(Ken Silva, Headline USA) CBS News reported Friday that it’s obtained “hundreds” of college emails and other academic records that belonged to Thomas Crooks, the man accused of nearly assassinating Donald Trump last July in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“Emails, essays and other documents reviewed by CBS News are offering a fresh glimpse into the mind of a young man who was simultaneously planning two irreconcilable futures,” the outlet reported. “In the hundreds of college emails obtained by CBS News, Crooks rarely veers into personal territory, with a few exceptions.”
While touting all the records it obtained, CBS only released a select few. One Jan. 31, 2024, email from his Community College of Allegheny County account shows that Crooks inquired about two gallons of nitromethane he ordered two weeks earlier from the company Hyper Fuels. That fuel may have been part of his plot to build the explosives allegedly found in his vehicle and in his room after the July 13 shooting.
CBS News reported that it's obtained "hundreds" of Thomas Crooks' emails and other academic records, but it's only released ONE email.
Cue up another Pulitzer Prize!Also pictured here is a 3D chess board Crooks made for his blind mother. A 3D printer was found in his room… pic.twitter.com/mOnfABKE4Q
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) May 26, 2025
“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,” Crooks said in the email.
CBS reported that Crooks made his initial order using one of his encrypted accounts as opposed to his college email—but the news outlet didn’t explain how it knew that.
The rest of the records described by CBS have no apparent connection to his purported assassination plot.
The records do further demonstrate that Crooks was a highly intelligence engineering student. For instance, Crooks, whose mother is blind, designed and 3D-printed a unique chessboard.
“The prototype included Braille labeling along the rows and columns, and alternating ‘raised squares with peg-holes to prevent the pieces from being knocked over,’ as Crooks described it,” CBS reported. “Former engineering professor Todd Landree recalls the small department’s staff marveling at the project.”
CBS also cited a college essay Crooks wrote about the 1986 Challenger disaster, in which he blamed NASA’s administrators for “trying to live up to the lofty promises they made to Congress which they were never going to be able to fulfill.”
Crooks also reportedly wrote about Trump once, criticizing him for withdrawing from the Iran deal.
“To prevent hostile nations from acquiring nuclear technology, America and its allies can stop sales of the technology to those nations and can enter into mutually beneficial agreements like the Iran deal, which effectively halted that nations (sic) nuclear program until President Trump withdrew from it,” Crooks wrote.
He also reportedly wrote about Joe Biden once, reviewing a 2021 Washington Post column about the then-President’s student-loan forgiveness program.
“Liberals also tend to be in favor of free community college and, in fact, free college in general,” Crooks reportedly wrote. “So it is very interesting to see an author try to convince the other side using their pre-exisiting (sic) political concerns rather than trying to impress their own on to them.”
CBS hasn’t explained how it obtained the above-mentioned records. The non-profit America First Legal filed a records request for Crooks’s academic records last year, including all of his emails, but was denied on the grounds that the request was too broad.
Headline USA has also filed a records request for Crooks’s emails.
Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) submitted a grand jury subpoena it received from the DOJ in its fight w/ @America1stLegal to keep Thomas Crooks' academic records secret. CCAC argued that it couldn't disclose the records because of the grand jury probe.
In a win for… pic.twitter.com/czscLSoZbX— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) December 16, 2024
Community College of Allegheny County also said it couldn’t disclose the records because they were subject to a federal grand jury investigation—suggesting that others may have been investigated in relation to the July 13 Butler shooting. Headline USA reported about the grand jury investigation in August.
Meanwhile, the July grand jury probe apparently didn’t yield any indictments. Butler residents are lobbying their district attorney, Richard Goldinger, to launch his own grand jury investigation, but Goldinger has refused to do so.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
