wanted to. So when we finished our report, it was basically based on everything that we could gather from local law enforcement, hardly anything from the feds at that time,” Kelly said.
Fox News Digital reviewed documents showing that Crooks’ father, Matthew Crooks, had searched in May 2024 for ways to prevent his son from accessing firearms. A source familiar with the task force’s work said that search was not known to House lawmakers during their investigation, and confirmed the task force report found Matthew Crooks handed his son the rifle used in the attack on July 13, 2024.
Kelly’s spokesman said the congressman’s office was not aware of federal authorities ever interviewing the Crooks family.
Senate inquiry pushes for a fuller record
The documents were obtained by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, as part of his continuing inquiry into the shooting. Records turned over to the Senate so far indicate Thomas Crooks’ actions surprised his family and that his motive remains unknown.
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee told Fox News Digital they had not yet seen the FBI documents themselves, but said that fact alone showed why the full details of that day still need to come out.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a committee member, said the release of the documents is “something that should have happened,” but that “so much that we don’t know about what happened” remains unresolved.
“I think we have got to, I’ve been saying forever now, we have got to have a full accounting of everything that happened on that day, all of the failures, law enforcement failures that occurred,” Hawley said.
Asked about the father’s attempt to keep guns from his son, Hawley said, “This gets back to if this guy was out there, if he was, if he was displaying erratic behavior, was that reported?”
Hawley, who visited the site days after the shooting, said he could have easily climbed onto the rooftop Crooks used to fire at the stage, and said there was “no coordination” among the local and federal agencies present that day.
“I mean, this is just wild. And I still don’t think we’ve gotten a full accounting. Pretty much everything we know about this is from whistleblowers. You know, we need a full accounting of what really happened on that day,” Hawley said.
He warned of the consequences of leaving the record incomplete. “Listen, otherwise, we run the risk of things like this happening again. And we run the risk of it turning into a, you know, JFK situation where, all of these years later, we still don’t really know what happened,” he said. “We owe it to the American people to figure out what exactly happened and what we need to fix. Clearly, there were massive failures.”
