← Pod Force One
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Foreigna With a new mini episode to start off your week, this new feature is a little more topical and more to do with my day to day job as a columnist for the New York Post. When I zoom in on topics I think will interest you today, it's more of a news story than usual and it appears on today's cover of the New York Post with the headline Trust Trump Shooter, Secrets Exposed why didn't FBI stop Thomas Crooks earlier? It all began when I received a call from a contact in the legal field who I know and trust. He wanted to introduce me to someone with crucial information about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last July. This is what he told me. We are all owed a better explanation from the FBI and the Secret Service about the attempted assassination of Don Trump 16 months ago at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. 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 AR15 style rifle and firing eight times at Trump, narrowly missing his head but hitting his ear. Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper that day, but not before he killed rally goer Corey Comperatori, 50, and seriously wounded David Dutch, 58, and James Copenhagen, 75, who were sitting in the bleachers behind Trump. 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 Butler attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crook's online that pointed to a motive or political ideology. A week later, Wray's deputy Paula Bate told Congress that comments posted on one of Crook's social media accounts, quote, appear to reflect anti Semitic and anti immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and are described as extreme in nature, end quote. Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crook's hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abate misled Congress by omission because he left out an entire section of Crook's online interactions from January to August 2020, when he did an ideological backflip and went from being 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 YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chesscom, and Quora. The online interactions from when crooks was aged 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. Quote 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 was not hidden, end quote. The official narrative claimed Crooks acted alone and without a clear motive, ideology or digital footprint. Yet the source found reams of information that shows Crooks quote was not simply some unknowable lone actor. He left a digital trail of violent threats, extremist ideology and admiration for mass violence. He spoke openly of political assassination posted under his real name and was even flagged by other users who mentioned law enforcement in their replies. Despite this, his account remained active for more than five years and was only removed the day after the shooting. None of this online activity was referenced in the final congressional report released in December 2024, making this even more troubling. Starting with Crook's phone number, the source used tools available to private investigators and web archives to uncover the assassin's very visible online Persona. Crook's most prolific activity was on YouTube with 737 public comments. The account, Tomcrooks2178, was created on January 14, 2019 and was suspended on July 14, 2024, the day after the Butler attack, for violating YouTube's policy on violent criminal organizations. Crook's trajectory from pro to anti Trump is evident. He referred to President Trump as quote, the literal definition of patriotism in a comment at 1:17am on July 20, 2019, he issued several targeted threats against the Democratic congressional representatives in the squad. Quote I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti Trump congresswomen who don't deserve any anything this country has given them, he wrote at 8:18am July 20, 2019. Another one Murder the Democrats, he wrote in all caps December 12, 2019. But in early 2020, Crook's online behavior flipped 180 degrees and he suddenly became very critical of Trump, Fox News and Republican complaints about mail in voting. The first time he criticised Trump was on January 23, 2020 when he commented on a video of law professor Jonathan Turley talking about Trump's first impeachment. Quote. Keep in mind the only reason we may know about any of this is because of Trump's stupidity, he wrote. He started describing Trump supporters as a cult quote, how can you people call others sheep but you are too brainwashed to realize how dumb you are, he wrote on February 26, 2020. I mean literally. You guys sound like at times the same day he described Trump as quote, racist. By April 2020, Crooks was constantly criticizing Trump's pandemic response, saying he was, quote, too slow and everything he's done now should have been done. Through the summer of 2020, Crooks online rhetoric became increasingly radical and violent. On August 5, 2020, Crooks wrote, in my opinion, the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks. Sneak a bomb into an essential building and set it off before anyone, track down any important people, politicians, military leaders, et cetera, and try to assassinate them. 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. Only one account, 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 on the weekends, 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 and now works in the oil and gas business in Houston. When told of Crook's online threats, he said there was no way the FBI would not be aware of the teenager. Quote, no matter how ridiculous the allegation, no matter if it's Covid or not, somebody is going to knock on somebody's door and 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, quote, 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 Crook's 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 Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, Crooks also 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 Crook's primary email were on the platform DeviantArt, with usernames Epic Microwave and the Epic Microwave. The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters with muscle bound male bodies and female heads. One of the people Crooks interacted with online was Willi Tepes, a member of a Norwegian Neo Nazi group, the Nordic Resistance Movement, that has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. Willie 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 October 5, 2025, more than a year after Butler Chepes commented to another user that he had been contacted by both Russian and American intelligence quot 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. 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? And 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 FBI 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 last year, 11 days after the shooting, that the bureau, quote, did not have any prior information about the shooter and 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. The Secret Service did not respond to my questions, But Susan Crabtree, investigative reporter for RealClearPolitics, who has broken multiple stories about the failures at Butler, said her key Secret Service Source from the 2020 time period, quote, told me that Crooks was not a person of your record at the United States Secret Service in 2020 and wasn't known to USSS until Butler. But something doesn't add up. Wray had been heavily criticized after the Parkland School shooting because the FBI failed to act after being repeatedly warned about the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, that he had guns, had threatened people, exhibited erratic behaviour and might carry out a school shooting? Was Ray trying to avoid being blamed for another atrocity on his watch? Is that why he downplayed Trump's injury when he testified to Congress a week after but and falsely suggested that Trump had not been struck by a bullet but by shrapnel from his podium? If the Secret Service had become aware of Crook's anti Trump rhetoric in 2020 during Trump's presidency, protocol is that they would have determined if he was a threat and offloaded to the FBI to take over the investigation. 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. Senator Ron Johnson's requests for information from the FBI have been rebuffed, including under Director Kash Patel. Johnson had to issue a subpoena this July on the one year anniversary of the Butler attack and complained that he had been, quote, 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. President Trump and those close to him are skeptical about the official story and questions 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 the Secret Service missed Crooks. The question is, what did they do about him? Don't forget to come back on Wednesday for my full episode. And this week we are talking to the talented and and very entertaining White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt. I hope you can tune in and have a wonderful week.