Trump Demands Wray 'Pay a Price' Over Butler Shooting as AG Blanche Confirms New Details on Shooter

President Donald Trump is demanding consequences for former FBI Director Christopher Wray after new details surfaced about Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot at Trump during a July 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

"Dirty Cop Christopher Wray should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt, and certainly for the things he said," Trump wrote on Truth Social, according to the Daily Wire. Trump also claimed, without evidence, that the shooting was "all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed."

The new material driving Trump's post came from FBI interview notes with Matthew Crooks, the shooter's father, obtained by the New York Post and first pulled from the bureau by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). According to those notes, Thomas Crooks used the online alias of former Kansas Senator Bob Dole, rarely showed emotion, and was fixated on guns. His father told investigators that six days before the shooting he saw his son in the garage cleaning a firearm while waving his arms and "frantically talking and not making any sense."

Blanche Confirms New Info, Won't Touch the 'Plot' Claim

Hours after Trump's post, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche addressed the matter directly during a White House press briefing in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. "It is new information about the shooter and about his background, about his history, and that stuff that we didn't know before," Blanche told reporters, according to CNN, the Jerusalem Post, and Reuters (via KFGO), without elaborating on what specifically was new.

Asked by CNN's Kristen Holmes about Trump's "Democrat Plot" language, Blanche declined to explain or endorse it. He was more direct about Trump's anger at Wray, telling reporters, "As far as the president's frustration with the FBI, I was there with him, I lived it," adding that "his frustration and concern about what the former director was doing is something that is not new," per CNN and the Jerusalem Post. Blanche was Trump's personal attorney at the time of the shooting.

Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI responded to a Reuters request for comment, and Wray could not be reached, according to the Jerusalem Post and KFGO.

A Claim That Contradicts the FBI's Own Prior Finding

This isn't the first time the current FBI has looked at this. In November 2025, FBI Director Kash Patel and then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino said their own review concluded Crooks acted alone and that Trump had been briefed and was satisfied with the findings. "Dan and I have been on this since we got here eight months ago," Patel said at the time, according to the Daily Wire.

Reuters, in reporting picked up by KFGO, states plainly that investigations into the shooting "have found the shooter acted alone and produced no evidence Democrats had anything to do with the shooting." That's the finding of Trump's own appointed FBI leadership, not the Biden-era bureau Trump is criticizing.

Trump's underlying grievance appears to be that the FBI, under Wray, may have failed to flag warning signs about Crooks before the attack, and that information about the shooter's background was incomplete or mishandled during the transition between administrations. Trump has said, "By the time I got into Office, on January 20th, most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone." That is Trump's own claim; no source here independently verifies it, and neither the DOJ nor FBI has confirmed evidence went missing.

Crooks fired eight shots from a rooftop before being killed by a Secret Service sniper, striking Trump's ear and killing rally attendee Corey Comperatore. FBI interview notes offer a fuller picture of Crooks' isolated, gun-obsessed behavior in the days before the attack. Any link between the shooting and Democrats remains unproven and unaddressed by both Blanche and the FBI's own November review.

The same Tuesday briefing also touched on other fronts in the administration's ongoing standoff with the bureau. FBI Director Kash Patel faced a heated Senate Judiciary Committee hearing the same day, fielding questions from Democratic Senator Cory Booker on FBI hiring standards, subpoenas of journalists, and unreleased Epstein files, according to CNN.

What happens next is unclear. Blanche did not say whether the Justice Department will take any formal action against Wray, and no charges, investigation, or disciplinary proceeding against him has been announced by any source here. Grassley's office has not said whether it will release additional documents from the FBI file beyond what the New York Post has already published.