Post from Truth Social

The Butler shooting, recast as a case file against a named man

Fourteen months into a second term, the post returns to July 13, 2024 not to narrate the wound but to assign a defendant. The sequence is tight: an agency is blamed ("the Crooked Joe Biden FBI didn't do what they should have"), evidence is declared spoiled ("missing, altered, corrupted, or gone"), a fresh discovery is announced without content ("New info was just found!"), a rhetorical question supplies the inference the evidence doesn't ("Why wasn't it seen long ago?"), and a single name absorbs the whole chain: "Dirty Cop Christopher Wray should pay a price."

The middle step is where the reasoning load is carried by punctuation rather than fact. "New info was just found!" names nothing — no document, no finding, no date. What follows it, "Why wasn't it seen long ago?", is the load-bearing move: a question whose only available answer is concealment. This is the standard architecture of an unfalsifiable accusation, and it recurs in his handling of the 2020 election and the Epstein files. Absence of evidence is converted into evidence of suppression, and the conversion is performed by a question mark.

A survivor's grievance running as a persecution claim

"the Lunatic who shot me in Butler, PA" is the only reference to the attempt on his life, and it is subordinate — a clause identifying which investigation was mishandled. The shooter is disposed of in five words. The interest is entirely downstream, in what officials did afterward. A near-death event is functioning here as a jurisdictional grievance rather than a personal one, which fits the pattern across two years of Butler references: the closer the topic gets to his own vulnerability, the faster the sentence moves to who should be punished.

"This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed" is the claim that carries the most weight and the least support. Thomas Matthew Crooks was a registered Republican who acted alone and died at the scene; no investigation — including the Republican-led House task force — produced any evidence of coordination. The construction also collapses logically: a plot inside the FBI to remove him, which failed, and whose failure is then blamed on FBI mishandling of the investigation into it. Both halves cannot be true at once, and the post does not notice.

"the Crooked Joe Biden FBI" attaches Wray to the opposing party. Wray was Trump's own appointee, nominated by him in 2017 after he fired James Comey, and he is a registered Republican. The relabeling is the tell for splitting: Wray's 2017 self and his 2024 self are different people in this narrative, with nothing linking them, because the man who chose him cannot be implicated in choosing him. "Dirty Cop" carries the same projection that appears whenever a law-enforcement official declines to produce the finding he wants.

"Should pay a price"

The phrase names a specific living private citizen, attaches a grievance, and specifies a consequence without specifying its form. Coming from a president with authority over the Justice Department, the primary reading is prosecution rather than a call to a crowd — that is an abuse-of-office concern more than an incitement one, and the distinction matters for how to weight it. But the demand is enlarged past any alleged act: "certainly for the things he said" makes speech itself a punishable offense in the sentence. That clause is what moves the danger reading above routine. A named target, a stated grievance, and a punishment whose form is left to the reader is the shape that precedes third-party action, even where the speaker means subpoenas.

Authorship

11:28 a.m. Eastern, back from Ireland, mid-morning — a time slot that in isolation points toward staff. Everything else points the other way. First person throughout ("shot me," "By the time I got into Office"), the personal-epithet inventory ("Crooked Joe," "Lunatic," "Dirty Cop"), the arbitrary mid-sentence capitals ("Office," "Election," "Plot"), the comma splice in "This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed," and the exclamation-driven pivot at "New info was just found!" An aide drafting a retribution post would supply what the new information is. The vagueness is the signature.

On his faculties

Nothing here departs from his established syntax. "with respect to" and "By the time I got into Office, on January 20th" are the connectives and date anchors he has used for years, and the argument, though unsupported, tracks from premise to demand without derailment. The incoherence is in the claim, not in the construction of it.

Fact Verification

What Trump's FBI said about the record. In a November 21, 2025 Fox News Digital interview announcing the investigation's conclusion, FBI Director Kash Patel and then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino described a complete and voluminous evidentiary file: 485 FBI employees worked the case, more than 1,000 interviews were conducted globally, roughly 2,000 tips were reviewed, more than 10 search warrants and 100 subpoenas were executed, 13 electronic devices belonging to Crooks and his family were analyzed, 35 social media/banking/online accounts were examined, more than 500,000 electronic files were manually reviewed, and more than 40,000 documents were produced to Congress over an eight-month period. Patel said flatly, "We got into all of the devices," calling claims of inaccessible encrypted content "false." A senior official on the case said, "We can say with confidence that there is no communication, there are no emails that Crooks had that we have not been able to access." Bongino said, "We have reviewed this case over and over — looked into every nugget... There is no cover-up here. There is no motive for it, there is no reason for it." At the September 15, 2026 Senate Judiciary oversight hearing, Patel said the bureau "looked at some 27 devices, exfiltrated all the data off of them."

Patel also said the FBI had already given Trump everything: "We fully briefed the president, as a victim of this case, at the White House, providing him with all of the details of our investigation, and the president was satisfied with the results and where we left it."

What the administration would not say. Asked at the September 15, 2026 White House briefing to substantiate the plot allegation and whether DOJ was considering charges against Wray, Attorney General Todd Blanche did not endorse the destruction claim. He said only that "it's not really clear what the leadership of the FBI were doing in the weeks and months ahead of the attempted assassination to protect President Trump," and described Patel as having undertaken "a Herculean effort to go through all the documents and understand what was missed, if anything" — a conditional that does not assert loss. ABC News, Newsweek, the Washington Examiner and MSNBC all reported that Trump identified no specific record and offered no evidence.

The file demonstrably still exists. The FBI has told FOIA litigants it holds roughly 75,000 pages of Butler material, which it is releasing in small tranches (Judicial Watch: "reviewing only a few hundred a month for release") — about 48 pages in November 2025, roughly 40 more in February 2026, and 37 pages in April 2026 under court order. The very tranche that prompted this post consists of 181 pages of FBI Pittsburgh interview summaries, invoices, evidence logs and internal communications, with the underlying interviews dated July 15–21, 2024. Documents created days after the shooting and still on hand in 2026 are direct evidence the file was not destroyed before January 2025.

Who is complaining, and about what. The most aggressive critics of the FBI's handling allege withholding, not spoliation. Sen. Ron Johnson subpoenaed the FBI in July 2025 saying "we're continuing to be stonewalled." Sen. Grassley has pressed for records through an ongoing inquiry. Judicial Watch's public position is that "key details about the case remain hidden" and demands full disclosure; it does not allege records were destroyed or altered.

The kernel of truth. There are real, documented evidence-handling controversies, but they concern physical evidence in July 2024 rather than the loss of investigative information: Crooks' body was released to his family and cremated on July 23, 2024, ten days after the attack; Rep. Clay Higgins, who sought to view the body on August 5, 2024, wrote that the release "can only be described by any reasonable man as an obstruction to any following investigative effort," while the FBI said the release followed normal procedures and was coordinated with the coroner and state and local partners. The AGR crime scene was released within days, biological material was cleaned from the roof, and the building was later demolished. Separately, Wray's July 2024 congressional testimony equivocating on whether Trump was struck by a bullet or shrapnel was later corrected, and Patel has cited it as having damaged the bureau's credibility — which is plausibly what "the things he said" refers to.

One likely conflation: Patel's widely reported 2025-2026 discovery of "burn bags" of documents in a concealed FBI records room involved Trump-Russia / Crossfire Hurricane and Durham material, not Butler.

Bottom line: the sweeping quantitative claim that "most" Butler information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone by January 20 is unsupported and is affirmatively contradicted by the Trump administration's own FBI accounting of an intact, fully accessible evidentiary record. It is not wholly baseless as a grievance — evidence handling and disclosure were genuinely contested — which is why this rates mostly false rather than false. | | ""New info was just found" regarding the Butler assassination attempt" | Mostly True | Contrary to the first-pass finding, this claim is anchorable to a specific, datable event. New Butler material did surface in the 24 hours before the post, and the administration's own attorney general confirmed on camera that it was new.

What surfaced. On September 14–15, 2026, the New York Post (first) and Fox News Digital reported on FBI investigative records provided to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley as part of his ongoing Butler inquiry. The previously unreported details included: Thomas Matthew Crooks ordered gun parts, tools and rifle-capacity components online under the pseudonym "Bob Dole," collecting the packages at his parents' house before his father returned from work; his father, Matthew Crooks, told the FBI his son "never identified anyone as a friend throughout middle school and high school" and had been withdrawn "from birth"; Crooks coached his father on VPNs and privacy browsers and maintained foreign-hosted email accounts; and an anonymous donor paid for Crooks' cremation shortly after the attack, with the records not identifying the donor, explaining the payment, or establishing any connection to the shooting.

Official confirmation that it was new. At the September 15, 2026 White House press briefing, Attorney General Todd Blanche said of the material: "It is new information about the shooter and about his background, about his history, and that's stuff that we didn't know before." He attributed it to FBI production in response to the Senate inquiry, and credited Patel with reviewing documents to surface material that had not previously come forward. ABC News, Newsweek and the Washington Examiner all reported the same characterization. So the narrow factual core — new information about Butler had just emerged — is corroborated by multiple independent outlets and by an on-record government official.

The important qualifications. First, "found" overstates it: these are FBI interview summaries and evidence logs created in July 2024. The father's interview was conducted two days after the shooting, and the tranche analyzed publicly spans investigative activity from July 15–21, 2024. Material reviewed by document trackers is described as previously withheld records being released in stages through FOIA and congressional production, not newly discovered documents — 95 pages of the 181-page tranche were withheld outright. Some reporting indicates the FBI produced the records to Grassley months earlier, reportedly in March 2026, though I could not confirm that date from the primary articles. Second, parts of it were already public: the FBI disclosed at a July 29, 2024 media briefing that Crooks used aliases and encrypted, foreign-hosted email for roughly 25 firearms-related purchases beginning in spring 2023 plus six purchases of explosive precursors — only the specific alias name is new; and the cremation itself was publicly revealed in August 2024 by Rep. Clay Higgins, with only the anonymous payer being new. Third, the new material supports nothing about a plot: at the same-day Senate hearing Patel testified the FBI examined "some 27 devices" and "found no evidence that that individual was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents," and Fox News and the New York Post themselves reported no conspiracy evidence.

Bottom line: new Butler information genuinely did just emerge, and the attorney general affirmed it as new — so the statement is substantially accurate as written. It falls short of fully true because "found" implies recovery of something lost, when the record shows staged disclosure of documents the FBI had held since 2024, and because the adjacent implication that the material substantiates a plot is contradicted by the FBI's own same-day testimony. |

Overall Veracity: 34%