Thomas Crooks and the Parallels Drawn to Kirk's Case

Showing 43 Thomas Crooks videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024, and his case resurfaced repeatedly in coverage of Charlie Kirk's assassination as commentators looked for patterns between the two shootings. Tucker Carlson's most substantive contribution was documentary rather than speculative: he obtained hundreds of YouTube comments from an account he attributed to Crooks showing years of violent rhetoric and a shift from professed Trump supporter to more radical politics, and argued the FBI possessed this material yet told Congress Crooks had no discernible online presence or ideology, a discrepancy Carlson called a cover-up rather than an oversight. Other creators pushed the comparison into more speculative territory, tracing a lineage from CIA mind-control programs like MK-Ultra and Cold War-era Gladio networks through disputed cases like Sirhan Sirhan's shooting of Robert Kennedy to build a broader theory about intelligence-agency involvement in both the Crooks and Kirk shootings, treating the pattern itself as evidence even without a documented connection between the two men. Andrew Bustamante, a former CIA officer who has otherwise pushed back on several Kirk assassination theories, said the Crooks case shared genuine unanswered questions with Kirk's, including gaps in publicly released motive and technical capability, though he stopped short of endorsing a connection between the two.