On July 22, 2024, nine days after Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI released his body to a funeral home. Within a day, the 20-year-old's remains were cremated. An anonymous donor paid for it after his family said they couldn't afford to give him a funeral.
Who was the anonymous donor? The FBI refuses to say.
Newly released federal files revealed the shocking detail buried at the end of an FBI interview summary with the Crooks family's lawyer: an unnamed individual quietly funded the cremation. No name attached. No explanation offered. No congressional notification before the body was destroyed.
The FBI says it completed its examination first. Collected DNA. Hair. Fingernail clippings. Blood samples. Checked the boxes on their internal protocols and handed the remains over. Case closed, body burned, move along.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana — who served on the House task force examining the Butler attack — have been pulling threads on this investigation for over two years. The cremation fits a pattern that keeps expanding. The FBI's own files on Butler have gone missing. Key evidence has been slow-walked or withheld from congressional investigators. And now we learn the physical remains of the shooter were incinerated on someone else's dime, with no public accounting of who or why.
The federal documents also shed light on Crooks' operational security. He used CyberGhost VPN and the Brave browser to mask his online activity. He had packages delivered under the pseudonym "Bob Dole" — packages that contained rifle parts, tools, and items designed to increase weapon capacity. The rifle used in the attack was an AR-15-style Panther Arms. His father was retired or unemployed at the time. His mother was on leave from work.
A 20-year-old with VPN-level tradecraft, a pseudonym for weapons deliveries, and enough planning to get within a trigger pull of killing a former president. And when it was over, somebody made sure his body couldn't be examined again.
In any other investigation — any case where a gunman nearly killed a major political figure — the physical evidence would be preserved indefinitely. Locked in a federal evidence facility. Available for future forensic review as technology improves, as new questions emerge, as congressional oversight demands access. That's standard procedure when the stakes are this high.
Instead, a donor nobody can name paid for a cremation nobody in Congress was told about, destroying evidence nobody can recover. The FBI had the body for nine days before releasing it. They had every legal tool available to retain custody or mandate preservation. They chose not to.
The cremation didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened alongside lost files, withheld evidence, and an investigation that has produced more questions in two years than answers. Every time Congress pulls one thread, another one frays.
Somewhere, someone wrote a check to ensure Thomas Matthew Crooks' body would never be examined again. The FBI knows who. They're just not sharing.