The FBI on Thursday denied saying Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old man who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in July 2024, had no online footprint.
Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson alleged that the FBI “lied” about the deceased shooter’s seemingly nonexistent digital footprint and asked why that would be the case, teasing he would answer the question in a story on Friday with Crooks’s social media posts in his possession.
The FBI quickly disputed Carlson’s statement.
“This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint. Ever,” FBI Rapid Response said Thursday.
The conflict between the FBI and Carlson raises the question of whether the bureau ever said Crooks had no presence on social media. Past FBI statements suggest that isn’t the case.
Last year, then-FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told the Senate there was a social media account “believed to be associated with the shooter” active from 2019 to 2020 that investigators were looking into. In his congressional testimony, Abbate said the account contained antisemitic and anti-immigration “themes” and promoted political violence.
However, the Biden-era official noted that the FBI still needed to verify Crooks’s connection to the account at the time. Apart from the suspected account, Abbate disclosed there was a “general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter’s potential motive and mindset.”
In the year since, very little information about the attempted assassin and his motive has been publicized. Authorities have found no manifesto belonging to the shooter.
Before becoming the next FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino questioned the peculiarity of Crooks’s case last year and cast doubt on the Biden administration’s official narrative.
When asked by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) about Crooks’s “missing” online presence, Bongino said the chance of a 20-year-old having no digital footprint “defies logic” based on his experience in the Secret Service.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. If you would have told me it was a 60-year-old guy who lived most of his life without a computer and for the last 10 years had been planning this, hard to believe but digestible,” he responded. “You’re telling me a 20-year-old kid who’s grown up in the digital era figured this out when he was, what, 13 to never get an online presence? We’ve seen nothing. Nothing.”
Bongino went on to note the improbability of no Facebook photo of Crooks emerging. At the time, he suggested information was being withheld about the shooting incident because “there’s a political narrative to be had by the media and the other side.”
Shortly after grazing Trump’s right ear with a bullet, Crooks was shot and killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper, who discovered his position on the rooftop of a nearby building roughly 400 feet away. The incident disrupted Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, before the Republican nominee won the presidency months later. One rally-goer was killed and two others were injured by Crooks’s barrage of gunshots.
Carlson has been particularly critical of FBI leadership under FBI Director Kash Patel and Bongino, especially over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files.
The FBI created its Rapid Response account, much like the one run by the White House, on Thursday after Bongino sparred with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) online over the bureau’s investigation of the Washington, D.C., pipe bomb case that remains unsolved nearly five years later.
With the new account, the FBI said it’s attempting to combat “fake news” in a bid for more transparency.
“Our team continues to face an avalanche of lies, smears, and falsehoods from the fake news and others seeking to undermine our work and national security,” the FBI Rapid Response team said in its first post. “No FBI has had the temerity to put truth as we have, they bent the knee to lies and DC swamp. We changed that on day 1, and now will go even further and more direct. The days of bad-faith attacks and fake-news narratives are over.”