The Crooked Story Around Thomas Crooks

My latest in Skeptic

The attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, remains one of the most consequential security failures in recent political history. It deserves, and still lacks, a full public accounting. For months, legitimate questions have lingered about the background of the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, and the lapses that allowed a 20-year-old with a rifle to reach an unsecured rooftop less than 200 yards from a former President and then current front-runner for the nation’s top job.

But the leap from unanswered questions to sweeping conspiratorial conclusions is a chasm worth avoiding. In recent days Tucker Carlson has encouraged precisely that leap. Rather than pressing for serious transparency, he has mixed factual gaps with political suspicion to construct a theory of concealed motives and hidden hands. The public deserves better than that, and so does the pursuit of truth.

Let’s start with what remains troubling. Federal investigators initially described Crooks as a quiet, socia…