The release of heavily redacted FBI records showing that a sheriff’s deputy exchanged emails with would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks before the July 13, 2024 shooting — as Raw Story reported — sent MAGA world into overdrive this weekend, with commentators across the political spectrum demanding answers about what those emails said and why the documents remain concealed.
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MeidasTouch, the liberal political media outlet, reached nearly 500,000 views with a post summarizing the Judicial Watch release, noting that “the records remain heavily redacted, concealing the nature of the communications.”
Kaelan Deese, a political reporter, called it “a bombshell in their Thomas Crooks FOIA fight,” and flagged the recovery of the gray remote device with an antenna from Crooks’ pocket as a detail warranting further scrutiny.
Sara Gonzales, a conservative commentator at The Blaze, kept her focus on the emails: “The public deserves to know why and when Crooks contacted law enforcement.”
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Not everyone agreed the word “exchange” was warranted. Heather Champion, a conservative social media personality, urged precision: “I don’t know if ‘exchange’ is correct but they did receive emails from Thomas Crooks before the July 13 Trump rally.”
Left-wing podcaster Jimmy Dore, who has previously raised questions about the official account of the shooting, used the records to revisit a string of unresolved details. “So you’re telling me there’s some nefarious stuff surrounding the supposed assassination attempt of Trump?” he wrote. “You mean the one where the cops admitted to seeing him THREE TIMES in a restricted area with a scope and a backpack and yet never did anything? The one where a bunch of people in the crowd saw the shooter on the roof but no cops or secret service officers or sheriff’s deputies or State troopers saw him?”
Shane Cashman, a journalist, offered the most pointed response, cataloging the same unanswered questions in a sardonic thread while warning against the leap to conspiracy. “There’s literally nothing weird about Thomas Matthew Crooks emailing a deputy from Butler, PA before the assassination attempt,” he wrote, before listing item after item: that Crooks practiced at the same range Homeland Security used, that local police and Secret Service spotted him with a rangefinder and texted about him for over an hour before he climbed the roof, that no Secret Service drones were flying that day while Crooks allegedly had one, that his house had no trash or silverware and his body was cremated ten days later before Congress could view it. “This is like when people say the CIA was shadowing Oswald before he, and he alone, shot JFK.”
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What nobody knows, still, is what those two emails said.
