(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In a rare public interview, the widow of the firefighter who was murdered at the July 13, 2024, Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania said she believes others were involved in the shooting that day.
Speaking to the New York Times, the widow, Helen Comperatore, specifically mentioned former President Joe Biden as being implicated in the assassination attempt against Donald Trump—and, by extension, the murder of her husband, Corey.
“That’s why I didn’t take Biden’s call: I thought he set something up,” Comperatore said, referencing the fact that she declined to speak to Biden after Butler.
“I do not believe that this kid just got out of bed that day and decided to come over there and kill the president,” she said at another point during the interview. “I believe that he was involved with someone greater than him, that worked with him and probably offered him money to do this, and I would like to know what that entailed.”
The Times interview is Comperatore’s first public comments since around the time of the first anniversary of Butler. At that time, she said that then-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said the bureau was about to release more information on the event. Bongino didn’t keep his promise—the FBI has released a few dozen pages of documents in response to a lawsuit from the transparency group Judicial Watch, but that’s about it.
Around the same time her comments were published, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna also said she believes Butler was an “inside job.”
“I don’t even think about it…”
That statement hit me.
The assassination attempts on Donald Trump have been jarring—especially the Butler, PA J13 attack, which came dangerously close to taking his life and did take Corey Comperatore’s.
But maybe Trump isn’t just dismissing it… https://t.co/1rrio1kHPz pic.twitter.com/1lekLbUFPx
— JaneDoeUKnow (@MsJaneDoeUKnow) May 3, 2026
Headline USA has published more information about the assassination attempt than any other outlet in the world—including Thomas Crooks’s autopsy and toxicology reports, his some of his online metadata, and his college emails, along with police radio communications and much more—and has uncovered no evidence that Biden was directly involved in the assassination attempt.
However, numerous questions from that event linger. Along with the fact that the Secret Service left the rooftop used by alleged gunman, Crooks, wide open, there’s the fact that the Butler rally was the first time Secret Service snipers protected someone who wasn’t in office. Those same snipers waited 15 seconds before responding to the would-be assassin’s gunfire (it was a local cop who shot him in the first six seconds).
There’s also the fact that the Secret Service allowed Trump to take the stage despite knowing that there was a suspicious person with a rangefinder on the loose, as well as the fact that the Secret Service didn’t say anything over the radios about someone being on the rooftop—despite being informed of this by local police.
Then, there’s the would-be assassin himself. The FBI initially said that Crooks did not interact with others online, but conservative media personality Tucker Carlson proved otherwise late last year, when he released correspondence between Crooks and a neo-Nazi. The two were talking in a YouTube comments section about committing violence against the government, which Carlson and others argue should have put Crooks on the government’s radar. It’s also unclear how Crooks learned to make anfo bombs.
FBI Director Kashyap Patel has said there’s not much more to know about what happened at Butler, but the bureau has declined Headline USA’s interview request.
The widow of the firefighter murdered at Butler said in June that she met with Dan Bongino, who told her the FBI was going to update the public on the case in a "couple weeks."
Deputy Dan also told her that the shooter acted alone and the bureau handled all the evidence properly. pic.twitter.com/VqyRiQxKjQ— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) August 31, 2025
While Comperatore and others still have suspicions that others were involved, she did denounce those who think that Trump “staged” the event.
“Like any of that’s staged. I mean, how? Why would you think that the president would stage taking a bullet? I mean, that’s insane,” she said. “I’m not an actress, I never was. I’m a small town country girl.”
“That scream you hear the entire time,” she added, “that was my daughter.”
To Comperatore’s point, the bullets, blood, bodies and shrapnel were all very much real. As for questions about Trump’s ear, plastic surgeons have explained that yes, it could have healed without a scar if it were just grazed. Meanwhile, Butler truthers have yet to articulate a cogent explanation for how Trump could have staged his own assassination attempt with the complicity of the Biden Justice Department, Secret Service and FBI, as well as with state and local authorities.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
