Free Republic

President Donald Trump may well have won his reelection effort in one fateful moment in Butler, Pennsylvania. It will doubtless prove to be one of those "remember where you were when..." moments, and his reaction to being grazed by an assassin's bullet, leaping back to his feet, shaking his fist and shouting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" was (as I've written repeatedly) probably the most powerful image in American politics since Ronald Reagan's Brandenburg Gate speech. As for the attempted assassin himself, he was quickly dispatched by law enforcement - and a lot of questions remain around him. Who was Thomas Crook?...

BETHEL PARK, Pa. — It’s been almost nine months since a seemingly mild-mannered 20-year-old attempted to alter the course of history by trying to assassinate then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a rally in Butler. Sources told The Post the FBI has obstructed efforts to solve the mystery of why Thomas Matthew Crooks, who left no manifesto, did what he did. It’s left local law enforcement as well as Crooks’ former friends, classmates and teachers and even Elon Musk frustrated. Those who may know, Crooks’ parents Matthew and Mary, have refused all interviews so far and remain in their small,...

This comes just days after Donald Trump requested all information on previous assassination attempts against him.

President Trump ordered the Secret Service on Friday to provide him “every bit of information” about his two would-be assassins. “I’m entitled to know,” he told The Post. “I want to find out about the two assassins. . . . Why did the one guy have six cell phones and why did the other guy have [foreign] apps? “No more holding back because of Biden. . . . I’m entitled to know. And they held it back long enough.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) claimed Thursday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that President Donald Trump had “legitimized” political violence against Democrats. When asked about the J6 pardons, Murphy said, “I mean, let’s let’s really talk about who he let out of prison this week, who walked out of prison. The guy walked out of prison this week that pepper sprayed multiple officers to the point where one had a heart attack, he let out of jail this week. People who were beating police officers over the head with poles he let out of jail. Someone who said when he arrived...

I highly recommend that you take the time to listen to the Tucker Carlson interview with Sean Davis, six months after the near-assassination of Donald Trump. The entire hour and a half is well worth your time, but at least watch the first 15 minutes. Half a year after Butler, there is still a thick blanket of secrecy surrounding Thomas Matthew Crooks. Who was he? What was his motivation? Was he a lone wolf, part of a group, or did he have help? Davis breaks this question into four options: Option 1: Butler was a “total SNAFU.” An amazing combination...

‘I refuse to believe this was just a series of unfortunate accidents and incompetence,’ Davis said. ‘It’s just not.’ Federalist CEO Sean Davis dropped some stunning details about the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life in a Friday conversation with Tucker Carlson on “The Tucker Carlson Show.” The conversation explored how, six months after the shooting, despite a congressional investigation, little is known — or has been released — about the shooter, and the incident quickly fell out of the news cycle. Davis began the interview by describing three critical things the American people need to know: the...

Federalist CEO Sean Davis blasted the FBI for stonewalling Congress’s investigation into the first assassination attempt against President-elect Donald Trump. The moment came during a Friday interview, in which Davis was asked by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson what information is publicly available about Thomas Crooks, the would-be assassin who tried to kill Trump at a July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The 20-year-old was killed by law enforcement shortly after the attempt on the incoming president’s life and information about his activities leading up to the shooting has remained scarce.Davis noted despite the near assassination having occurred months ago, Americans “still...

Within hours of his apprehension in Pennsylvania in connection with the cold-blooded murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, scads of information rolled out about the life and times of suspect Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man who has been accused of the killing, and in a very short period of time, the Internet being a fast medium. We've seen pictures of his family, and heard their statements of shock and regret at the news. We learned he grew up wealthy, the son of the owner of two resorts near Baltimore. We learned he once worked in a nursing home owned by...

The Department of Justice and FBI provided only “limited cooperation” to the House task force investigating assassination attempts against President-elect Donald Trump, according to the task force’s final report. Among recommendations offered in the final report, which include reconsidering whether the Secret Service should remain within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and limiting protection for foreign leaders, the task force wrote that Congress needs to “clarify its right” to obtain information related to law enforcement investigations. “With respect to the assassination attempt in Butler, the Task Force’s requests for information were characterized by the FBI as implicating ‘significant law...

In recent years, the FBI has become increasingly skilled not at capturing the masterminds of terror but at fabricating their own foes, preying on the vulnerable, the mentally ill, and the socially isolated. What once was a proud institution tasked with the safeguarding of the Republic now finds itself busying thousands of its agents not with countering sophisticated threats to the nation but in entrapping men who, left to their own devices, would likely never muster anything more dangerous than a misguided blog post. Instead of arresting actual dangers to society, the FBI is, with alarming frequency, manufacturing them from...

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson Wednesday shared a website where citizens can check whether their name has been used for any political donations without their permission amid scrutiny of the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue. House Republicans recently widened their probe into the ActBlue platform investigating whether four foreign adversaries--Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and China--have funneled money into Democratic Party campaigns in 2024, Just the News reported. The lawmakers specifically demanded any Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) related to monies passing through Act Blue that were filed by U.S. financial institutions as part of their money-laundering monitoring activities. "It has long been...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday said his investigation into ActBlue uncovered large number of suspicious donations made through obscured identities and untraceable means. “Our investigation into ActBlue has uncovered facts indicating that bad actors can illegally interfere in American elections by disguising political donations,” Ken Paxton said. “It is imperative that the FEC close off the avenues we have identified by which foreign contributions or contributions in excess of legal limits could be unlawfully funneled to political campaigns, bypassing campaign finance regulations and compromising our electoral system,” Paxton said. “I am calling on the FEC to immediately begin...

Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA), who is the leader of the House task force in charge of investigating the assassination attempt on President Trump, has revealed the autopsy of Trump rally shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks is “gruesome.” In a comment to The Daily Mail, Rep. Kelly said that people who “don’t have a strong stomach” shouldn’t see the autopsy. Punch Bowl News reported the Trump Shooting Task Force obtained the autopsy through a subpoena to the Allegheny County medical examiner. Also contained in the subpoena was a request for everyone in the room when the autopsy occurred.

Thomas Crooks is the American Antifa. We now know he was groomed over five years in bomb-making lessons and then sniper training to go on to almost murder a President. How did the Science Scholarship Winner building chess sets for the blind become a bomb builder and a sniper for Antifa? Thomas Crooks wore the “Demolition Team” T-Shirt to the Trump Assassination. The FBI is currently hiding the Antifa involvement with the grooming of Crooks as a bomber and a sniper, and it seems even members of Congress are coming to that conclusion.

The FBI has released the first photos of the AR-15 rifle that Thomas Matthew Crooks used in his attempt to kill former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania last month. The images show that Crooks — a 20-year-old gun nut — broke down the semi-automatic DPMS DR-15 rifle into two pieces and stowed it in a black SwissGear backpack as he made his way through the Butler, Pa. rally crowd. A closer look at the weapon reveals an approximately three-inch chunk missing from the gun’s buttstock, which could be where the police sniper’s bullet struck before the Secret Service sniper...

It was a shot from above that killed would-be assassin Thomas Crooks at a July campaign rally where he almost murdered President Donald Trump. But it was a shot from below that took Crooks out of action first, according to a congressional report ... And that shot, fired by a local law enforcement sniper, was incredible. ... Louisiana Republican Rep. Clay Higgins... Crooks fired eight shots, killing a firefighter who attended the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally with his family, critically wounding two others, and coming within a hair’s breadth of ending the life of the 45th president. ... The ninth shot...

A preliminary investigation report by Rep. Clay Higgins (LA-R) has revealed the body of Trump rally shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks is gone. In Rep. Higgins’s report, he wrote that on August 5th, when he requested to view the body of Thomas Matthew Crooks, he was told the body of Crooks was “gone.” The representative from Louisiana further noted that the FBI released the body to be cremated just ten days after the shooting occurred on July 13. Higgins, in his preliminary report of the Trump rally shooting, wrote, “My effort to examine Crooks’ body on Monday, August 5, caused quite...

On August 2nd many news outlets reported that the autopsy of Thomas Matthew Crooks had been released by the Butler County Coroner’s office. The fact is that mainstream media is late to the party and the Butler County Coroner’s office released the cause and manner of death of Thomas Matthew Crooks to AbleChild nearly two weeks earlier on July 21st. Unfortunately, what the mainstream media doesn’t understand is that the cause and manner of death is not an autopsy and, although an autopsy has already been conducted on the alleged body of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the results of that autopsy...

A whistleblower alleged that Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe personally cut security resources and “retaliated” against agents with security concerns leading up to former President Donald Trump’s rally on July 13, according to a letter released Thursday. The whistleblower alleged that Rowe personally implemented “significant cuts” to the Counter Surveillance Division (CSD), which does advanced threat assessments for venues, and alleged that agents who expressed security concerns were “retaliated against,” according to Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s letter to Rowe. As a result, the CSD failed to perform its “typical evaluation” of the rally venue in Butler County, Pennsylvania,...