reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
These remarks were notable as Crooks reached the final phase of his YouTube commenting, during which a new figure, Willie Tepes, pressured Crooks to embrace violence. Tepes wrote, “if a gun and a badge is all that is needed, then authority obviously comes from the barrel of a gun. We have more guns than they do. There is no way we can avoid a war at this point, so you better just get used to the idea. We have nothing to lose and everything to win. And the alternative, a global police state, is unacceptable.” The identity of Willie Tepes remains unknown; the FBI has not publicly mentioned him, though they are aware he exists. Days after the shooting, someone screenshotted Tepes’ YouTube account page despite him having few followers. The user’s online footprint now appears on a foreign Antifa website linking Tepes to the Nordic Resistance Movement, a group designated a terrorist organization by the US State Department. Crooks’ online footprint abruptly ends after his encounter with Tepes. Regardless of Tepes’ motives or affiliations, Crooks was clearly ripe for recruitment; from early 2019 to mid-2020, his political views evolved and he searched for Trump more than 700 times online, as well as for Jack Ruby, the man who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald. He submitted queries including “craziest chemical reactions,” “cars running over protesters,” “best places for mass shooting,” “mass shooting El Paso,” “Trump’s civil war,” “Orlando shooting reaction,” “firing an AR-15 as fast as possible,” “fertilizer bomb,” “how to make napalm,” “how to make Molotov cocktail,” “mass shooting Canada,” “Oklahoma bombing,” and “sniper in Dallas shooting.” He also searched for “American Nazi Party,” “German national anthem 1933, 1945,” “Hitler’s speeches with subtitles,” “neo Nazis,” and “why gays need to go.”
Thus, a volatile, troubled, possibly mentally ill young man with a long record of espousing violence in public. The FBI clearly knew he existed. At the same time Crooks was making these posts publicly, the FBI was issuing contracts to private sector tech surveillance firms to harness mass data collection tools to monitor social media for people just like Crooks. It is hard to imagine Crooks, posting in his own name, had not been identified and looked at closely by federal law enforcement. The FBI had access to these YouTube comments, and instead of providing valuable insights, they selectively read them to mischaracterize Crooks’ thoughts. Two and a half weeks after the July 30 attack, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN that federal investigators were looking into a YouTube account possibly connected to Crooks that espoused political violence as well as antisemitic and anti-immigration themes. It wasn’t “possibly connected to Thomas Crooks” as the FBI knew it was Crooks’ account; the same day, the FBI’s deputy director made the same dishonest claim before Congress, and the previous week FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly questioned whether Trump was even shot.
In February 2025, the New York Post reported that the FBI obstructed efforts to solve why Thomas Matthew Crooks, who left no manifesto, did what he did. The Post said this left local law enforcement, Crooks’ former friends, classmates, and teachers frustrated, and noted that the cremation timing raised concerns. Less than a month after the shooting, Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a former police officer, investigated in Butler and learned that the FBI released Crooks’ body for cremation ten days after July 13. Higgins reported that the coroner said Crooks’ body would not have been released to the family for cremation or burial without FBI permission. The cremation, the day House Homeland Security and Oversight Committees began investigations, made it impossible for investigators outside the FBI to verify the autopsy report; a new tox screen could not be performed because the body no longer exists.