Thomas Crooks ordered rifle parts off Amazon under the name "Bob Dole." He used encrypted email, coached his own father on VPN software, and talked to himself. His family couldn't afford a funeral.

Two years after the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt on President Trump, we're finding out more and more details like these about the young man who tried to assassinate President Trump in 2024.

The Senate released new intelligence records this week that detail the Crooks family's behavior before and after the shooting in ways that raise an obvious question: why is any of this new? The documents paint a picture of a young man whose paranoia and obsessions were visible to everyone except the people whose job it was to stop him.

This week we learned Thomas Crooks adopted the pseudonym "Bob Dole" while ordering large numbers of Amazon packages, including "parts, tools, and items to increase the capacity of his rifle." The paranoia started after his father Matthew Crooks's Citizens Bank checking account was hacked with fraudulent BetMGM charges. Thomas decided pseudonyms were the answer.

His father told him it wouldn't work — the charge still hits a bank account under his real name. Thomas ignored him. According to the New York Post, "Thomas dismissed his dad's logic and continued using pseudonyms to make his online purchases, believing he was shielding his accounts from being compromised. He also coached Matthew how to use identity-obscuring software like CyberGhost VPN and the Bravenet Browser — which Thomas would argue made them 'less likely to be compromised by outside actors.'" Matthew Crooks further recalled his son using multiple privacy-focused encrypted email providers, including GMX and Mailfence.

So a twenty-year-old with no friends, no interest in girls, and an obsession with firearms was ordering rifle-capacity upgrades under a fake name while running encrypted communications through multiple platforms. His own father described him as emotionless since birth, a loner who frequently talked to himself.

None of this raised red flags with family members, according to the documents.

Matthew Crooks took early retirement after the shooting. His mother, Mary Crooks, went on leave from work to "process the situation." The family could not afford a funeral for their son. That's a detail that sits oddly next to the volume of Amazon purchases and privacy software subscriptions, and nobody in the federal record seems curious about the gap.

The FBI spent two years telling us they couldn't establish a motive. What they apparently could establish — the aliases, the encrypted email, the rifle upgrades, the total social isolation, the emotional flatness from childhood — just never made it into the public record until the Senate forced the documents loose.

That's the part that doesn't require a conspiracy theory to find troubling. A kid orders gun parts under a dead senator's name, runs his family through operational security training, and exhibits every behavioral red flag short of a written manifesto. The information existed. The agencies had it. The public didn't — for two years.

We still don't have a motive. We still don't have a satisfactory explanation for the security failures at Butler. What we have now is a clearer picture of Thomas Crooks, delivered on the Senate's timeline instead of the FBI's.

The documents were always there. The question is who decided we didn't need to see them.