Texts, drone photos from Trump shooter made public by FOIA request
Federal officials have released texts and drone images from Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who attempted to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in July 2024 at the Butler Farm Show grounds.
Material obtained by the nonprofit activist group Judicial Watch from the FBI through a Freedom of Information Act request garnered 249 pages of primarily text message logs gathered from Crooks’ cellphone and images captured from the DJI drone Crooks flew over the rally site hours before the shooting took place.
A Butler County resident, Corey Comperatore, was fatally shot before the shooter was killed.
While the documents were only recently released, they are dated July 2024 — the month of the assassination attempt. They are part of an internal FBI investigation into the event. The contents of the FBI release are heavily redacted and do not include many names or other pertinent information.
One noteworthy exchange, which the FBI marked as “pertinent,” occurred between May 2023 and January 2024 between Crooks and an unknown recipient. While the incoming messages side of the conversation is entirely redacted, Crooks’ messages consist of one- or two-word strings such as “hello reddd,” “hello,” “Gevegeg” and “red red.”
Also included in the logs of text messages are four notifications of tracking information for packages shipped through DHL Express, plus a series of automated text messages from the Democratic fundraising organization ActBlue, urging respondents to donate to the 2022 Senate reelection campaign of Raphael Warnock in Georgia. Investigations from shortly after the shooting revealed Crooks had made a one-time donation of $15 to ActBlue in 2021.
In total, the text messages cover a period between December 2022 and January 2024.
The FOIA release also includes contents extracted from Crooks’ drone, a DJI Air 2S. According to FBI documents, Crooks flew his drone across the Pittsburgh area as early as February 2024, five months before the shooting.
The earliest images included in the released documents include those of a Market District store and the Village Green Park in Bethel Park, Crooks’ hometown. They are dated Feb. 6, 2024. Crooks would later use his drone to capture images of landmarks across the Pittsburgh area, including Acrisure Stadium and PNC Park, which were also included in the Judicial Watch release.
