trump assassination attempt
kokopelli
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26 Dec 2024, 3:30 pm
carlos55 wrote:
Those who think the shooter deliberately missed don't know anything about guns.
A bullet has a tolerance distance depending how far away the shot, windspeed the tiniest movement can make a bullet go an inch or two from target, which in this case would have killed him.
If you go to shooting ranges for army & cops you`ll see the shots are spaced out slightly in the target circle, its almost impossible to guarantee a bulls eye at that distance
A bullet has a tolerance distance depending how far away the shot, windspeed the tiniest movement can make a bullet go an inch or two from target, which in this case would have killed him.
If you go to shooting ranges for army & cops you`ll see the shots are spaced out slightly in the target circle, its almost impossible to guarantee a bulls eye at that distance
Exactly. Very well said.
Also, unless using "match ammo", there can be significant difference between individual rounds. For "match ammo", there is a great deal of effort to limit those differences so that variations in shot placement is minimized. Most of us, myself included, have never even seen "match ammo", much less used it.
kokopelli
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26 Dec 2024, 3:32 pm
Auldyin wrote:
Agreed, I'm not offering evidence that it WAS staged, I'm asking the question " can we be sure that it wasn't staged " It surely played a big part in his re-election and I for one think it could have been the brainchild of one of his clever electioneering team.
It would very hard to stage that. Especially with someone who was not a world class sniper.
27 Dec 2024, 12:32 pm
Biden just has politics he doesn't agree with swept under the carpet, in politically correct way. An underhanded stubborn character insisting he is the only correct way, that none of Biden's hypocrisy should surface in Iran or EU
Trump is gaining more popularity, even won election because Biden can't cover up lies, forever, even scolding Kamilla on leaving office.
Obviously no assassination attempts at Biden by silenced side of the coin.
27 Dec 2024, 5:47 pm
Why always the assumption that a staged assassination would require a competent sniper?
If it was staged, the target is desired to survive, and the bullet would be aimed off target into the crowd.
In the interests of deniability you need an unknown shooter with at least tenuous links to the opposition. I see it therefore as possible that a staging committee/organiser would select someone possibly incompetent enough to fail the brief by actually injuring the "non-target"
Ursula wrote:
Biden just has politics he doesn't agree with swept under the carpet, in politically correct way
What part of that doesn't just say "politician?"
Quote:
An underhanded stubborn character insisting he is the only correct way,
Not sure which you're talking about here, because it looks applicable to both sides, but it is a better description of Trump
Quote:
that none of Biden's hypocrisy should surface in Iran or EU
Need more specificity to interpret this
Quote:
Trump is gaining more popularity, even won election because Biden can't cover up lies, forever,
It appears to me more that's it's because Trump has learned that he doesn't HAVE to cover up lies, just shout louder and point the finger. e.g. "Biden is lying"... it doesn't matter if it's true or not.
Quote:
Obviously no assassination attempts at Biden by silenced side of the coin.
The only people with a motive to kill Biden would have been the Democrats, making Harris the incumbent.
Is "the silenced side of the coin" meant to mean the Republicans?
That is truly funny... I'd like to see that on a t-shirt.
kokopelli
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27 Dec 2024, 7:38 pm
Ursula wrote:
Obviously no assassination attempts at Biden by silenced side of the coin.
Do you think that assassination attempts have anything to do with politics? Some are, but a great are hardly political at all.
For an example that most have probably heard of, Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan was because he was trying to attract the attention of actress Jodie Foster. There was nothing political about it.
In the Crooks attract on Trump in Pennsylvania, Crooks was not particularly political. There was some even indication that he might have favored the Republicans. There were reports a week or two after the attempt that said he was tracking both Biden and Trump.
There are kooks out there who will try to assassinate government officials in spite of having little or no political influence to do so. No President is immune to this.
28 Dec 2024, 2:10 am
kokopelli wrote:
carlos55 wrote:
Those who think the shooter deliberately missed don't know anything about guns.
A bullet has a tolerance distance depending how far away the shot, windspeed the tiniest movement can make a bullet go an inch or two from target, which in this case would have killed him.
If you go to shooting ranges for army & cops you`ll see the shots are spaced out slightly in the target circle, its almost impossible to guarantee a bulls eye at that distance
A bullet has a tolerance distance depending how far away the shot, windspeed the tiniest movement can make a bullet go an inch or two from target, which in this case would have killed him.
If you go to shooting ranges for army & cops you`ll see the shots are spaced out slightly in the target circle, its almost impossible to guarantee a bulls eye at that distance
Exactly. Very well said.
Also, unless using "match ammo", there can be significant difference between individual rounds. For "match ammo", there is a great deal of effort to limit those differences so that variations in shot placement is minimized. Most of us, myself included, have never even seen "match ammo", much less used it.
The liklihood of him using match ammo greatly depends on what caliber he was using.I heard reports that he was using AK-47 which shoots a notoriously low quality ammo in most cases in 7.62x39mm. I heard he was possibly using AR-15. The thing is that match ammo is not really designed for maximum terminal performance. I even heard he could of been using .22LR so if he was using that I would say there was almost no chance it was match because .22LR generally does not come in match.I have seen match ammo at the store.Also there is this thing called MOA or minute of angle....a real accurate gun will put a few shots in a 1 inch group at 100 yards which was unheard of back in the day. But even then you cant promise a bullseye. Theoretically that bullet taking a slightly different path in a perfectly aimed shot could have saved his life.Because he was only about 1 mm off.
kokopelli
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28 Dec 2024, 5:42 am
Texasmoneyman300 wrote:
The liklihood of him using match ammo greatly depends on what caliber he was using.I heard reports that he was using AK-47 which shoots a notoriously low quality ammo in most cases in 7.62x39mm. I heard he was possibly using AR-15. The thing is that match ammo is not really designed for maximum terminal performance. I even heard he could of been using .22LR so if he was using that I would say there was almost no chance it was match because .22LR generally does not come in match.I have seen match ammo at the store.Also there is this thing called MOA or minute of angle....a real accurate gun will put a few shots in a 1 inch group at 100 yards which was unheard of back in the day. But even then you cant promise a bullseye. Theoretically that bullet taking a slightly different path in a perfectly aimed shot could have saved his life.Because he was only about 1 mm off.
I would put the odds of him even knowing about match ammo at arbitrarily close to 0.
28 Dec 2024, 6:47 am
kokopelli wrote:
Texasmoneyman300 wrote:
The liklihood of him using match ammo greatly depends on what caliber he was using.I heard reports that he was using AK-47 which shoots a notoriously low quality ammo in most cases in 7.62x39mm. I heard he was possibly using AR-15. The thing is that match ammo is not really designed for maximum terminal performance. I even heard he could of been using .22LR so if he was using that I would say there was almost no chance it was match because .22LR generally does not come in match.I have seen match ammo at the store.Also there is this thing called MOA or minute of angle....a real accurate gun will put a few shots in a 1 inch group at 100 yards which was unheard of back in the day. But even then you cant promise a bullseye. Theoretically that bullet taking a slightly different path in a perfectly aimed shot could have saved his life.Because he was only about 1 mm off.
I would put the odds of him even knowing about match ammo at arbitrarily close to 0.
Good point.
ASPartOfMe
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18 Nov 2025, 11:13 am
Quote:
We are all owed a better explanation from the FBI and Secret Service about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump 16 months ago at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
The president himself remains unsatisfied with the answers he’s been given about the circumstances leading to 20-year-old Thomas Crooks climbing on a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle and firing eight times at Trump, narrowly missing his head but hitting his ear.
There is something very wrong with the official story and that invites conspiracy theories.
The president demanded answers months ago. A man was murdered. What is going on?
Then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress after the July 13, 2024, attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history that pointed to a motive or political ideology.
A week later, Wray’s deputy Paul Abbate told Congress that comments posted on one of Crooks’ social media accounts “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”
Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.
The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.
“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”
Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.
The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.
“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”
Crooks’ most prolific activity was on YouTube, with 737 public comments. The account “Tomcrooks2178” (visible to other users as Tom Crooks) was created on Jan. 14, 2019, and suspended on July 14, 2024, the day after the Butler attack, for violating YouTube’s policy on violent criminal organizations.
Political 180
Crooks’ trajectory from pro- to anti-Trump is evident. He referred to Trump as “the literal definition of Patriotism” in a comment at 1:17 a.m. July 20, 2019.
He also issued several targeted threats against the Democratic congressional representatives in “the Squad.”
“I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who don’t deserve anything this country [sic] has given them,” he wrote at 8:18 a.m. July 20, 2019.
“MURDER THE DEMOCRATS,” he wrote in all caps on Dec. 12, 2019.
But in early 2020, Crooks’ online behavior flipped 180 degrees and he became very critical of Trump, Fox News and Republican complaints about mail-in voting.
Any sort of head-to-head fight is suicide and even ambush/surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well. A large portion of the war will also be propaganda/information wars — both sides will want people to join them, and a big deciding factor in wars is often which side has more popular support for them,” he wrote.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source, only one, on PayPal, was operated under an alias: “Rod Swanson.”
Rod Swanson is a former senior FBI agent who was the chief of investigations for the state of Nevada during the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.
He also previously served on FBI Director Robert Mueller’s protective detail and as a firearms instructor in Pennsylvania.
Contacted by phone over the weekend, Swanson said he was surprised his name was connected to Crooks.
“I don’t know anything about that kid or his family,” he said. “I don’t even use PayPal. I don’t even know how to set up a PayPal account.”
He said he retired from the FBI in Vegas in 2016 and went to work for the Nevada attorney general from September 2015 to March 2020. He now works in the oil and gas business in Houston.
Furry fetish?
When told of Crooks’ online threats, he said there was no way the FBI would not be aware of the teenager.
“No matter how ridiculous the allegation, no matter if it’s COVID or not, somebody is going to knock on somebody’s door,” Swanson said. “If they investigated that kid there’s a record of it and there’s an assessment that some leader made that this was not a threat or it rose to a level and they did something else.”
He also said that “if the FBI had that information [about his name on the PayPal account], I can’t even imagine they would not have reached out to me right away.”
Given Crooks’ pattern of tracking high-profile mass shootings and violent events, the source believes it is plausible that he adopted Swanson’s name as a private joke.
Like alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, Crooks appears to have been interested in “furries” and exploring gender identity.
He described himself with the pronouns “they/them” on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for “furry” art and the “furry” community. (A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish.)
Two accounts linked to Crooks’ primary email were found on DeviantArt, under usernames “epicmicrowave” and “theepicmicrowave.” The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.
Pals with neo-Nazis
One of the people Crooks interacted with online was “Willy Tepes,” a member of Norwegian neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.
Tepes encouraged violence and Crooks’ extremism, using a Maoist phrase, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” which Crooks repeated several times.
In one comment on Oct. 5, 2025, more than a year after Butler, Tepes commented to another user that he had been contacted by both Russian and American intelligence.
People who ask you to contact them when they just as easily could contact you, are Feds. This is how they avoid entrapment. Both American and Russian intelligence does this. I have chatted to both,” he claimed.
Shortly after his interactions with Tepes, Crooks disappeared offline.
Did his brush with the Norwegian and his own violent rhetoric win him a visit from the FBI or the Secret Service?
If not, why not? If so, why has it not been disclosed?
The FBI refused to comment when asked on Sunday whether Crooks was ever investigated, visited or in some way brought to the attention of the agency before he tried to assassinate Trump, or whether there was an FBI file on Crooks before Butler.
The FBI also refused to comment on why it has not been forthcoming on congressional oversight requests.
Wray told Congress on July 24 2024, 11 days after the shooting, that the bureau “did not have any [prior] information about the shooter” and that “he was not in our holdings before the shooting.” He said the FBI ran a search for Crooks through its databases, and he was not found.
Susan Crabtree, an investigative reporter for RealClearPolitics who has broken multiple stories about the failures at Butler, says her key Secret Service source from the 2020 time period “told me that Crooks was not a person of record at the USSS in 2020 — and wasn’t known to USSS until Butler.”
We don’t know what happened because the Secret Service after-action report is classified. The only bodies that could look at it are the intelligence committees in Congress, which so far have shown little curiosity.
A criminal investigation of a presidential assassination or attempted assassination falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Therefore, any comments on the subject matter would come from the bureau.
Requests for information from the FBI by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have been rebuffed — including under Director Kash Patel.
Johnson had to issue a subpoena in July on the first anniversary of the Butler attack and complained that he had been “stonewalled” by the FBI and the Secret Service in his efforts to request security camera footage, forensic reports and other documents related to the Crooks case.
Trump and those close to him are skeptical about the official story and question how the impoverished parents of Crooks, who had to ask for money from neighbors to pay for their son’s funeral, could afford to hire a white-shoe law firm, Quinn Logue out of Pittsburgh.
It is hard to believe the FBI and/or Secret Service missed Crooks. The question is, what did they do about him?
The president himself remains unsatisfied with the answers he’s been given about the circumstances leading to 20-year-old Thomas Crooks climbing on a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle and firing eight times at Trump, narrowly missing his head but hitting his ear.
There is something very wrong with the official story and that invites conspiracy theories.
The president demanded answers months ago. A man was murdered. What is going on?
Then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress after the July 13, 2024, attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history that pointed to a motive or political ideology.
A week later, Wray’s deputy Paul Abbate told Congress that comments posted on one of Crooks’ social media accounts “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”
Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.
The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.
“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”
Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.
The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.
“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”
Crooks’ most prolific activity was on YouTube, with 737 public comments. The account “Tomcrooks2178” (visible to other users as Tom Crooks) was created on Jan. 14, 2019, and suspended on July 14, 2024, the day after the Butler attack, for violating YouTube’s policy on violent criminal organizations.
Political 180
Crooks’ trajectory from pro- to anti-Trump is evident. He referred to Trump as “the literal definition of Patriotism” in a comment at 1:17 a.m. July 20, 2019.
He also issued several targeted threats against the Democratic congressional representatives in “the Squad.”
“I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who don’t deserve anything this country [sic] has given them,” he wrote at 8:18 a.m. July 20, 2019.
“MURDER THE DEMOCRATS,” he wrote in all caps on Dec. 12, 2019.
But in early 2020, Crooks’ online behavior flipped 180 degrees and he became very critical of Trump, Fox News and Republican complaints about mail-in voting.
Any sort of head-to-head fight is suicide and even ambush/surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well. A large portion of the war will also be propaganda/information wars — both sides will want people to join them, and a big deciding factor in wars is often which side has more popular support for them,” he wrote.
Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source, only one, on PayPal, was operated under an alias: “Rod Swanson.”
Rod Swanson is a former senior FBI agent who was the chief of investigations for the state of Nevada during the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.
He also previously served on FBI Director Robert Mueller’s protective detail and as a firearms instructor in Pennsylvania.
Contacted by phone over the weekend, Swanson said he was surprised his name was connected to Crooks.
“I don’t know anything about that kid or his family,” he said. “I don’t even use PayPal. I don’t even know how to set up a PayPal account.”
He said he retired from the FBI in Vegas in 2016 and went to work for the Nevada attorney general from September 2015 to March 2020. He now works in the oil and gas business in Houston.
Furry fetish?
When told of Crooks’ online threats, he said there was no way the FBI would not be aware of the teenager.
“No matter how ridiculous the allegation, no matter if it’s COVID or not, somebody is going to knock on somebody’s door,” Swanson said. “If they investigated that kid there’s a record of it and there’s an assessment that some leader made that this was not a threat or it rose to a level and they did something else.”
He also said that “if the FBI had that information [about his name on the PayPal account], I can’t even imagine they would not have reached out to me right away.”
Given Crooks’ pattern of tracking high-profile mass shootings and violent events, the source believes it is plausible that he adopted Swanson’s name as a private joke.
Like alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, Crooks appears to have been interested in “furries” and exploring gender identity.
He described himself with the pronouns “they/them” on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for “furry” art and the “furry” community. (A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish.)
Two accounts linked to Crooks’ primary email were found on DeviantArt, under usernames “epicmicrowave” and “theepicmicrowave.” The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.
Pals with neo-Nazis
One of the people Crooks interacted with online was “Willy Tepes,” a member of Norwegian neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.
Tepes encouraged violence and Crooks’ extremism, using a Maoist phrase, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” which Crooks repeated several times.
In one comment on Oct. 5, 2025, more than a year after Butler, Tepes commented to another user that he had been contacted by both Russian and American intelligence.
People who ask you to contact them when they just as easily could contact you, are Feds. This is how they avoid entrapment. Both American and Russian intelligence does this. I have chatted to both,” he claimed.
Shortly after his interactions with Tepes, Crooks disappeared offline.
Did his brush with the Norwegian and his own violent rhetoric win him a visit from the FBI or the Secret Service?
If not, why not? If so, why has it not been disclosed?
The FBI refused to comment when asked on Sunday whether Crooks was ever investigated, visited or in some way brought to the attention of the agency before he tried to assassinate Trump, or whether there was an FBI file on Crooks before Butler.
The FBI also refused to comment on why it has not been forthcoming on congressional oversight requests.
Wray told Congress on July 24 2024, 11 days after the shooting, that the bureau “did not have any [prior] information about the shooter” and that “he was not in our holdings before the shooting.” He said the FBI ran a search for Crooks through its databases, and he was not found.
Susan Crabtree, an investigative reporter for RealClearPolitics who has broken multiple stories about the failures at Butler, says her key Secret Service source from the 2020 time period “told me that Crooks was not a person of record at the USSS in 2020 — and wasn’t known to USSS until Butler.”
We don’t know what happened because the Secret Service after-action report is classified. The only bodies that could look at it are the intelligence committees in Congress, which so far have shown little curiosity.
A criminal investigation of a presidential assassination or attempted assassination falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Therefore, any comments on the subject matter would come from the bureau.
Requests for information from the FBI by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have been rebuffed — including under Director Kash Patel.
Johnson had to issue a subpoena in July on the first anniversary of the Butler attack and complained that he had been “stonewalled” by the FBI and the Secret Service in his efforts to request security camera footage, forensic reports and other documents related to the Crooks case.
Trump and those close to him are skeptical about the official story and question how the impoverished parents of Crooks, who had to ask for money from neighbors to pay for their son’s funeral, could afford to hire a white-shoe law firm, Quinn Logue out of Pittsburgh.
It is hard to believe the FBI and/or Secret Service missed Crooks. The question is, what did they do about him?
There are reasons to be skeptical about the reporting above. The whole article is based on one source. This publication and this columnist have an axe to grind. If Crooks was trans or furry that would fit perfectly into their agenda.
What often happens when a competing outlet breaks a story is other outlets try to confirm the story with the hope of reporting further detail or debunking it. This is different with the NY Post their reporting is usually ignored. The problem is sometimes as with Hunter Biden’s laptop they are right.
Beyond the Post the assassination attempt, how Trump reacted to it, and how the Trump campaign used it were important factors in getting Trump reelected and radically altering the direction of this country. Due to technology in routine mass shootings we usually know any scrap of information about possible motivation quickly. This is just not the case here. There was intense interest in the few weeks after the assassination attempt, then crickets. The assassination attempt happened 16 months ago, but it might have well happen before any of us were born.
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