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Thomas Crooks, who attempted the assassination of President Donald Trump in 2024, had a sprawling digital footprint of violent threats, a furry fetish, and they/them pronouns, all of which the FBI ignored, according to a bombshell New York Times report.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin of President Donald Trump who opened fire at Trump’s 2024 Butler rally, maintained a sprawling online presence marked by sexualised “furry” content, “they/them” pronouns, violent fantasies, and a rapid anti-Trump ideological swing that federal officials never disclosed, according to a new report by the New York Post.

On 13 July, 2024, Crooks fired off eight shots from a nearby rooftop, grazing President Trump’s ear, killing 50-year-old rallygoer Corey Comperatore, and wounding two others, before being shot dead by a Secret Service Service Sniper.

Testifying before Congress shortly after the assassination attempt, Biden-era FBI Director Chris Wray claimed the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history to indicate a political ideology or motive.

Wray’s deputy, Paul Abbate, informed Congress that the FBI assessed Crooks’ social media presence as containing “antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature”.

However, according to NYP reporter Miranda Devine:

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.

“The official narrative claimed [Crooks] acted alone and without a clear motive, ideology or digital footprint,” Devine writes, adding:

Yet the source found reams of information that shows Crooks “was not simply some unknowable lone actor… He left a digital trail of violent threats, extremist ideology and admiration for mass violence. He spoke openly of political assassination, posted under his real name and was even flagged by other users who mentioned law enforcement in their replies. Despite this, his account remained active for more than five years — and was only removed the day after the shooting.

“None of this online activity was referenced in the final congressional report released in December 2024, making this even more troubling,” the source said.

Crooks’ Furry Fetish and They/Them Pronouns

Crooks first emerged online in 2019 as a fervent Trump supporter, hailing the 45th President as “the literal definition of Patriotism” while issuing threats against Democrats and members of the left-wing congressional faction known as “the Squad”.

However, Crooks abruptly reversed course in early 2020, first attacking Trump over his impeachment, then denouncing his supporters as a “cult”, calling Trump a “racist”, and blasting his pandemic response as far too slow.

“Through the summer of 2020, Crooks’ online rhetoric became increasingly radical and violent,” Devine continues, highlighting an August rant in which Crooks fantasised about “terrorism style attacks” against the US government and the assassination of politicians and military leaders.

According to Devine, Crooks was also “exploring gender identity” and had developed a fascination with “furries”:

Like alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, Crooks appears to have been interested in “furries” and exploring gender identity.

He described himself with the pronouns “they/them” on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for “furry” art and the “furry” community. (A furry is someone who has an interest in anthropomorphised animal characters, often as a sexual fetish.)

Two accounts linked to Crooks’ primary email were found on DeviantArt, under usernames “epicmicrowave” and “theepicmicrowave.” The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.

It’s incredible how many mass shooters and political assassins have been mixed up with transgender identities and furry sex fetishes, and how much the government has tried to conceal their path to radicalization

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) November 17, 2025

Questions Remain Over FBI Failures

Devine’s source uncovered 17 of Crooks’ social media accounts across platforms like YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Discord, Google Play and Quora.

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

Among Crooks’ online contacts was one “Willy Tepes,” a known affiliate of the Nordic Resistance Movement, a Norwegian neo-Nazi group designated by the State Department as a terrorist organisation.

Tepes reinforced Crooks’ extremist views and invoked the Maoist maxim, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun” — a phrase Crooks repeated on multiple occasions.

More than a year after the Butler attack, Tepes told another user that he had been approached by both Russian and American intelligence, writing:

People who ask you to contact them when they just as easily could contact you, are Feds. This is how they avoid entrapment. Both American and Russian intelligence does this. I have chatted to both.

Crooks vanished from online activity shortly after his interactions with Tepes, Devine reports.

“It is hard to believe the FBI and/or Secret Service missed Crooks,” she concludes. “The question is, what did they do about him?”

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Images courtesy of Bethel Park School District and Wikimedia Commons.