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More than a year after Thomas Crooks opened fire on Donald trump During a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, one of the most influential figures in conservative media says Trump’s hand-picked Justice Department leaders are hiding crucial information about how a 20-year-old killer got within rifle range of a former president — and what motivated him to do so.
In an episode of his eponymous podcast released Friday, Carlson took aim at the current FBI director Kash Patelhis predecessor Christopher Wray, and Patel deputy (and ex-Secret Service agent) Dan Bongino, each of whom he accused of concealing key facts about the crooks and security failures that led him to come within “a quarter inch” of fatally attacking Trump.
He also broadly objected to the Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, which oversees the FBI.
Carlson said, “Thomas Crooks came within a quarter of an 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, don’t want us to know.”
The former Fox News host continued by telling viewers that the Justice Department and the FBI have “hid everything they know from the public” about the potential killer and said that his report will “reveal details of Crooks’ social media accounts” while asking why the FBI was keeping their views secret.
He then offered a surprisingly detailed account of how he and his staff possessed and authenticated copies of most of Crooks’s social media history and online footprint, which he says leads to the conclusion that Crooks was “not some secret lone wolf who never warned anyone that he was planning violence.”
Carlson described how Crooks had left “an extensive digital trail of violent threats, including calls for assassinations and political violence” against prominent Democrats and that he was a Trump supporter who had “called for a dictatorship” and “putting Hispanics back in their place” before being “radicalized” against Trump in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It was an amazing change,” he said, repeating a series of quotes from Crooks’ online history that demonstrated a growing interest in violence and disdain for right-wing media personalities like him.
“So here you have an unstable, disturbed, possibly mentally ill young man who has a long record of publicly endorsing violence. The FBI clearly knew he existed,” Carlson continued, before explaining that the FBI had contracted to monitor social media with “massive data collection.”
But he then turned to accusing the FBI of “selectively reading those comments to lie about what Thomas Crooks was thinking.”
He also said the bureau was “not only stonewalling, but actually preventing an honest look at what actually happened”, in part by refusing to release footage of the gun range where Crooks practiced before trying to kill Trump and refusing to release other evidence to Congress, including Crooks’ autopsy report.
He then asked: “Why did the FBI suggest he had no digital footprint in the first place, when the FBI had tons of evidence, hundreds and hundreds of comments, not to mention, of his digital activity, and what about the other dozen accounts that the FBI apparently had access to?
“If there’s nothing there, if they tell you it’s just a lone madman who gave no indication he could do this, then what’s stopping the FBI from at least giving the facts to Congress? Because if there’s nothing there, these questions should be a lot easier to answer,” he said.
The right-wing podcaster’s allegations against the FBI drew a strong response from the bureau’s Trump-aligned leadership, which created a so-called “rapid response” account on Thursday to go after Carlson.
It quickly reshared one of the media personality’s posts with the caption: “This FBI never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint. Ever.”