FBI Docs Uncover Chilling Details on Trump Shooter Thomas Crooks
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
a father telling the FBI that his son “did not scream” at birth and was “always quiet. ” It’s haunting, sure. It also risks turning a national security failure into a gloomy origin story.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
“When Thomas was born he did not scream and he was always quiet from that point on," his father, Matthew, told feds in newly unearthed investigation documents exclusively viewed by The Post about the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt in Butler, Penn.
Original source:
Read at New York PostHow We See It
New Republican Times Editorial Board
a father telling the FBI that his son “did not scream” at birth and was “always quiet.” It’s haunting, sure. It also risks turning a national security failure into a gloomy origin story. A quiet baby is not a motive. And it’s not an excuse, either.
If the newly unearthed FBI notes are real, they may tell us something about how this family saw Thomas Crooks. They do not tell us why he climbed onto a roof with a rifle and came within inches of killing a former president in broad daylight. The media loves the neat psychological breadcrumb trail. We’re less interested in that than the parts that are still fuzzy: who saw what, when they saw it, and why the response on the ground didn’t stop him in time. Stop selling “chilling details” as answers.
There’s also something a little indecent about the way these snippets get packaged. A father is talking to federal investigators after an attempted assassination that shook the country. Of course the memories are strange, painful, searching for meaning. The point of releasing this kind of material shouldn’t be to feed the true-crime appetite. It should be to help the public understand what the government learned and what it missed, especially when the target was Donald Trump. Transparency is only useful if it leads to accountability.
We’re not opposed to learning more about Crooks. We just don’t want the country distracted by the cinematic version of events while the practical questions rot on the shelf. The Secret Service, the FBI, and the local agencies involved should be able to explain, clearly and without theatrics, how a man got that close and what has changed since. If “he was always quiet” is the headline, then someone is trying very hard to make us forget the real story.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.