(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The FBI has at least some 75,000 unreleased records pertaining to Thomas Crooks, the man who allegedly tried assassinating Donald Trump at his July 13, 2024, campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, court records show.
That information comes from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed last July by the transparency organization Judicial Watch, which is seeking all of the FBI’s records on Crooks.
In January, the FBI admitted to having 45,000 records responsive to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit. A month later, that number grew to 75,000.
The FBI initially said it had 45K pages of records related to Thomas Crooks.
That number has since increased to 75,000.
And yet, Patel and Bongino say they've disclosed everything. https://t.co/k1qwzH0c9y pic.twitter.com/LDsmvhBi8o— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) May 16, 2026
In response to the lawsuit, the FBI has started making monthly disclosures. To date, the bureau has released four productions of a few dozen pages apiece—200 pages in total.
The FBI said in an April 20 status report that it has sent “narrowing proposals” to Judicial Watch since the number of records is so large. It’s unclear whether Judicial Watch is receptive to that proposal. The parties are set to file another status report on June 22.
Many of the pages released so far are highly redacted. Some are being withheld altogether, either because they’re sealed by the court or because the FBI is citing FOIA exemptions—including redactions to hide the identities of FBI informants.
The sealed records may be related to the DOJ’s grand jury investigation, which was intended to find out Crooks’s motive and whether he had help. As part of that investigation, the DOJ subpoenaed Crooks’s internet and financial records. No witnesses were called to the grand jury.
In December, a judge issued an order that allowed the DOJ to provide those records to Congress. But it’s not clear whether the same records would be subject to FOIA disclosure.
Members of Congress have claimed that the FBI is stonewalling them, but FBI Director Kashyap Patel insists that the bureau provided them everything.
“Congress is accusing us of not turning over all of this stuff — but all of this stuff doesn’t exist. It is an empty narrative they’re firing into a vacuum,” Patel told Fox News in November. “The very limited information we have not turned over is respective to victims’ rights. There isn’t some trove of documents that we haven’t sent over there.”
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
