Republican lawmakers are digging back into the Butler, Pa., assassination attempt after fresh records surfaced that they say raise even more questions than answers. The new details point to gaps in what federal investigators shared, what local officials knew, and how much of the picture was missing when Congress tried to piece the attack together.
Newly surfaced documents have put Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman who tried to kill President Donald Trump in July 2024, back under the spotlight. Crooks fired on Trump at a campaign rally, grazing his ear and killing a rally attendee who moved to protect his family.
Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who led a bipartisan House task force on the shooting, said the federal side of the investigation was frustratingly thin. He said agencies were handling things on their own and kept telling lawmakers they would circle back, but that never really happened. By the time the task force finished its report, Kelly said much of what it had came from local law enforcement, not the federal government.
Kelly also said the Biden-era executive branch gave lawmakers little access to the information they needed at the time. That left the House report with major blind spots, even as the committee was trying to move quickly and get a clear account of what went wrong. His complaint was simple enough: the questions were there, but the answers were not.
The newly reviewed records reportedly show that Crooks’ father, Matthew Crooks, searched in May 2024 for ways to keep his son away from firearms. That detail matters because it suggests warning signs may have existed long before the attack, yet lawmakers say they never saw that thread during their own investigation.
A source familiar with the task force’s work said that search was not known to House investigators while they were building their findings. The same source said the task force’s report did confirm that Matthew Crooks provided the rifle used in the July 13 attack. That link makes the family angle harder to ignore, especially with so many unanswered questions still hanging over the case.
Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, obtained the records as part of his ongoing probe into the Butler shooting. So far, the records turned over to the Senate suggest Crooks’ actions caught his family off guard, and his motive remains murky. For lawmakers pushing for transparency, that kind of uncertainty is exactly the problem.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the latest document dump is the kind of thing that should have happened much earlier. He argued that too much still remains unknown about what unfolded that day, including whether Crooks was showing erratic behavior before the attack and whether anyone reported it. To Hawley, the bigger issue is not just what happened, but what was missed.
Hawley also said that after seeing the ground around the site, it was obvious Crooks may have had an easier path to the rooftop than many people expected. He blasted the lack of coordination among the law enforcement agencies on scene and said the public still does not have a full accounting of the failures. In his view, that gap leaves the country exposed to the same kind of breakdown again.
That concern is why the Butler case has not faded, even two years later. The shooting became one of those moments that keeps pulling investigators back in, because every new paper trail seems to open another hole in the story. And with lawmakers now saying fresh documents were sitting out there all along, the pressure for a real answer is only getting louder.
