The FBI told America that Thomas Matthew Crooks was a ghost with no online presence.
New FOIA records just proved that was a lie.
What those financial records show about the hours after Butler is something the FBI has never explained.
The Rod Swanson Alias and What the FBI Knew Before the Butler Shooting
Thomas Matthew Crooks was the 20-year-old who climbed a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 and opened fire on Donald Trump at a campaign rally – killing Corey Comperatore and wounding Trump before a Secret Service sniper ended the attack.
More than two years later, what actually drove Crooks to that rooftop remains locked inside FBI investigative files the bureau has refused to release.
Judicial Watch has been suing the Justice Department for those records since 2025 – and each batch they’ve forced out has revealed details the FBI never volunteered.
The latest batch – 142 heavily redacted pages – contains Crooks’ financial history.
Thomas Crooks didn’t use a random fake name.
He used the name of a real FBI agent – Rod Swanson – the same agent who headed FBI investigations in Nevada during the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, the deadliest in American history.
A 20-year-old borrowing an FBI agent’s name as his alias isn’t random – it’s deliberate.
The records reveal Crooks maintained a Venmo account, a PayPal account under the Rod Swanson alias, and two foreign encrypted email accounts – one registered through a German server, one through a Belgian server – along with an extensive digital footprint the FBI initially told the public didn’t exist.
The real Rod Swanson was clear when reporters reached him: there is “no way” the FBI wouldn’t have been aware of Crooks’ activity.
If the bureau knew about a PayPal account opened in his name, Swanson said, the FBI almost certainly would have contacted him.
The bureau never did – or if they did, they never told the public.
Crooks’ Venmo account was suspended for “unusual activity” on July 14, 2024 – the day after the assassination attempt. Venmo notified Crooks by email that his account would remain suspended pending a response and requested photo identification.
The suspension hit at 4:41 a.m.
Headline USA editor Ken Silva first reported that timestamp – and it matters, because Crooks’ identity had only been public for roughly four hours at that point.
The FBI learned about the suspension through a review of Crooks’ Gmail account.
They’ve never explained what triggered it, who may have been attempting to access the account, or whether any transactions tied to the shooting.
FBI records confirm Crooks was active across multiple platforms under multiple aliases, making more than 25 firearms-related purchases from an online vendor going back to spring 2023 – more than a year before he climbed onto that rooftop in Butler.
The 142 pages just released represent a rounding error.
The FBI’s own investigative file on Thomas Matthew Crooks contains 75,000 pages – and at the current court-ordered release rate of 500 pages per month, the American people won’t see the full record until 2038.
Fourteen years after Corey Comperatore died covering his wife and daughters with his body at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called it what it is: “The FBI is abusing FOIA by hiding, redacting, and slow-walking documents on the Butler assassination attempt on President Trump.”
NEW Butler Documents Dribbled Out By FBI: The FBI is actually SLOWING its review and censoring of the documents on the near killing of @realDonaldTrump. At this rate it will be well over 20 years till we receive all the releasable documents (heavily censored!)!
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 11, 2026
The new documents also reveal the FBI submitted a formal Foreign Dissemination Request – sending intelligence about images recovered from Crooks’ devices to international intelligence partners.
The FBI found multiple photos of Biden and Trump on Crooks’ devices, alongside images of other political figures. Agents noted that most appeared to be cached web images rather than photographs Crooks took independently – but told foreign partners they were “currently working to identify additional details” and would follow up on any content tied to foreign nationals.
The bureau says there’s no evidence of foreign coordination – but 74,858 pages remain hidden, so that claim is worth exactly what it costs to make.
The latest release follows a steady drip of damaging disclosures: drone photographs Crooks took in the Pittsburgh area, a “gray remote device” with an antenna recovered from his pocket after he was killed, and text messages sent to an unknown recipient the FBI still refuses to fully identify.
Kash Patel Controls the Butler Files and Refuses to Release Them
The FBI has played this game before.
JFK assassination records sat buried for 60-plus years. Trump’s own executive orders finally forced some out – and the FBI promptly “discovered” 2,400 records it had never turned over to the review board that was specifically created to find them.
Kash Patel has been running the FBI since January 2025 and has had the keys to that 75,000-page file the entire time.
When Tom Fitton called out the drip-drip release schedule in June, Patel didn’t order the files released – he went on social media and promoted an FBI post calling Judicial Watch “click bait.”
Trump declassified JFK records with the stroke of a pen. He can do the same thing for Butler before lunch tomorrow.
Corey Comperatore’s family has been waiting two years for the truth about the day he died. The only organization willing to sue for those answers just got called fake news by the director of the agency that’s hiding them.
Release the 75,000 pages – all of them – today.
Sources:
- Tom Fitton, “Judicial Watch: New FBI Records Released on Trump Butler Assassination Attempt,” Judicial Watch, November 10, 2026.
- Robert McGreevy, “Judicial Watch’s Thomas Fitton Slams FBI’s ‘Drip-Drip’ Release for 75,000 Pages of Trump-Butler Shooting Files,” Fox News, October 10, 2026.
- Staff, “Report: Biden Admin Hid Online Footprint of Trump’s Would-Be Assassin,” The Federalist, November 17, 2025.
- David Manney, “Two Years After Butler, FBI Files Are Still Filling in the Crooks Story,” PJ Media, October 3, 2026.
- Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless), post with FBI record image showing 4:41 a.m. Venmo suspension, X, November 2026.
