Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, February 28, 2025 Real World News
There were no big revelations in Thursday’s much-hyped “Phase 1” release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The Epstein case is a can of worms possibly involving high level U.S. and Israeli intelligence operations. A more immediate concern is the new U.S. president’s intense interest in the assassinations and attempted assassinations of U.S. presidents.
During last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Elon Musk yelled out to the audience: “By the way, why do we know nothing about that guy in Butler?”
An investigator hired by a private client told the New York Post in a report published on Thursday that he does not believe would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks acted alone.
Additional sources told The Post the FBI has obstructed efforts to unravel Crooks’s motivation for his July 13 attempt on then-GOP candidate Donald Trump’s life.
The investigator, from Erie, Pennsylvania, was hired shortly after the fateful July 13 event at the Butler rally to look into Crooks by a private client, told The Post he believes a “criminal network” was operating with Crooks at the time of the assassination attempt.
That network, the investigator said, is still in existence and still wants to kill President Trump.
The Post’s Dana Kennedy interviewed Doug Hagmann, whose team of six other investigators have been working the case for months and have interviewed more than 100 people. Hagmann said the investigative team conducted extensive geofencing analysis of cellphones and tablets not belonging to Crooks that were found with him at his home, at the rifle range where he took target practice, at the Butler rally, and at Bethel Park High School, where he graduated in 2022.
“We don’t think he acted alone,” Hagmann told The Post. “This took a lot of coordination. In my view, Crooks was handled by more than one individual and he was used for this [assassination attempt]. And I wouldn’t preclude the possibility that there were people at the rally itself helping him.”
This is an early challenge for new FBI Director Kash Patel.
During his investigation, Hagmann said he was personally escorted to the Butler County line and told to leave twice by individuals who were either federal agents or some type of private security.
Current national security adviser Mike Waltz, a former GOP congressman, said the Biden FBI was very tight-lipped about what they discovered about Crooks.
Louisiana Republican Rep. Clay Higgins, who has also been investigating the assassination attempt for months, told The Post he believes Crooks acted alone and there was no conspiracy. However, he also said the FBI continually obstructed his investigation.
“Thomas Crooks was a brilliant engineering student who was on a path to success,” Higgins said, noting that Crooks had been accepted and was given a scholarship to Robert Morris University, where he would be starting in the fall of 2024.
“Something happened to make him go crazy and that’s why I think it might have been pharmaceuticals. He performed an attempted assassination and he was committed all the way through — to death. He was not acting erratic but he was a wild lunatic at the same time, incredibly calculating and incredibly smart.”
But terms like “wild lunatic” and “incredibly calculating” are not adjectives that any of the former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends whom The Post interviewed during a week in the Bethel Park area used to describe Crooks.
The Pittsburgh County medical examiner did not perform toxicological tests for pharmaceuticals — or at least did not include them in the autopsy report. Crooks’s body was released to his parents eight days after the shooting without most officials involved the investigation knowing — and was promptly cremated.
Crooks’ friend from his high school economics class, Mark Sigaroos, told The Post that the case “still baffles me now.”
“It’s presented like an open-and-shut case like, ‘Oh, he went crazy’ but it doesn’t really add up. It’s like JFK. Do we think we’ve become so modern that wouldn’t happen again?”
As Musk told the CPAC crowd: “Kash [Patel] is going to get to the bottom of it.”
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