Why Do We Know So Little About Thomas Matthew Crooks, Still?

… and yet so much about Luigi Mangione?

I tried to learn a little bit about Thomas Matthew Crooks in the days after the attempted shooting of then-candidate, now-President-elect Trump, and while I gleaned some basic crap that was publicly available, it wasn’t much. That was in July. It’s now January, and in reality, the public does not know much more about this kid than it did in July. One parallel you will hear sometimes in casual conversation is that we know almost nothing about a guy who missed a President by two inches, but we know seemingly a lot about Luigi Mangione, even though he tried to go off the grid for six months before (probably) shooting a CEO in the back.

Why would that be?

The Basic Logic

The basic reason is very simple: an attempt on a once-and-future President’s life is high-level national security type stuff, so even though virtually all aspects of that rally seem to have been utterly bungled by the feds, whatever they do know about that kid and his family is likely redacted to the hilt for 25 years.

Luigi killed a CEO (again, probably) and while it is worth exploring whether he’s a patsy, a CEO is still essentially a citizen. While the terror charge in the Magione case is a bit weird…