Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old man who plotted to assassinate former US President Donald Trump, was a former donor to a Democratic political action committee.
Following the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump, reporters and online sleuths have been scouring public records to see if they can deduce the shooter’s motive.
The investigation uncovered two seemingly contradictory rumors about the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks. The first was that he was registered to vote as a Republican. (Snopes confirmed the validity of that claim in a separate fact check.) The second was that he made a donation to a Democratic-leaning political action committee on January 20, 2021, the day President Joe Biden was sworn in.
The latter claim is also true: According to the Federal Election Commission, Crooks, who was shot and killed by police after opening fire at a Trump rally, donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee that encourages Democrats to vote. Records show the donation was made on Jan. 20, 2021.
However, some social media users have alleged that the donation was actually made by a 69-year-old Pittsburgh man with the same name as Thomas Crooks, the man who attempted to assassinate President Trump.
A few X-users made the argument in copy-pasted text along the lines of “another wasted MAGA talking point.”
This argument was based primarily on two facts: the existence of an older, unrelated Thomas Crooks with ties to the city of Pittsburgh, and the FEC records in question listed Pittsburgh as the donor’s city.
A review of public records revealed that several people have or have had ties to Pittsburgh, including a 69-year-old man, “Thomas Crooks,” but there was no evidence linking these people to the $15 donation in question to the Democratic-leaning PAC, and the FEC filing lists an address and zip code that does not exist in Pittsburgh.
But Federal Election Commission documents about the donations matched nearly every detail perfectly with another Trump assassin, Thomas Crooks, who lived in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, where authorities have confirmed the shooter was from and whose address is known from voter registration records and other sources.
Donations to the Progressive Turnout Project were made through ActBlue, another Democratic PAC that serves as a fundraising platform. Many political groups and campaigns use ActBlue to raise funds. As a result, FEC records list such donations as contributions to ActBlue with a note indicating the specific use of the funds. In this case, the note states, “To be applied to the Progressive Turnout Project.”
Address details related to the donations are listed in a 189,746-page FEC document from February 2021 listing all of Act Blue’s donations during the previous month. The address and zip code match the shooter’s home, according to a public records search and photos from a police search of the home.
Given the address match, and the fact that the location listed in the FEC filing at issue does not exist in Pittsburgh, this evidence supports the conclusion that it was the shooter who made the donation, and not someone else of the same name.