It has been the better part of a year since Thomas Crooks tried to assassinate now-President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania — and we’re somehow just learning that he attempted to acquire explosives that could, depending on how they were used, take down an entire building.
The revelation came as part of a CBS News report last week with the title “Trump shooter Thomas Crooks’ emails reveal a student dreaming of a bright future. And contemplating a violent attack.” Gotta love that order.
Indeed, the look at his emails provided CBS’ writers with one of those opens only a feature writer could love:
Thomas Matthew Crooks had a lot on his mind in January 2024.
The 20-year-old who, six months later, would open fire at President Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally — striking his ear and killing an audience member — was busy polishing his applications to transfer from community college to a four-year engineering program.
Crooks was gathering transcripts and asking friends to review his personal statement.
He was also designing a bomb.
Oh. Yeah, kind of an important fact to throw into the mix.
Apparently, Crooks had placed an order for “more than two gallons of nitromethane from an online speciality fuel retailer using an encrypted email account.”
“Twelve days later Crooks’ purchase hadn’t shipped and he wanted to know why,” they reported.
So, he emailed the seller, Hyperfuels, to ask when it would arrive on Jan. 31, 2024.
“Hello, my name is Thomas. I placed an order on your website on January 19. I have not received any updates of the order shipping out yet and I was wondering if you still have it and when I can expect it to come,” he asked.
“Crooks used his community college email account to inquire about shipping, one of the few operational missteps that has allowed for a rare look into the dark side of this ambitious young student,” CBS reported.
Hyperfuels had been asked about the purchase last year and said merely that it was “aware of the whole situation.” It did not comment further for the piece.
But let’s talk about other stuff about Crooks! He got a 1530 on his SATs but had trouble with grammar and spelling. His favorite season was fall (according to an essay on the email account). He was a good student trying to save money by going to community college before transferring. He thought Trump’s nuclear weapons policies were misguided, and …
So, can we talk a bit more about that bomb stuff again? Because autumn is great and even 1530 SAT scorers can make grammatical errors here and there, but I think two gallons of nitromethane and whether or not it actually shipped to Crooks is more than a little important.
We here at The Western Journal did a little bit of Grok AI research into what could be accomplished with that. If he were to use it to make a backpack-sized bomb, say, it would have a lethal radius of up to roughly 30 feet.
However, let’s say he were to build a larger device with nitromethane as a starter and ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in fertilizer — and in vehicle-borne bombs like the one that brought down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Only about 400 pounds of ammonium nitrate would need to be added to the nitromethane to make a bomb with a blast radius capable of destroying a small building.
Now, again, this depends on how much knowledge Crooks was able to obtain about explosives and how adroitly he was able to put such a device together. However, this apparently wasn’t a dumb young man. So, what’s the story there?
That’s what Pennsylvania lawyer Wally Zimolong would like to know. He’s the litigator who pursued Crooks’ record on behalf of America First Legal, a nonprofit that was founded by now-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
“I think it raises a lot of important questions. Were they investigating anyone else? Are they still investigating?” Zimolong asked. “A year later we still don’t know enough.”
No, but we know that fall was Crooks’ favorite season. (“He waxed poetic about the fall weather and asked, ‘who doesn’t love the changing color of the leaves?’” CBS News noted.)
Again, this is the closest that anyone has come to assassinating a president or a presidential candidate since the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981. Forty-three years passed between attempts — a veritable lifetime, given America’s turbulent history.
And for the most part, this attempt — including the shooter, the bungled Secret Service protection, and any other plots he may have hatched — has been mostly forgotten or memory-holed.
Even CBS News, reporting on the strange dichotomy between Thomas Crooks, A-student who loves sweater weather and Thomas Crooks, attempted assassin, seems to institutionally shrug: Well, what do you expect us to find? is the report’s subtext.
I don’t know — how about less foliage, more where-the-heck-did-that-nitromethane-go reporting? Can the institution from which Edward Murrow, William Shirer, and Walter Cronkite once sent their dispatches be roused to care a bit more about this?
Dan Rather once pressed the White House on a daily basis during the Watergate scandal to get the whole truth. Can CBS News not do the same now with the authorities and Thomas Crooks, when it’s crystal clear we aren’t being told the whole story?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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