FBI Records Reveal Trump Gunman's Redacted Chat Thread, Drone Photos

FBI Records Reveal Trump Gunman’s Redacted Chat Thread, Drone Photos Jim Vondruska/Getty Images Judicial Watch announced that it obtained 249 pages of new FBI records detailing a redacted “chat thread” tied to Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman who attempted to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at a July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The conservative watchdog group said it received the files through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit it filed in July 2025 after the FBI failed to answer a request for records on Crooks and the shooting. An FBI electronic communication dated July 19, 2024, describes a cell phone conversation between Crooks and a recipient whose name is redacted, running from May 21, 2023, to January 3, 2024. The outgoing messages consist largely of one- and two-word strings such as “Hello red,” “Yolo,” “890,” and mashes of letters. The incoming messages are completely blacked out. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the files are further evidence the bureau is withholding too much. “These latest records reveal more pieces of the puzzle surrounding Thomas Crooks,” Fitton said, pressing the FBI to “stop the slow drip of heavily redacted records” and release the full investigative file “especially since the death last week of James Copenhaver,” a rallygoer wounded in the attack “on President Turmp [sic].” A “Samsung Messaging Review” dated July 18, 2024, flagged other communications on a Crooks phone as “pertinent,” including campaign solicitations from then-U.S. Senate candidate Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and DHL shipment notifications from Hong Kong. Much of the production is FBI laboratory analysis of a drone. A July 19, 2024, report says agents extracted 40 images and eight flight logs, taken between February 6 and February 27, 2024, in the Pittsburgh area. Seven flights occurred around Allegheny-West; the eighth was over Butler on July 13, 2024, the day of the shooting. The device had been powered on 15 times. In a companion release, the group said the records include texts under a “January 7 Intel Chain” heading referencing “two CIA bomb techs” assisting at a pipe-bomb scene and “several CIA dog teams on standby.” The group said the full file runs to roughly 75,000 pages, and at about 500 pages a month would take 12 years to produce. The release follows Trump’s September claim 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” by the time he took office. The FBI has maintained Crooks acted alone.