Nearly two years after the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the American public is still left with more questions than answers, and that frustration surfaced plainly during FBI Director Kash Patel’s tense exchange with Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Tuesday.
The issue was not whether the FBI investigated the shooting, but whether Americans have been told enough to reasonably understand who Thomas Matthew Crooks was and why he opened fire at a presidential rally.
Baier’s question cut to the heart of lingering public unease. The shooter is dead, the event was historic, and yet the picture remains incomplete. Patel rejected the premise outright, insisting the FBI has released everything it can legally disclose.
He emphasized that the bureau has provided more than 40,000 pages of documents to Congress, a figure he said represents a dramatic increase over prior administrations. From Patel’s perspective, the bureau has gone above and beyond, constrained not by secrecy for secrecy’s sake, but by law and procedure.
That explanation, however, highlights the very tension fueling skepticism. Patel repeatedly stressed that the FBI is bound by legal limits and ongoing investigative standards, even when a suspect is deceased.
He made clear that disclosure decisions ultimately flow through the Department of Justice, not the director’s personal discretion. In doing so, Patel framed the issue as one of institutional consistency, arguing that the FBI treats all major cases the same, whether involving Jeffrey Epstein, Charlie Kirk, or the Butler shooter.
But consistency is not the same as clarity. Nearly two years on, investigators have still not identified a motive. What the public knows about Crooks comes in fragments: he was registered as a Republican, yet donated to a progressive turnout group; his encrypted phone reportedly yielded no political manifesto but did reveal disturbing and banal final searches; a threatening online post initially tied to him turned out to belong to someone else. Each revelation seems to close one door while opening another.
Further complicating matters are reports that raise uncomfortable questions without definitive answers. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project flagged device-tracking data suggesting that someone frequently present at Crooks’ home and workplace also appeared near an FBI office in Washington.
The FBI has not substantiated any connection, but the mere existence of such reports feeds public suspicion in an environment already saturated with mistrust.
Patel has stood firm on one key conclusion: Crooks acted alone. That finding, reached after an investigation involving hundreds of agents and more than a thousand interviews worldwide, is meant to be definitive. Yet for many Americans, “acted alone” feels less like a conclusion and more like a placeholder, especially when motive remains unknown and details continue to dribble out through anonymous sources rather than formal briefings.
