Article is below Benny’s Vid
The FBI File on Trump’s Assassin Just Leaked…Everything They Told You is A Lie
New evidence just blew up the Thomas Crooks narrative.
Two mystery men were with him at a gun store weeks before Butler. Another unidentified man trained with him the day before.
Even more… pic.twitter.com/51DVuUmd18
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 15, 2026
The FBI File on Trump’s Assassin Just Leaked…Everything They Told You is A Lie New evidence just blew up the Thomas Crooks narrative. Two mystery men were with him at a gun store weeks before Butler. Another unidentified man trained with him the day before. Even more damning, an anonymous donor paid to cremate him. Who paid? What are they hiding? This new information is disturbing. – Benny Johnson’s Post (clip above – article is below
COME CLEAN.
The FBI has not been honest with America about the attempts on Donald Trump’s life. Benny Johnson just put the receipts on the table.
On Tuesday, Johnson dropped a 13-minute breakdown (above) of the newest Thomas Matthew Crooks file: “The FBI File on Trump’s Assassin Just Leaked… Everything They Told You is A Lie.” He is not wrong about the gap. The story sold to the country after Butler was simple. A quiet 20-year-old from Bethel Park had a bad day, climbed a roof by himself, fired eight shots, grazed a president, killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, and died a lone wolf. Two years and eight-plus document dumps later, that story is leaking from every seam. We can all smell something is rotten. We all, especially us here at Whatfinger News, know something is seriously wrong with Intel.
Hiding the rest does not make anyone safer. It makes Americans assume the worst. And after more than one attempt on the same man, that assumption is no longer a fringe hobby. It is the national mood.
The questions they still will not answer:
The line they sold vs. the paper they sat on
The official line has been remarkably durable: Crooks acted alone. No co-conspirators. No foreign nexus. No manifesto. No motive that survives a press conference. FBI Director Kash Patel has said investigators chased the overseas emails and still landed on a lone actor. President Trump, as of today, is no longer buying the tidy version. He posted that by the time he took office, “most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone,” and he called the Butler attack a “Democrat Plot.” Whether that last charge holds is a separate argument. The first charge — that the file America was given was incomplete and, in places, misleading — is now sitting in black and white.
Tom Elliott went through the latest 181-page tranche. It is heavily redacted. Ninety-five pages were withheld outright. What they did leave visible is damning enough.
Two mystery men at a gun store. On May 25, 2024 — seven weeks before Butler — Keystone Armory in Edinboro, two hours from Crooks’ home, called the FBI itself. A person who “resembles the shooter” spent about an hour in the store “accompanied by a white male believed to be around his mid 30’s and another older white male with a gray beard.” The lookalike bought 20 rounds of 7.62x54R, Mosin-Nagant ammo, on a MasterCard. The store handed over the video. The file gives no follow-up identifying the two men, and no 302 ruling the lookalike in or out. Every relative and acquaintance in the same dump swears Crooks had “no friends in general.” Then the paper shows two adults standing next to a Crooks double while he shops for rifle ammo. Pick one. The Bureau has not.
An unidentified man on the range the day before. On July 12, Crooks signed into Clairton Sportsmen’s Club at 2:45 p.m. Cameras show him talking on the rifle range with “another, unknown club member” — the only other person there. He shot his AR and “an older military style rifle,” the kind that eats the same 7.62x54R bought in Edinboro. Agents photographed the stranger and his vehicle off a club officer’s phone and ran the sign-in sheet. Whatever they found is not in this release.
Christopher Wray’s ladder. On July 24, 2024, then-Director Wray told the House Judiciary Committee: “We did not find the ladder at the scene.” Technically cute. A 302 dated July 17 — a full week earlier — records that a private citizen found a ladder and a long-gun bag in a wood lot in Bethel Park, 40 miles from Butler, sitting with two empty 20-round ammo boxes and Crooks’ Clairton membership badge. The citizen loaded the evidence into his pickup and drove it to a Crowne Plaza, where the FBI Evidence Response Team collected it. Wray’s sentence was accurate in the narrowest possible sense and misleading in every sense that matters. Congress was left with the impression the ladder was a rumor. It was already in a federal bag.
They were hunting a third phone. Agents already had Crooks’ Samsung off his body and a second Samsung with a year of texts ending in July 2023. On July 21 they still walked a grid and rummaged a dumpster “for a phone believed to be associated with Thomas CROOKS.” You do not toss a dumpster for a device you already possess.
Four encrypted Belgian inboxes. Crooks’ phone hit Mailfence — an encrypted Belgian service — across four account IDs between April 15 and July 8, 2024. Two days after the shooting, FBI Counterterrorism sent formal foreign-dissemination requests to two governments. Rep. Mike Waltz later said the trail ran through Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany. What came back is not in the file. Patel has said there is no foreign nexus. Fine. Show the answers. Redactions are not a briefing.
An anonymous donor burned the body. A note at the end of the FBI interview summary with Crooks’ father, Matthew, reads: “Anonymous donor paid for cremation.” The information appears to have come from a family lawyer. The same notes describe Matthew as retired or unemployed and his wife on leave — a household that, on paper, was not flush enough to float a funeral. Rep. Clay Higgins was already furious in 2024 that the FBI released the body for cremation about ten days after the shooting, cutting off any independent look at the remains. Now we learn someone outside the family paid the bill. Name. Amount. Relationship. None of it is in the record.
The official line versus the paper:
It is a complete failure of candor. The difference matters. Americans can live with “we don’t know yet.” They cannot live with “trust us” after the director of the FBI shades a ladder, a third phone goes missing from the narrative, two men in a gun store vanish into a redaction, and a stranger pays to cremate the man who almost killed a president. We all know when we are being lied to. This is what creates conspiracy theories, and at last tally, well over 95% of them have been proven correct over the last five years.
This was not the only attempt
Butler was the one that drew blood. It was not the last time someone tried.
On September 15, 2024 — two months later — Ryan Wesley Routh hid an AK-style rifle in the bushes at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach while Trump was on the course. A Secret Service agent spotted the barrel and fired. Routh fled, was caught, convicted, and sentenced in February 2026 to life in prison. Prosecutors told the judge he had “plotted painstakingly” to ambush a presidential candidate.
In February 2026, 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin came onto the grounds of Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun and a gas canister. Secret Service killed him on site. In April 2026, Cole Allen rushed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, where Trump was in the room, and now faces attempted-assassination charges. Add the disrupted Iranian murder-for-hire tracks from 2024 and the picture is not “one disturbed kid.” It is a target deck.
Multiple attempts. One pattern of secrecy.
Helen Comperatore, the widow of the man Crooks murdered when the shot missed Trump’s head, has said publicly she believes this was not a one-man job and that Crooks had help. You can disagree with her. You cannot tell her to sit down while the Bureau still will not identify the men in the Edinboro aisle or the man on the Clairton line.
Earlier FOIA work from Judicial Watch already showed a Butler County sheriff’s deputy exchanged emails with Crooks before the rally. The substance is redacted. A SWAT officer pulled a gray remote with an antenna out of Crooks’ pocket. He had flown a drone. He was photographed on a phone in the minutes around the shooting. Who was on the other end? The file shrugs.
Why the secrecy is the scandal
Crooks was emotionally blank from birth, his father told agents. He did not cry as a newborn. He rarely laughed. He talked to himself, paced the house, built a 3D-printed Glock frame, ordered rifle parts to the family house under the name “Bob Dole,” used CyberGhost and Brave, kept at least 35 digital accounts including German and Belgian inboxes, and on the morning of the rally accepted the Panther Arms A15 from his own father, who thought he was going to the range. He scored a 1500 SAT. He left no manifesto. He donated $15 to a Democratic-aligned group years earlier and also talked like a Republican who hated “woke.” The Bureau still cannot say why he climbed that roof. That is not a small omission. That is the whole case.
Eight-plus tranches. Thirty-five accounts. Ten days to a nameless cremation. Zero public motive.
Americans are not crazy for noticing the pattern. They are paying attention. When an agency that spent years investigating parents at school boards and a former president’s boxes cannot produce a clean, unredacted account of the afternoon a sniper almost ended a presidential campaign, people fill in the blanks. Some of those blanks will be wrong. The Bureau made that problem. Every black bar on a 302 is an invitation to a worse theory than the one the facts would have supported.
Come clean means specific things:
- Identify the two men at Keystone Armory, or state on the record that the lookalike was not Crooks and release the video.
- Identify the unknown club member on the Clairton range on July 12.
- Explain why Wray chose the phrasing he chose about the ladder while it sat in FBI custody.
- Account for the third phone, or admit there wasn’t one and explain the dumpster search.
- Publish what the two foreign governments sent back on the Mailfence accounts.
- Name the donor who paid to cremate Thomas Crooks, or explain under what legal theory that name is a secret.
- Stop pretending a motive that has not been proven is a motive that has been closed.
President Trump is alive because a Secret Service counter-sniper made a shot that the planning of that rally did not deserve. Corey Comperatore is not alive. His widow is still waiting on a story that does not insult her. The country is still waiting on a Bureau that treats an assassination attempt on a president as something other than another document to bleed out in FOIA court two years later.
Benny Johnson did not invent the file. He read it and so can the FBI. The only question left is whether they will tell the rest of us what is under the black ink — or keep training Americans to assume the worst, attempt after attempt. We had to wait decades to find out that the CIA had a hand in killing President Kennedy. Are we going to have to wait decades to find out that perhaps rogue FBI and other Intel agencies were actively trying to kill a President of the United States? The more they hide info, the more it makes us all question their integrity on the whole issue.
— The Whatfinger News Team: Sgt K and Beth, with Ben, plus Grok on editing, and the graphics
References
- The FBI File on Trump’s Assassin Just Leaked… Everything They Told You is A Lie — Benny Johnson
- Would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks used ‘Bob Dole’ pseudonym to stock up before Butler rally shooting — New York Post
- Cremation of would-be Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks paid for by ‘anonymous donor’ — New York Post
- The 10 Weirdest Things I Found in the Latest Thomas Crooks FBI Drop — Tom Elliott
- Judicial Watch: FBI Records Reveal Crooks’ Emails with Deputy
- Man Convicted of Trying to Assassinate Trump Gets Life Sentence — The New York Times
- A timeline of assassination attempts against Donald Trump since 2016 — Fox News
- Security incidents involving Donald Trump — Wikipedia
- Trump says 2024 assassination try was political plot — Reuters / Fort Worth Star-Telegram
- Chilling new details about Trump shooter revealed in bombshell FBI docs — New York Post
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