Trump’s Would-Be Assassin Emailed a Butler County Deputy Before the Attack.

FBI records pried loose by a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that Thomas Matthew Crooks — the 20-year-old who opened fire on a Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 — had exchanged two emails with a Butler County Sheriff’s Office deputy before the attack. The subject of those emails was redacted by the FBI before release.

What the documents do not establish is what Crooks and the deputy discussed. The deputy told investigators she “did not have any personal interaction” with Crooks and only discovered the messages after a New York Timesreporter prompted her to search her inbox. The content stays behind the FBI’s black ink — which is exactly the problem two congressional investigations have spent a year describing.

The redacted emails are the newest entry in a record of missed signals and unshared intelligence that the Senate and a House task force both concluded made a man’s death — and a near-miss on a former president — preventable. One person was killed. Almost no one was fired.

• 2 emails — from Crooks to a Butler County Sheriff's deputy, surfaced in FBI records; the subject line was redacted before release · Source: Daily Caller / Judicial Watch FOIA
• 25 minutes — before Crooks opened fire, he had already been reported to the Secret Service as suspicious and carrying a rangefinder · Source: Senate HSGAC Final Report
• 0 fired — Secret Service personnel terminated over Butler; only six were formally disciplined, two with reduced punishments · Source: Senate HSGAC Final Report

The disclosure comes from a batch of heavily redacted FBI records that Judicial Watch obtained after suing the bureau in 2025, when its July 2024 FOIA request went unanswered. Among the interview summaries is a July 17, 2024 electronic communication memorializing the bureau’s interviews with five Butler County Sheriff’s Office deputies the day before.

One deputy, the summary records, “advised she checked her emails and records and only had two email communications from CROOKS and both emails were in regard to” — and there the sentence stops, swallowed by a redaction. The same summary states the deputy “did not have any personal interaction with CROOKS.” She had gone looking only after a reporter asked.

On the available record, the responsible thing to say is the narrow thing: a man who would attempt to kill a former president had, at some point, emailed a local law-enforcement office twice, and the federal government has chosen not to tell the public what about. That is not proof of a conspiracy. It is proof that nearly two years on, basic facts about the shooter’s contacts remain sealed.

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At 6:11 p.m. on July 13, 2024, Crooks fired eight rounds from an AR-15–style rifle off the roof of a building in the AGR International complex, roughly 130 yards from the stage. A bullet grazed Trump’s right ear. Behind the former president, the gunfire killed Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former chief of the Buffalo Township Volunteer Fire Company, who was struck shielding his family. Two other rallygoers, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, were critically wounded.

A local Butler County Emergency Service Unit sniper hit Crooks’s rifle roughly four seconds after he began firing; about twelve seconds later, a Secret Service counter-sniper killed him. Investigators later catalogued the contents of his pockets — including a gray remote-style device with an antenna and a cellphone. The building he chose was, by the admission of every official body that has examined the day, the most obvious threat vector on the field and the one nobody locked down.

Crooks did not arrive unnoticed. He had registered for the rally on July 6, 2024 using a VPN. On the day, a witness photographed his vehicle and license plate; a “be on the lookout” bulletin circulated describing a man with a rangefinder. The Senate report found that Crooks had been reported to the Secret Service as suspicious and carrying a rangefinder at least 25 minutes before he opened fire.

That information never reached the people who could have stopped him. Investigators found that agents failed to relay the threat to Trump’s shift detail — the unit with the authority to keep him off the stage. The newly released FBI records add still another wrinkle: witnesses described Crooks getting into an “altercation” with rallygoers and making “hateful” remarks about Trump in the minutes before the shooting.

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Two congressional investigations reached the same verdict. The bipartisan House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, chaired by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), concluded in its December 2024 final report that the attack “was preventable and should not have happened.” It found the AGR complex was left outside the secure perimeter, that there was no unified command post, and that personnel with little advance-planning experience were handed responsibility for a high-risk outdoor venue. The report issued 37 recommendations.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, under Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY), went further in its July 2025 final report. After 17 transcribed interviews and more than 75,000 pages of documents, it found a “cascade” of failures and accused the agency of a “cultural cover-up.” A separate Senate Judiciary report led by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) reached the same core finding: the Secret Service’s failure to share threat information allowed a preventable tragedy.

“A complete breakdown of security at every level — fueled by bureaucratic indifference, a lack of clear protocols, and a shocking refusal to act.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) · Chairman, Senate HSGAC · Final Report, July 2025

For a failure both parties called preventable, the accountability ledger is nearly empty. The Senate found the Secret Service did not fire a single personinvolved in planning or executing the Butler rally. Six employees were formally disciplined — some not until July 2025, a full year later — and two of those punishments were reduced from what was originally recommended.

Director Kimberly Cheatle (a Biden appointee) resigned on July 23, 2024, the day after a bruising House hearing — but the Senate report concluded she had falsely testified to Congress that no asset requests were denied for Butler, contradicted by evidence that multiple requests for additional resources were turned down. Sean Curran, the agent who threw himself over Trump on the Butler stage, was later named Secret Service director; FBI Director Kash Patel (R, Trump appointee) now sits on the redacted records.

The open questions are not exotic. What did Crooks write to the Butler County deputy, and when? Why did the FBI redact the subject of two emails from a dead gunman whose motive officials concede they still cannot explain? Why, in a case where both parties demanded transparency, did the public learn about the emails from a private watchdog’s lawsuit rather than from the bureau itself?

Until those answers are unsealed, the emails belong in the same column as the unshared rangefinder report and the unsecured roof: another data point the system had and the public did not. The victims of Butler — Comperatore’s widow among them — have said the same thing in plainer words. They are still waiting for accountability, and they are still waiting for the full record.

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