News/Commentary

GOP Rep not convinced Trump shooter was lone wolf, more details that emerge, the more questions he has

August 22, 2024 | | Print Article

Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, a Republican, suspects Thomas Crooks didn’t act alone when he tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump last month.

As one of the congressional Republicans investigating the shooting, Waltz told the Daily Mail that Crooks’ motivation still remains unknown and that he’s personally worried that a foreign country or some other group may have been involved.

Moreover, Waltz revealed that he’s asked law enforcement to explain how they so confidently were able to conclude that Crooks was a lone wolf when so much remains unknown.

“I don’t understand, and I don’t have any answers yet to help me understand how the [Secret] Service and DHS came out so quickly and said – and I think the FBI as well, but I’ll have to check that – and said, he operated alone,” he said. “How do you know that mere days into your investigation?”

“You can’t tell us his motive, but you could tell us he operated alone? You can’t get into these encrypted overseas accounts, but you can tell us he acted alone? So, I don’t buy that yet,” he added.

“The more we get into it, the more questions I have. It’s really what’s coming out around it that is so disturbing. And for me, the thing that’s most disturbing is that we have ongoing plots from Iran to take out a former president, leading candidate, and that a Pakistani national was just arrested after making a down payment for hitmen, and it’s barely even being covered in the news,” he continued.

Waltz is also concerned about the fact that Crooks, 20, was able to piece together multiple explosives with remote detonators. The FBI reportedly found explosives in Crooks’ car, as well as his home.

“I don’t know of many 19-year-old kids who could make multiple IEDs with a remote detonator on their own,” he said. “Why didn’t that get picked up if he’s searching that online or buying literature on how to do that?”

According to Waltz, more briefings with the FBI remain ahead, but he’s not confident he’ll learn anything new or important.

What’s known, he said, is that a number of new details have emerged that make the attack seem that much more ominous.

“That includes the revelation of the Iranian plot to assassinate Trump around the same time as the Crooks attempt,” he told the Daily Mail.

That and the fact that Crooks had, prior to his death, encrypted messaging accounts on platforms based in Germany, Belgium, and New Zealand.

“We still haven’t learned a lot, we haven’t learned that much about those overseas accounts,” Waltz said. “Why does a 19-year-old kid who is a healthcare aide need encrypted platforms not even based in the United States, but based abroad where most terrorist organizations know it is harder for our law enforcement to get into? That’s a question I’ve had since day one.”

“They need to be releasing information as they come across it because this wasn’t an isolated incident. The threats are continually Iran’s threats,” he added.

The latest publicly released finding from this case is that Crooks had been casually walking through the crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania hours before he opened fire and tried to assassinate Trump.

“[A] short clip, released by the clothing company Iron Clad USA, shows Crooks at 4:26 p.m. dressed in shorts and a ‘Demolitia’ T-shirt walking past a line of vendors selling Trump merchandise ahead of the July 13 rally,” Fox News notes. “He was wearing the same T-shirt when he opened fire on Trump and is not carrying anything in the eerie video.”

The owner of the video, Joe Tomko of Iron Clad USA, told Fox News that he and his family had been promoting new merchandise in the rally’s “vendors row.”

“This was the area where we spent the day promoting our hats and speaking to wonderful people, as a majority of attendees parked their cars in a connected large grass field, exited their vehicles, and walked past vendors row to the security entrance,” he said.

Vivek Saxena
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