1. Everyone is chasing the same detail out of the new Butler documents this morning. An anonymous donor paid to…

1. Everyone is chasing the same detail out of the new Butler documents this morning. An anonymous donor paid to cremate Thomas Crooks. I’ve gone through what Grassley released, and I think that’s the wrong thing to be angry about. There’s something worse in there. 💎🧵

2. First the detail itself. A note attached to the FBI’s summary of an interview with Crooks’ father reads: anonymous donor paid for cremation. It came through the family’s attorney. The records don’t name the donor, don’t give an amount, don’t explain a thing.

3. His body went to a funeral home on July 22, 2024. Cremated about ten days after Butler. Congressman Clay Higgins, who sat on the House task force, says Congress was never notified before that body was released.

4. Now here’s where I’ll be straight with you, and I could be wrong on this. Matthew Crooks was unemployed. His wife was on leave. These were people who could not afford a cremation. Somebody paying for it looks ugly, but it’s also the most ordinary explanation there is.

5. And chasing that donor is exactly how you miss what else is sitting in those files.

6. Start here. The records say Matthew Crooks handed his son a rifle on the morning of July 13th. He believed the boy was going to a shooting range. He’d bought that rifle legally. Then he handed it over, that morning, and went about his day.

7. The same files show a kid running a shadow life under his own roof. Gun parts ordered under the alias Bob Dole, timed so he could collect the packages before his father got home from work. Encrypted email. Privacy software he taught his own dad how to use.

8. His father told agents the thing that stuck with me most. That his son never identified anyone as a friend, through all of middle school and all of high school. A 1500 SAT and not one name.

9. But here’s the one that should be the headline this morning, and nobody is running it. On July 3, 2024, one day after the Pittsburgh field office learned about the Butler rally, senior Secret Service officials were briefed on a classified threat to Trump’s life. They had ten days to pass it down. They never did

10. GAO’s own finding, not mine: had that intelligence been shared, it would have changed the security posture for that event. The agency’s explanation was that it had no process for sharing classified threat information unless the threat was considered imminent. Ninety-eight pages of that.

11. The GAO report doesn’t describe the threat. But reporting since has indicated it concerned an Iranian plot to kill Trump. Sit with that. Two years before Iranian missiles killed three Americans in Jordan, Tehran was reportedly plotting this, and the agents in Butler were never told.

12. Trump posted Tuesday that Butler was, his words, all a Democrat plot to get me out of the election, that failed. He said new information was just found. He didn’t say what. I’d like to know, because he was briefed on these very files back in March.

13/ Corey Comperatore is still dead. David Dutch and James Copenhaver still carry those bullets. Two years on we’ve got a mystery donor, a father who handed over a rifle, and a warning nobody passed down. Stop chasing the donor. Read the GAO report. 💎🇺🇸

Source, Sen. Grassley’s release with the full GAO report: judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/rele…