New FBI files obtained by Judicial Watch show Thomas Matthew Crooks traded mysterious coded texts about 3D-printed parts, took stadium drone photos, and received a Hong Kong package before the Butler rally shooting that killed two Americans.
New FBI files obtained by Judicial Watch show Thomas Matthew Crooks traded mysterious coded texts about 3D-printed parts, took stadium drone photos, and received a Hong Kong package before the Butler rally shooting that killed two Americans.
Months before he opened fire at President Donald Trump’s July 13, 2024, rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Thomas Matthew Crooks was already messaging an “unknown contact” about 3D-printed parts and sending strings of odd, one- and two-word texts that the FBI later flagged as pertinent.
The New York Post reported that Judicial Watch obtained the FBI records detailing those messages, a DHL notice of a package from Hong Kong, and dozens of drone images Crooks captured in the Pittsburgh area. The documents add hard detail to what investigators already knew about the gunman who nearly killed a former president and left two rally-goers dead.
Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old fire chief, died that day shielding his family from the bullets. James Copenhaver, a 76-year-old veteran, was hit in the triceps and midsection, suffering injuries to his kidneys and colon. He left the hospital about a week later, then lived with the complications until he died on Sept. 23, 2026.
Trump survived with a wound to his ear. The public still has only a partial view of the case file.
Fox News reported the same core trail from the Judicial Watch release: an unknown contact messaged Crooks on Feb. 9, 2023, about fabricated parts, and Crooks answered in plain terms.
The FBI described the other party only as an “unknown contact.”
An individual the FBI labeled an unknown contact asked Crooks on Feb. 9, 2023:
"Did you 3D print the parts?"
Crooks answered:
"Yes, except for the fan blades."
The contact replied, “Woah that looks cool.”
From May 21, 2023, through Jan. 3, 2024, Crooks sent a long run of short, jumbled messages to a second party whose replies the FBI redacted. The chain included repeated “Hello red,” “Yolo,” strings of gibberish letters and numbers, and more “red” lines. A Crooks message about “parts” was also redacted.
Just The News reported that those February 2023 texts align with earlier accounts of Crooks’ homemade gun work. His father, Matthew Crooks, told investigators the young man once tried to fashion a handgun on a 3D printer.
Matthew Crooks told investigators:
"Using carbon fiber plastic, a dryer and a toaster oven, Thomas did once create a Glock 19."
The father said he forbade further use, fearing the gun would explode. Prior documents obtained by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and reviewed in earlier New York Post coverage, covered that same attempt.
None of this is a hobby anecdote after Butler. It is a record of a man already working with printed firearm parts more than a year before he climbed a roof and fired on a presidential candidate.
The FBI file also includes a DHL notification that Crooks received a package from Hong Kong. The records do not say what was inside.
Between Feb. 6 and Feb. 27, 2024, Crooks took 40 drone photos. The images included PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium, the Pittsburgh venues used by the Pirates and Steelers.
Breitbart reported that Judicial Watch received 249 pages through a FOIA lawsuit after the FBI failed to answer, and that the production included phone messages flagged as pertinent plus drone extractions of those 40 images and eight flight logs, including one over Butler on July 13, 2024, the day of the shooting. The full investigative file is estimated at roughly 75,000 pages. At the current release pace, full production could stretch about 12 years.
That timeline is not a clerical footnote. Two Americans are dead. The shooter is dead. And the public is still reading heavily redacted scraps.
Readers who track how the bureau handles politically charged files have seen similar friction before, including when the FBI shut down its own inquiry into a top ally of Sen. Susan Collins.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton tied the new release directly to the latest fatality from the rally.
Fitton said:
"These latest records reveal more pieces of the puzzle surrounding Thomas Crooks. The FBI should stop the slow drip of heavily redacted records and immediately provide the full investigative record, especially since the death last week of James Copenhaver, who was severely injured from being shot during the assassination attempt on President Trump."
That demand is basic accountability. A near-assassination of a president, a murdered fire chief, and a veteran who died of his wounds years later should not sit behind a multi-year FOIA crawl.
Separate reporting on other FBI actions, from an Annandale man who admitted posing as an FBI agent at a 2024 Virginia polling place to routine enforcement memos, keeps public attention on how the bureau uses its authority. The Butler file is a harder test: whether the agency will show its work on an attack that almost removed a national leader.
The Washington Examiner reported that the FBI concluded Thomas Matthew Crooks acted alone in the 2024 attempted assassination in Butler. Crooks, then 20, struck Trump’s ear and killed Comperatore. It was the first assassination attempt on a former or current president since the 1981 attack on Ronald Reagan.
Acting alone is the bureau’s finding. It does not erase the open items still sitting in the redactions: who the “unknown contact” was, what the other side of the coded chat said, what arrived from Hong Kong, and why a man photographing stadiums and printing gun parts was not stopped before July 13, 2024.
Breitbart also noted Trump’s September statement on Truth Social that the Butler attack “was all a Democrat Plot” and that much of the case file was “missing, altered, corrupted, or gone.” The FBI’s lone-actor conclusion stands in official tension with that claim; the incomplete production is what keeps the fight alive.
Trump has kept pressing public fights on his own terms in other arenas, including when Trump posted Sen. Tom Cotton’s cellphone number to push permanent daylight saving time. The Butler records are a different order of business. They go to whether federal investigators will fully explain an attempt on his life.
Put the dated facts in order and the pattern is plain.
In February 2023, Crooks confirmed 3D-printed parts to an unknown contact. Through early 2024 he kept sending the redacted “Hello red” style traffic. In February 2024 he flew a drone over major Pittsburgh sports venues and logged dozens of images. On July 13, 2024, he fired on Trump in Butler. Comperatore died on the spot. Copenhaver was hit in vital organs, released after a week, and died of complications on Sept. 23, 2026. Judicial Watch’s latest tranche, including the 249 pages described in the FOIA production, still arrives with heavy blackouts while the broader file runs toward an estimated 75,000 pages.
Other recent FBI-linked cases, such as a Massachusetts man indicted for cyberstalking Katie Miller after an FBI arrest, show the bureau can move when it chooses. The Crooks production has moved in drips.
Lawful gun owners, veterans, and fire chiefs did not invent this timeline. Crooks did, in texts, in a garage printer setup with a dryer and toaster oven, in drone flights, and finally on a rooftop in Butler. The FBI’s own records, wrestled out by Judicial Watch and flagged again after Copenhaver’s death, are what put those steps on paper.
An FBI memo alerting immigration officers to bogus “tradwife” dating accounts is the kind of operational notice the bureau issues in ordinary threat work. Americans can fairly ask why the same institution still slow-walks the unredacted Butler investigative record after two funeral processions tied to one gunman’s bullets.
The victims were not abstract. Comperatore covered his family with his body. Copenhaver, a 76-year-old veteran, took rounds to the midsection and spent his final years carrying the damage. Trump kept campaigning with a scar from the same attack. Those are the people who paid while redactions piled up.
When a shooter leaves a trail of printed gun parts, foreign-origin packages, coded chats, and drone recon, the country is owed the file, not a 12-year estimate and another blacked-out page.