Thomas Matthew Crooks emailed a Butler County Sheriff's deputy at least twice before he opened fire on President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, a detail buried in heavily redacted FBI files that the bureau fought to keep from public view.

The documents came to light only because Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog, forced their release through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The FBI had sat on the records for nearly two years.

What Crooks wrote in those emails remains unknown. The FBI blacked out the substance of the communications. But the mere existence of pre-attack contact between the shooter and local law enforcement raises fresh questions about what officials knew, when they knew it, and why none of it prevented the deadliest security failure at a presidential event in decades.

What the FBI files reveal

Among the dozens of documents Judicial Watch pried loose is an FBI electronic communication titled "Disc of 5 Deputies of Butler County Sheriff's Office," as the Daily Caller first reported. The file, dated July 16, 2024, just three days after the shooting, compiled interviews the bureau conducted with sheriff's deputies.

One unnamed female deputy told FBI agents she "checked her emails and records and only had two email communications" from Crooks. She also stated she had not had any "personal interaction" with him.

The content of those two emails is entirely redacted. So is any context that might explain why a 20-year-old would reach out to a county sheriff's deputy before attempting to kill a former president at a political rally. The FBI offered no public explanation for the redactions.

A remote device and a canine alert

A separate document in the same release describes what happened on the rooftop after Crooks was shot dead. A first responder told the FBI she watched a Washington County SWAT officer search the shooter's body.

The document states: "The Washington County SWAT officer checked the shooter's right pocket and discovered a gray remote device with numerical push buttons and an antenna and a cell phone."

A gray remote device with push buttons and an antenna. That is not a garage door opener. The FBI files do not identify what the device was designed to trigger or control. Its purpose remains an open question nearly two years later.

The same first responder told the FBI she remembered being told there was a "canine hit on the building beneath" the structure Crooks had been firing from. A canine hit typically signals the detection of explosives or other contraband. The documents do not elaborate on what the dog alerted to, what was found, or what follow-up occurred.

After the canine alert, personnel were evacuated from the area. Crooks' body remained on the roof.

Two years and still redacted

The timeline here matters. Crooks fired on President Trump on July 13, 2024. The FBI interviewed Butler County deputies by July 16. Then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testified before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on July 22, 2024, a hearing that produced more questions than answers about the catastrophic security breakdown.

And yet the FBI held these documents until Judicial Watch dragged them out through federal court. The released records arrived heavily blacked out, with the most operationally significant details, the content of Crooks' emails, the purpose of the remote device, the results of the canine alert, all hidden behind redaction bars.

This is the pattern. Every significant disclosure about the Butler assassination attempt has come not from the FBI volunteering transparency, but from outside pressure, congressional hearings, FOIA lawsuits, and public outrage. The bureau's default posture has been to conceal, delay, and redact.

Questions the FBI has not answered

The gaps in these documents are as telling as the facts they contain. Consider what remains unknown:

• What did Crooks write to the Butler County Sheriff's deputy, and when did he send the emails?
• Why was a 20-year-old contacting a sheriff's deputy before a presidential rally?
• What was the gray remote device with an antenna designed to do?
• What triggered the canine alert on the building beneath Crooks' firing position?
• Were any explosives or secondary devices found?
• Who ordered the evacuation, and what threat assessment drove that decision?

None of these questions are trivial. A shooter who contacted local law enforcement before an assassination attempt, who carried a remote triggering device, and whose firing position sat above a building that drew a canine alert, that is not a simple lone-gunman narrative. It is a fact pattern that demands full disclosure.

The cost of institutional secrecy

The FBI's handling of the Butler shooting investigation fits a broader pattern that conservative critics have identified for years. The bureau treats transparency as a threat rather than an obligation. It redacts not to protect national security but to protect itself from accountability.

Judicial Watch has been doing the work that congressional oversight committees and the FBI's own leadership should have done voluntarily. The fact that a private legal organization had to sue the federal government to obtain basic investigative records about an assassination attempt on a president speaks for itself.

The American public deserves to know what Thomas Matthew Crooks was doing in the days and weeks before July 13, 2024. They deserve to know why he contacted a Butler County deputy. They deserve to know what that remote device was for. And they deserve to know why the FBI, the agency entrusted with investigating the most serious attack on a presidential candidate in modern memory, spent two years hiding the answers behind black ink.

A government that cannot explain how a gunman got onto a rooftop 150 yards from a president, and then fights to suppress the details of its own investigation, has forfeited the benefit of the doubt. Transparency is not optional after a failure this grave. It is the bare minimum.

When the FBI treats its own records like state secrets, the public is left to wonder what's worse, what the redactions hide, or the fact that the bureau thinks Americans don't deserve to see it.