An anonymous donor paid to cremate Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024 — just ten days after the attack, according to documents reviewed by the New York Post and turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The buried detail appears at the end of an FBI interview summary with the gunman’s father, Matthew Crooks. A brief note reads simply, quoting the records: “Anonymous donor paid for cremation.” According to the reporting, the information originated with a lawyer representing the Crooks family.
There is no public evidence tying the anonymous donor to the attack itself, and neither the identity of the individual nor any organization that may have contributed has been disclosed. But the timing and the secrecy surrounding the payment are already drawing attention on Capitol Hill, where the rapid handling of Crooks’ remains has been a point of contention for months.
A body released and gone before most knew it
The revelation lands amid an ongoing congressional inquiry led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who has been examining the security failures and subsequent investigative decisions surrounding the Butler shooting. The documents reviewed by the New York Post were provided to Grassley’s committee as part of that probe, according to the reporting.
The cremation itself became a flashpoint in August 2024, when Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), a member of the House task force investigating the assassination attempt, disclosed that Crooks’ body had been released and cremated only ten days after the shooting.
Higgins described his effort to examine the body on Monday, August 5, as causing “quite a stir” and revealing what he called a “disturbing fact” — that the FBI had released the body for cremation on July 23, just over a week after the attack. By the time Higgins attempted his examination, Crooks was gone, a fact Higgins said was unknown to the county coroner, local law enforcement, and the sheriff until that first week of August.
The congressman further asserted that the coroner would never have released the body without specific FBI authorization, and he characterized the bureau’s action bluntly: “This action by the FBI can only be described by any reasonable man as an obstruction to any following investigative effort.”
Parallel questions about the crime scene
The cremation controversy has run alongside separate concerns about how quickly the FBI moved to release the Butler crime scene. The Gateway Pundit previously reported that the bureau cleared the AGR building rooftop after only three days and cleaned biological evidence from the site — a pace that veterans of homicide investigations said they had never seen.
Both the swift scene release and the rapid cremation now sit within the broader questions Grassley’s committee has been pursuing about the FBI’s handling of the assassination attempt investigation. The newly surfaced note about the anonymous donor adds another layer: not only was the body disposed of quickly, but according to the family’s own lawyer, the family did not pay for it.
No committee statement or FBI response regarding the donor detail was included in the source material, and no information has been made public about who the donor is or why they stepped forward. The absence of any public explanation has left open questions that the records themselves do not answer.
What remains unknown
As of the reporting, it is unclear whether the donor had any relationship to the Crooks family, whether the payment was arranged through the funeral home or another intermediary, or whether the FBI or any other agency was aware of the arrangement at the time it was made. The interview summary with Matthew Crooks does not provide those details, according to the New York Post’s review.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the Butler attack continues, and the documents at issue were among a batch turned over as part of that effort. Whether the committee will seek additional information about the donor’s identity is not yet known from the available reporting.
What is clear from the records is the sequence: Crooks attempted to kill a former president and current candidate on July 13, 2024; he was dead within seconds after being shot by a Secret Service counter-sniper; his body was released to his family; and on July 23, ten days after the attack, his remains were cremated — paid for, the records say, by someone whose name has not been revealed.
Source: www.thegatewaypundit.com — https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/anonymous-donor-paid-cremate-thomas-crooks-just-10/