“Thomas Crooks’ phone has offered federal investigators no clear explanations about why the 20-year-old from suburban Pittsburgh tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump,” the New York Post reports in the lede to their Monday night story about the phone’s contents, citing “law enforcement sources.” Given the Post’s reputation for being less-than-reliable narrators and the elasticity of the language there with “no clear explanations,” it’s hard to imagine the phone would not yield at least something satisfactory to those among us whose biases crave confirmation.

This is a leak, there’s no real restriction on what can be said to reporters, just what the Post wants to print. Which is to say a quote like “We found out Crooks was into that weird anime porn and had saved up a lot of reward points on his Pizza Hut app” or even just “the source declined to offer further specifics about the phone’s contents” would go a long way with blunting our skepticism.

Instead we have to take our pick between the Post were just too fucking lazy to ask some basic questions about the nature of the data or that they did and deliberately chose not to print that the FBI source told them Crooks was a lurker who followed this or that deranged MAGA influencer on Telegram or Zello because that wasn’t a “clear” enough explanation for their audience.

Anyway, the Post adds that the FBI are now examining Crooks’s laptop, to which we won’t hold our breath anticipating the Post to report which PC games he bought on Steam. They also mention that Crooks was not known to the FBI but, funny enough, his parents were actually in a certain national database: The 2016 Trump campaign’s. That year Channel 4 News UK obtained the “secret” data from a leak of the campaign’s microtargeting data of gun owners, checking it again this week to find that the two Bethel Park, Pennsylvania residents were seen as potential Trump voters.