More than a year after Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson is accusing the FBI of concealing key information about the 20-year-old gunman.
“Thomas Crooks came within a quarter inch of destroying this country, and yet, a year and a half later, we still know almost nothing about him or why he did it. That’s because, for some reason, the FBI, even the current FBI, doesn’t want us to know,” Carlson said in a video released Nov. 14.
As CatholicVote previously reported, Crooks was identified the morning after the July 2024 attack and killed on scene by a Secret Sniper after a bullet grazed Trump’s right ear.
The dispute between Carlson and the FBI began with a Nov. 13 post in which Carlson teased new findings about Crooks’ online history.
“The FBI told us Thomas Crooks tried to kill Donald Trump last summer but somehow had no online footprint. The FBI lied, and we can prove it because we have his posts. The question is why?” he wrote. “Story tomorrow.”
Within hours, the FBI pushed back, saying in its Rapid Response account created Nov. 13 that it “has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint. Ever.”
The next day, Carlson released a lengthy report claiming that an anonymous source used private-investigator tools to access and authenticate Crooks’ digital accounts. According to Carlson, Crooks left a substantial trail of YouTube comments, email records, and social-media activity dating from 2019 to 2020.
In the video, Carlson argues that while the FBI portrayed Crooks as a “right-winger,” the recovered posts show a teenager who shifted sharply from praising Trump to attacking him in the lead-up to the 2024 assassination attempt.
“Thomas Crooks was not some secretive lonewolf who never warned anyone that he was planning violence,” Carlson said. “Just the opposite.”
He added that the comments “show a man who started out as a radical Trump supporter whose views on the President transformed — changed completely — during COVID. The FBI lied about that fact and pretended that Crooks was a right-winger.”
In July 2019, Crooks allegedly called Trump the “literal definition of Patriotism” and urged violent retribution against lawmakers who opposed him. In other posts, he called for “Trump-hating Democrats” to be beheaded, Carlson said.
But by early 2020, Crooks’ political views had flipped, according to Carlson. The former FOX News host highlighted a January 2020 YouTube comment in which Crooks allegedly mocked Trump’s “stupidity,” dismissed “deep state” talk, and accused Trump supporters of behaving like a “cult.”
“How can you people call other sheep, but you are [too] brainwashed to realize how dumb you are,” Crooks allegedly wrote of Trump supporters, according to Carlson. “If someone told you chinese people dissented from aliens and put the fake archeologist who found out on air as ‘evidence’ you’d believe it. But somehow you guys have ‘woken up.’ I mean literally you guys sound like a cult at times.”
“No I’m pretty sure people are just racist and Trump is one them, there does not need to be a deep state for that,” Crooks allegedly wrote, according to Carlson.
In August 2020, Crooks allegedly endorsed “terrorism-style attacks” against the government and outlined ways to smuggle explosives into a federal building or to assassinate political leaders.
“[In my opinion] the only way to fight the [government] is with terrorism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building [and] set it off before anyone sees you, track down [sic] important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to assassinate them,” Crooks allegedly wrote, according to Carlson. “Any sort of head to head fight is suicide and ambush/surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well.”
Carlson said another user, operating under the handle “Willy_Tepes,” encouraged Crooks to commit violence.
“So here you have a volatile, troubled, possibly mentally ill young man with a long record of espousing violence in public. The FBI clearly knew he existed,” Carlson said, arguing the bureau had access to mass data-collection tools that would have flagged Crooks’ activity.
He then posed a series of questions to the bureau: Why did the FBI initially claim Crooks had no online footprint? What is known about “Willy_Tepes”? Was Crooks on the radar of federal law enforcement before the shooting? And who was he in contact with in the days leading up to the attack?
“If there’s nothing there,” Carlson concluded, “these should be very easy questions to answer.”
FBI Director Kash Patel responded later on Nov. 14, releasing an overview of the Crooks investigation on X. Patel said that FBI employees conducted more than 1,000 interviews, reviewed nearly 500,000 digital files, and analyzed data from several social media accounts.
“The investigation, conducted by over 480 FBI employees,” Patel said, “revealed Crooks had limited online and in person interactions, planned and conducted the attack alone, and did not leak or share his intent to engage in the attack with anyone.”
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