Americans aren’t getting enough transparency on President Trump’s would-be Pennsylvania assassin, while Democrats may live to regret the budding transparency regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s political entanglements.

That’s the opinion of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley in an exclusive interview with The Heartlander.

New reports this week indicate the Biden FBI “stonewalled” a House probe into Thomas Crooks’ attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and that his social media profile was much broader, darker and available than the FBI let on at the time.

“Then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress after the July 13, 2024, attack that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks’ online history that pointed to a motive or political ideology,” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine wrote this week.

In contrast, Devine’s source unearthed 17 online accounts linked to Crooks, including “ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Venmo, Zelle, GroupMe, Discord, Google Play, Quizlet, Chess.com and Quora.”

As the Post puts it, Devine’s reporting reveals Crooks’ “online activity included numerous endorsements of political violence, and a severe turn from being a hardcore advocate for Trump to coming within a few millimeters of killing him.

“The FBI never shared those files with the congressional investigation …

“Crooks’ activity online and on social media ranged from researching how to produce homemade bombs and how to shoot an AR-15 assault rifle ‘as fast as possible,’ calling for the deaths of Jews and politicians, to advocating violence as the only way to bring about political change.”

“IMO the only way to fight the gov is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building and set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to assassinate them,” Crooks wrote in an Aug. 5, 2020 online post.

But 10 months into the Trump administration, Devine writes, “the president himself remains unsatisfied with the answers he’s been given about the circumstances leading to 20-year-old Thomas Crooks climbing on a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle and firing eight times at Trump, narrowly missing his head but hitting his ear.”

Is Trump’s own FBI holding back on Thomas Crooks?

“Well, I hope not,” Hawley tells The Heartlander. “I have to tell you, I don’t know quite what’s going on there. 

“I’m grateful for the whistleblowers who are coming forward and giving us more information. We learned just in the last couple of days, for example, that he does actually have a pretty significant online footprint – that his online content was hardly right-wing as was previously reported. 

“In fact, it looks like he was on these sites that are associated with trans ideology and furries and weird, crazy stuff. He was making all kinds of anti-Trump, anti-authority comments in the days leading up to the assassination attempt. So, there’s a lot more to learn here. 

“Here’s what troubles me: We’re learning all of this still from whistleblowers. We’re not learning this from FBI reports. We’re not learning this from a Secret Service report. 

“I just think it’s time for total transparency here. The guy is dead. He’s not going to be prosecuted. There’s no reason to hold back for possible prosecution or ongoing investigation. Get it all out there. 

“I think the public deserves to know everything that the FBI knows about Thomas Crooks and everything that the FBI knows about what happened that day, including all of the security failures. And there were a bunch of security failures. 

“I’m not some conspiracy theorist. I don’t think that there’s some deep state grand conspiracy here. But I do believe people deserve the facts. And at this point, to be honest with you, I’m irritated that we’ve learned almost everything we know from whistleblowers over the last year and a half. 

“Let’s get the facts from the agencies themselves. I think it’s time for that.”

As Hawley told Fox News’s Jesse Watters this week, “when’s the day going to come that the FBI is going to level with us and just make everything public?”

Meanwhile, Hawley says Democrats might well rue the day they forced disclosure of the Epstein files – which, to this point, have only revealed the uber-pedophile’s ties to Democrats such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries – whose campaign solicited contributions from Epstein five years after his conviction in a child sex case – and Stacey Plaskett, House delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands, who records show was texting Epstein for guidance during a 2019 committee hearing.

What more are the files going to reveal?

“Just look at the stuff we’re seeing already with Hakeem Jeffries,” Hawley says. “It turns out they solicited donations from Epstein. You’ve got Democrat lawmakers who were texting Epstein and taking phone calls from him while on an oversight committee in the middle of hearings. 

“These people have pretended that they don’t know him. In fact, he has so many ties to so many politicians and public figures … 

“I just think that the Democrats’ hysterics about this are ridiculous. What I really think they thought was that none of it would ever become public. They thought that they could just grandstand, and at the end of the day, nothing would happen, and they’d all be safe. Well, guess what: Now it is all going to be public. It should always have been public. 

“I am in favor 100% of it being public and have voted for that. And I hope that now we can find out exactly what Epstein did, who he did it with, who was involved – and that will allow us to turn the page on this and to put to rest this corruption. 

“This was quite a web of corruption that touched many, many people. Obviously, it involved a huge number of trafficking victims, but also major public figures from the royal family in Britain to high-ranking politicians, university presidents in the United States – Larry Summers. It’s a lot of people, and I think it’s time that we get total transparency on it.”

Despite Democrat attempts to tar Trump with Epstein’s memory, Hawley told Watters “the president’s been right all along on this. He said months ago, make public everything you can that’s not classified. Now Congress is finally gonna do it. And I think we’re going to learn a lot, Jesse. 

“A lot of people suddenly are going to get real reticent to talk about Epstein, whether it’s Hakeem Jeffries, whether it’s Larry Summers, that Harvard president you mentioned a second ago who worked for Barack Obama.

“We’re going to find out a lot about a lot of folks, because you know what else is in this bill that just passed tonight? It’s gotta be a searchable database, so any American can go in and read the files for themselves.

“That’s how it should be. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s there.”