Helen Comperatore, whose husband died shielding their family from gunfire at the July 13, 2024, Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, says she believes the attack was orchestrated from within the federal government, and that the man identified as the lone shooter did not act alone.

In a sit-down interview with NewsNation's Rich McHugh, Comperatore said plainly what many Americans have suspected for two years: the official story of 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as a solitary gunman does not add up.

"I don't believe there was another shooter there, but I do believe he was working with somebody. I believe it was an inside job, inside the government somewhere."

She offered no names. She cited no classified documents. But she said she has been "told things" since her husband's death, and that a personal experience in the aftermath pushed her toward that conclusion. "You start putting the pieces together," she told McHugh. "It just made total sense."

The interview arrives just past the second anniversary of the attack that killed Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former volunteer fire chief, and wounded President Donald Trump. Two years on, the Comperatore family still has no satisfactory accounting of how a young man with a rifle reached an unsecured rooftop within easy range of a sitting president, and fired.

A hero's final words

Corey Comperatore's last act was to push his daughter to the ground and cover his family as shots cracked across the Butler County Fairgrounds. His last word, his widow has said, was a command: "Get down!"

Fox News reported that Trump personally called Helen Comperatore three days after the shooting. She accepted that call. She declined one from then-President Biden. At the time, she described her husband's sacrifice in terms that left little room for politics: "He left this world a hero and God welcomed him in. He did not die in vain that day."

But politics, and the government's failure to protect the people at that rally, have consumed her life since.

Their daughter Allyson confirmed that her father physically threw her to the ground and was shot in the act. Her older sister, Kaylee, 24, was more pointed about who bears responsibility. She told the New York Post: "I just want them to know I think my dad's blood is on their hands, and I hope they wake up every day thinking about what they took from our family."

Helen Comperatore hired a lawyer to investigate the security failures shared between the Secret Service and Butler Township police. "I want justice for my husband," she said at the time, "and I'm going to get it."

The Secret Service's silence

What makes Helen Comperatore's claims harder to dismiss is not the claims themselves, it is the conduct of the agencies that could refute them. NewsNation's McHugh reported that the Secret Service took nearly a year to contact the widow of the man killed at a rally the agency was responsible for securing.

Nearly a year. A man died because the perimeter failed, and the agency charged with that perimeter could not pick up a phone for twelve months.

That kind of institutional silence does not breed trust. It breeds exactly the suspicion Helen Comperatore now voices publicly. When a grieving family has to beg for basic information while the bureaucracy circles the wagons, the government has no standing to complain when people stop believing its version of events.

The pattern is not new. Congress warned the Secret Service to reform back in 2015, after a string of embarrassing security lapses. A decade later, the same institutional weaknesses persisted, and a man is dead because of them.

Unanswered questions in Butler

The central factual mystery remains stubbornly unresolved. Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old with no known public motive, managed to position himself on a rooftop with a clear line of fire to the stage. AP News reported that how Crooks outmaneuvered law enforcement and accessed that rooftop remains among many unanswered questions about what it called "the worst Secret Service security failure in decades."

Crooks was killed by sharpshooters after he fired. Dead men answer no questions. And the agencies that might fill the gaps have offered the Comperatore family, and the public, remarkably little.

Helen Comperatore does not claim to have proof of a conspiracy. She has not named co-conspirators. She has not produced documents. What she has is the lived experience of a woman whose husband was killed in broad daylight at a political rally, who was then ignored by the very agency whose failure made that killing possible, and who, after two years, still cannot get a straight answer about what happened and why.

Asked whether she believes the motive behind the attack was political, she did not hesitate: "Oh yeah, absolutely."

The broader question of political violence against American leaders has a long and ugly history. But the Butler shooting stands apart in one respect: the sheer volume of basic procedural questions that remain open. Who cleared the rooftop? Who was responsible for the perimeter around the AGR building? Why were warnings from rallygoers who spotted Crooks on the roof not acted on in time?

A widow's appeal to the president

Helen Comperatore directed a message to Trump during the interview, asking him not to forget the people who were there that day.

"Just to not forget about us and remember what they went through that day. You know, we're still here. We need answers."

She said closure would come only "when the people who put this all together that day are caught, and it comes out." That language, "the people who put this all together", goes well beyond blaming a lone gunman. Whether her belief is correct or not, it reflects a level of institutional distrust that the Secret Service and federal law enforcement have earned through their own conduct.

When Trump returned to Butler for a campaign rally months after the shooting, the security posture told its own story. Armed officers in camouflage lined the rooftops. Protective glass encased the stage. The contrast with July 13 was damning, an implicit admission that the original security plan had been grossly inadequate.

Trump himself acknowledged the weight of the day, telling the crowd, "Twelve weeks ago, we all took a bullet for America." He called Crooks "a vicious monster" and credited "the hand of providence and the grace of God" for his survival.

The broader climate of political hostility that preceded the Butler attack has not disappeared. Nor have the security threats. Just recently, a foiled terror plot targeting a Trump event underscored how persistent the danger remains for this president and the people who attend his rallies.

Trust is earned, not declared

There is a temptation in polite Washington circles to wave away Helen Comperatore's claims as grief-fueled speculation. Maybe they are. She has not produced evidence that would hold up in court. She says she has been "told things" but will not say by whom or what.

But the burden here does not fall on a widow from rural Pennsylvania. It falls on the federal agencies that failed to stop a rifle-armed 20-year-old from reaching an open rooftop 150 yards from the president of the United States, and then went silent for a year when the dead man's wife wanted to know why.

You do not get to botch the security, stonewall the family, drag out every investigation, and then act surprised when people stop believing you. Helen Comperatore may not have all the answers. But she has earned the right to demand them, and two years of institutional evasion have earned every ounce of the suspicion she now carries.

Governments that want public trust have a simple option available to them: tell the truth, and tell it promptly. The silence from Butler speaks for itself.