A new report digs into the online life of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who tried to kill President Donald Trump, and suggests authorities left key digital evidence out of public briefings.

A fresh investigative piece says Crooks’ online history shows a disturbing shift and a trail of violent rhetoric that was largely absent from public reports. The uncovered footprint spans youth years, multiple platforms and a clear ideological flip in 2020. That gap raises hard questions about what the FBI and other agencies knew and why some findings were not publicly disclosed.

The would-be assassin struck at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, and since then his motive and background have been under scrutiny. Officials have been tight-lipped about many details, and this new accounting says important material remained hidden until an outside source surfaced it. The revelations focus on posts and accounts from when Crooks was a teenager, showing an evolution that matters to investigators and the public alike.

Then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress after the July 13, 2024, attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history that pointed to a motive or political ideology.

A week later, Wray’s deputy Paul Abbate told Congress that comments posted on one of Crooks’ social media accounts “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”

Thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, we can see that Abbate misled Congress by omission, because he left out an entire section of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.

Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.

The online interactions from when Crooks was ages 15 to 17 give us a better understanding of his evolution into an assassin, and invite more questions about what — or who — reversed his ideology.

“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” says the source. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”

The Post’s reporting says Crooks left an extensive digital trail promoting assassination ideas and praising mass violence, material that reportedly did not make it into the December congressional report. He appears to have been a strong Trump supporter as a teen, calling Trump “the literal definition of Patriotism” in 2019. Those early posts also included violent attacks on Democratic officials and immigrants, with one entry saying he wished “a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-Trump congresswoman who don’t deserve anything this country [sic] has given them.”

By early 2020 the tone shifted dramatically. His timeline shows the first public criticism of Trump on Jan. 23, 2020, followed by increasingly hostile comments that labeled supporters as cult-like and accused Trump of racism. Within months he was faulting the president’s pandemic response and openly arguing that the administration had been too slow to act. Those months of ideological movement are central to understanding what happened later.

The first time he criticized Trump was on Jan. 23, 2020, when he commented on a video of law professor Jonathan Turley talking about Trump’s first impeachment.

“Keep in mind the only reason we may know about any of this is because of Trump’s stupidity,” Crooks wrote.

He started describing Trump supporters as a cult: “How can you people call others sheep, but you are do [too] brainwashed to realize how dumb you are,” he wrote on Feb. 26, 2020. “I mean literally you guys sound like a cult at times.”

The same day he described Trump as “racist.”

By April 2020, Crooks was constantly criticizing Trump’s pandemic response, saying he was “too slow and everything he’s doing now should have been done.”

Investigators and readers are left with uncomfortable facts: the suspect reportedly suggested “terrorism style attacks,” talked about planting bombs in government buildings, and had online ties to extremist individuals. The reporting also notes Crooks experimented with identity and subcultures, reportedly adopting they/them pronouns on DeviantArt and spending time in “furry” communities. Alleged connections to neo-Nazi groups and encouragement from foreign extremists are part of the picture being presented.

All of this prompts direct questions for law enforcement: did agencies see this material and not disclose it, or did they miss it entirely? If the Post’s account is accurate, why were so many explicit warnings and violent statements absent from public records and congressional testimony? Those are serious gaps that need answers from the agencies responsible for protecting candidates and the public.

Whatever the full truth turns out to be, the newly surfaced material changes how Crooks’ path to violence is understood and forces a reexamination of what investigators shared with Congress and the public. The stakes are political and practical, and the missing pieces demand clear explanations from the institutions involved.