Thomas Matthew Crooks Archives

Trump’s shooter Pennsylvania trained at the same gun range used by DHS agents and had an encrypted messaging account in Belgium, where NATO is headquartered. Sounds completely normal.

But no media investigation or coverage. No media on the Trump assassination attempt at all. The Trump assassination story disappeared faster than Jimmy Hoffa.

Trump shooter Thomas Crooks had encrypted messaging accounts in Belgium, Germany, New Zealand

Josh Christenson, Aug. 21, 2024:

CHICAGO — Trump rally gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks used encrypted messaging accounts on various platforms located in Belgium, New Zealand and Germany, according to a member of a congressional task force investigating his assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), one of 13 lawmakers tapped to serve on the House bipartisan task force, told reporters at a Wednesday press conference at the Trump Hotel Chicago that the “overseas accounts” piqued his suspicion immediately regarding the shooter’s motives.”

“Why does a 19-year-old kid who is a health care aid need encrypted platforms not even based in the United States, but based abroad – where most terrorist organizations know it is harder for our law enforcement to get into?” asked Waltz.

“That’s a question I’ve had since day one,” the Republican panel member said, before pivoting to bash the US Secret Service and FBI for declining to release the full findings of their investigation into the July 13 shooting at a Trump rally.

Both agencies are conducting their own probes of the assassination attempt, along with the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.

Crooks, 20, opened fire onto the main stage minutes after Trump, 78, mounted it to warm up the crowd, striking the former president in the right ear, killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore, 50, and seriously wounding two others, David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 54.

New photos from local law enforcement — who confronted but did not stop the shooter in time — show Crooks sitting on a wall and looking and at his phone moments before he climbed onto the roof of the AGR International building and took aim.

Butler officers on the ground at the rally had labeled him “suspicious” well before that.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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The conditions that allowed a 20-year-old would-be assassin to get a clear shot at assassinating former President Donald J. Trump didn’t happen by coincidence, Donald Trump Jr. said July 26.

“I don’t honestly think that the guys at the Secret Service — many who I know and respect — magically left an entire roof unguarded where a guy with a rifle could get there for 20 minutes within 150 yards,” Trump Jr. said in an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson.

“Like, that doesn’t happen. That’s not being a conspiracy theorist,” Trump Jr. said. “Like, you’re a freaking idiot if you think that that just happened by coincidence.”

The junior Trump’s explosive statement raises the public specter of what has been mostly whispered only in private: Were the U.S. Secret Service or others in government somehow complicit in the attempted assassination? Did would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks have help?

J. Michael Waller, senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy and author of the best-selling book “Big Intel: How the CIA Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains,” said the ugliest explanations cannot be ruled out.

“It’s really hard to separate incompetence from willful negligence or even simple negligence or malice,” Waller said on the July 19 episode of “Blaze News Tonight.” “You can’t rule out malice. You can’t rule out somebody wanted this to happen.”

A top-tier U.S. military special operations expert told Blaze News that after examining all of the evidence to date, the hallmarks are there to suggest that Crooks was groomed and trained for an assassination attempt.

“It’s not in the realm of real possibility for the government to be this incompetent,” the special operator said on condition of anonymity. “There is no chance Crooks was not pointed to which building he needed to be on.

“Rank incompetence vs. rank arrogance. I’ve seen a lot of it in my 30 years in government ops. This was neither,” the expert said, suggesting that initial clues are visible in Crooks’ behavior.

Crooks’ 11-minute drone flight two hours before the shooting was likely not for surveillance, the expert said, but for planning his route onto the grounds and up onto the roof. FBI Director Christopher Wray told a U.S. House hearing that Crooks flew the drone some 200 yards from the stage where Trump would speak.

This piece by Blaze Media features quotes from CSP Senior Analyst, J. Michael Waller.

J. Michael Waller

J. Michael Waller is Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy.

His academic and professional areas of concentration are foreign propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion.

He is the former Walter and Leonore Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, DC.

He has been an instructor with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg. He has guest lectured at the FBI Academy, George C. Marshall Center, Marine Corps University, National Defense University, National Intelligence University, and other military schools and combatant commands.

Dr. Waller holds a Ph.D. in international security affairs from the University Professors Program at Boston University. His award-winning doctoral dissertation, written in 1993 and published as Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today (Westview, 1994), foresaw the rise of a KGB officer to seize political control of Russia. He received his military training as an insurgent with the Nicaraguan contras.

He is author or editor of books relating to intelligence, political warfare, public diplomacy, terrorism, subversion, and strategy. See his page on Academia.edu. His latest book is Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains (Regnery, 2024).

He has written for American Greatness, the American Mind, the Daily Beast, Daily Caller, The Federalist, Forbes, Insight, Investor’s Business Daily, Kyiv Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Clear Politics, USA Today, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Waller is on Twitter/X at @JMichaelWaller.

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Tag Archive for: Thomas Matthew Crooks

Trump shooter Thomas Crooks had encrypted messaging accounts in Belgium, Germany, New Zealand

Pamela Geller

J. Michael Waller