A Republican congressman appointed to the House bipartisan task force investigating the assassination attempt on Donald Trump has slammed the FBI’s handling of the crime scene following the shooting.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) says he is especially troubled by the FBI’s decision to release the body of 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks to his family for cremation with so many questions remaining about his motive for the attack.
He also criticized the feds for releasing the crime scene “so early” three days after Crooks opened fire at the former president from a nearby rooftop, hitting him in the ear.
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“This pattern of investigative scorched earth by the FBI is quite troubling,” Higgins wrote in a preliminary report sent to task force chairman Mike Kelly.
The former police officer traveled to Butler, Pennsylvania, where the July 13 shooting took place, and tried to view the gunman’s body on August 5. He said his visit “caused quite a stir and revealed a disturbing fact… the FBI released the body for cremation 10 days after” the attack.
On July 23, he wrote, “Crooks was gone.”
“Nobody knew this until Monday, August 5, including the County Coroner, law enforcement, Sheriff, etc,” he continued. “Yes, Butler County Coroner technically had legal authority over the body, but I spoke with the Coroner, and he would have never released Crooks’ body to the family for cremation or burial without specific permission from the FBI.
“The problem with me not being able to examine the actual body is that I won’t know 100% if the coroner’s report and the autopsy report are accurate. We will actually never know.”
Higgins also claimed the first responders at the scene of the Trump assassination attempt were “surprised” to be allowed to leave by the FBI on the night of the shooting. “I interviewed several First Responders who expressed everything from surprise to dismay to suspicion regarding the fact that the FBI released the crime scene so early,” he wrote.
The congressman, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who supported Donald Trump’s claims that he was the victim of voter fraud in the 2020 election, said that on the day Crooks was cremated “both the Homeland Security Committee and the Oversight Committee had begun House Committee jurisdictional investigation into” the shooting.
“Again, similar to releasing the crime scene and scrubbing crime scene biological evidence... this action by the FBI can only be described by any reasonable man as an obstruction to any following investigative effort,” he claimed in the report.
Higgins praised the local law enforcement effort and said he could find no evidence there was a “second shooter” despite “videos on the internet showing a dark figure or a shadow on the water tower” near the Trump rally.
“I do not believe it was possible for a “2nd shooter” sniper to be on top of that water tower on J13, nor have I seen any evidence that supports the theory of a 2nd shooter,” he says in his report. “I’m not saying conclusively that there was no other shooter somewhere or that no other conspirators were involved in J13, but I’m saying that based on my investigation thus far, there were 10 shots fired on J13, and all shots are accounted for, and all shots align with their source.”
