Judicial Watch has pulled 249 pages of FBI records that map a heavily redacted phone chat tied to Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman in the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The production also covers drone images, flight logs, and other phone data agents flagged after the shooting.

Breitbart News reported the records release and the pressure campaign behind it, including Judicial Watch’s demand for the full investigative file rather than another slow trickle of blacked-out pages.

The legal fight is simple. A FOIA lawsuit filed in July 2025 followed the FBI’s failure to answer a records request on Crooks and the Butler attack. Conservatives tracking the case want the evidence trail in public view, not locked behind redactions while the bureau still says Crooks acted alone.

Redacted chat thread and coded one-word strings

An FBI electronic communication dated July 19, 2024, describes a chat thread between Crooks and a recipient whose name is redacted. The thread runs from May 21, 2023, to January 3, 2024.

Outgoing messages are mostly one- and two-word strings such as “Hello red,” “Yolo,” “890,” and mashed letter sequences. Incoming messages are completely blacked out. That imbalance leaves the public with Crooks’s side of the exchange and almost nothing from the other party.

The New York Post reported that the same FBI production reaches further back into 2023 printing activity and other odd phone traffic agents later marked as pertinent.

A Samsung Messaging Review dated July 18, 2024, also flagged other communications on a Crooks phone. Those included campaign solicitations from then-U.S. Senate candidate Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and DHL shipment notifications from Hong Kong.

Transparency fights over FBI paper are not new terrain for readers who have followed other high-stakes bureau actions, including coverage of how declassified FBI memos exposed a secret probe tied to the Comey firing fight.

3D-print texts and a father who intervened

Separate messages from February 9, 2023, put a sharper edge on the phone record. An individual the FBI called an “unknown contact” messaged Crooks with a direct question.

"Did you 3D print the parts?"

Fox News reported Crooks’s reply in the same exchange: “Yes, except for the fan blades.” That answer sits more than a year before the Butler rally shooting and shows pre-attack technical talk with someone the bureau still has not publicly named.

Matthew Crooks, the gunman’s father, told investigators about an earlier homemade weapon effort. “Using carbon fiber plastic, a dryer and a toaster oven, Thomas did once create a Glock 19,” he said. Other reporting on the same records notes the father stopped the use of that build, and that Thomas fired only one round out of fear the gun would explode.

Just The News reported that the unredacted February 2023 texts were deemed pertinent to the investigation, and that the pair’s earlier contact included traded Christmas gifts in 2022 plus talk about college classes. Closeness matters in any conspiracy screen. Investigators still have not publicly identified that contact.

Major FBI cases often turn on what agents seize, preserve, and later disclose under oath or in court, a pattern also visible when agents seized devices in a high-profile political misconduct probe.

Drone flights over Pittsburgh venues and Butler

FBI laboratory analysis of a drone, dated July 19, 2024, shows agents extracted 40 images and eight flight logs. The images and logs run from February 6 to February 27, 2024, in the Pittsburgh area. Supporting coverage of the same files places those photos over PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium.

Seven flights occurred around Allegheny-West. The eighth flight was over Butler on July 13, 2024, the day of the shooting. The device had been powered on 15 times. That last flight lands on the attack date itself and raises basic surveillance questions the public file still does not answer in open text.

Authorities have not publicly released a full narrative explaining why those stadium flights happened months earlier, or what the Butler flight captured on July 13. The production confirms the logs and image count. It does not settle motive or targeting analysis in plain language.

Forensic detail of this kind is the sort of material FBI specialists routinely walk through in other criminal cases, including when an FBI psychiatrist delivered key testimony challenging a defendant’s mental-state claim.

January 7 intel chain texts and the FOIA clock

The records also include texts under a “January 7 Intel Chain” heading. Those messages reference “two CIA bomb techs” assisting at a pipe-bomb scene and “several CIA dog teams on standby.” The year and full scene context are not stated in the release description. Investigators have not publicly tied that chain, in the pages described, to a finished public theory of the Butler plot.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton framed the stakes around both the redactions and the human cost still unfolding after Butler.

"These latest records reveal more pieces of the puzzle surrounding Thomas Crooks. The FBI should stop the slow drip of heavily redacted records and immediately provide the full investigative record, especially since the death last week of James Copenhaver, who was severely injured from being shot during the assassination attempt on President Trump."

James Copenhaver is described as a rallygoer wounded in the attack and as having died “last week” in the Judicial Watch comments. The precise calendar date of his death is not given in the package. The attack also killed Corey Comperatore, a fact carried in the supporting coverage of the same records fight.

The full file is said to run roughly 75,000 pages. At about 500 pages a month, production would take 12 years. That math is why FOIA plaintiffs treat pace as a substance issue, not a clerical one. Long-running FBI manhunts and document wars show the same institutional tension between investigative control and public accounting, including after the bureau captured an alleged Medicare fraud ringleader following years on the run.

Trump’s file claim and the bureau’s lone-actor line

In a September Truth Social post, Donald Trump said 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. That is his claim, stated in his words as carried in the records coverage.

The FBI has maintained Crooks acted alone. The newly forced pages do not, on the public descriptions available, adjudicate that conclusion one way or the other. They do show a redacted counterparty in a months-long chat, 3D-print parts talk with an “unknown contact,” a Hong Kong DHL notice, stadium drone imagery, and a Butler flight on the day of the shooting.

Each item is a lead category, not a courtroom finding. What remains missing is the unredacted identity of the chat recipient, the blacked-out incoming texts, the complete drone image set in public form, and a full accounting of how agents weighed those threads against the lone-actor position.

Judicial Watch’s FOIA suit is the procedural lever. The July 2025 filing came after the FBI failed to answer the request. The 249 pages are a slice, not the vault. Large FBI enforcement stories often move from sealed work to public reckoning only under sustained legal pressure, the same dynamic seen when agents dismantled organized crime networks in sweeping California raids.

What investigators still must put on the record

Investigators will need to determine, on the public record, who sat on the other side of the May 2023 to January 2024 chat and why every incoming line remains blacked out. They will need to determine how the February 2023 3D-print exchange connects, if at all, to later attack planning. They will need to determine what the eight drone flights were doing over Pittsburgh venues and Butler, and what the 15 power-ons mean for pre-attack reconnaissance.

They will also need to determine the full context of the “January 7 Intel Chain” references to CIA bomb techs and dog teams, including the year and the pipe-bomb scene those texts describe. No public results in this production close those questions. The documents confirm the data was collected and reviewed. They do not publish the finished answers.

For readers who watched Butler live, the stakes are not abstract. A former president and then-candidate was nearly killed. A rallygoer died that day. Another wounded man has since died. The country is owed a complete file, not a 12-year drip of pages with the other half of the conversation painted black.

When the government holds the evidence after an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, delay and heavy redaction are not neutral acts. They are choices, and choices have consequences for public trust in equal justice under law.