FBI Pushes Back on Tucker’s Thomas Crooks Exposé

FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday defended the scope of the bureau’s investigation into would-be presidential assassin Thomas Crooks, pushing back on Tucker Carlson’s claim that federal authorities misled the public about the 20-year-old gunman’s online footprint and motives.

Patel’s statement, posted on X, came after the former Fox News host released a 34-minute video alleging the FBI under both former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump has “hidden from the public what they know” about Crooks, who opened fire on Trump at a July 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. At the time of the assassination attempt, the bureau was led by Director Chris Wray.

In his post, Patel emphasized the breadth of the FBI’s work on the case, outlining an investigation that he said involved “over 480 FBI employees” and touched nearly every corner of Crooks’s digital and financial life.

“Over 480 FBI employees were involved in the Thomas Crooks investigation,” Patel wrote, without referencing the video released by Carlson hours earlier. “Employees conducted over 1,000 interviews, addressed over 2,000 public tips, analyzed data extracted from 13 seized digital devices, reviewed nearly 500,000 digital files, collected, processed, and synchronized hundreds of hours of video footage, analyzed financial activity from 10 different accounts, and examined data associated with 25 social media or online forum accounts.”

Patel said the bureau’s work “identified and examined over 20 online accounts, data extracted from over a dozen electronic devices, [and] examination of numerous financial accounts,” reiterating that agents fielded “over 1,000 interviews and 2000 public tips.”

According to Patel, the investigation ultimately concluded that 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.” He did not refer to Carlson by name or mention the new video.

Carlson alleges FBI misled public about Crooks

Carlson’s video followed a teaser he posted Thursday on X, in which he accused the FBI of falsely suggesting Crooks had no online presence.

“The FBI told us Thomas Crooks tried to kill Donald Trump last summer but somehow had no online footprint,” Carlson wrote. “The FBI lied, and we can prove it because we have his posts. The question is why? Story tomorrow.”

The FBI’s new “rapid response” account, created to answer high-profile criticisms of the bureau, quickly replied, “This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint. Ever.”

In the full video released Friday, Carlson argued that Crooks’s social media posts and online activity show a young man who once praised Trump but later turned sharply critical of the former president and conservative media during the COVID-19 pandemic. Carlson said those posts contained violent rhetoric and racist and antisemitic comments, and he argued that this record contradicts early media characterizations, citing law enforcement, that Crooks’s political motives were “unclear.”

He also criticized the decision to cremate Crooks’s body 10 days after the shooting, noting the timing coincided with the start of House Homeland Security and Oversight committees’ investigations into the incident. Carlson said that choice made it “impossible for investigators outside the FBI to verify the coroner and autopsy report.”

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.”

Little information about the attempted assassin and Crooks’s motive has been publicized in the year since. Authorities have found no manifesto belonging to the shooter.

Old Bongino comments feed skepticism

Critics of the bureau, including political commentator Glenn Greenwald, have pointed to earlier commentary from Dan Bongino, now Patel’s deputy at the FBI but then a media personality, who complained in a 2024 exchange with Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) that investigators appeared to have uncovered almost nothing about Crooks’s background in the weeks after the attack.

“We’re now six weeks in, there’s not a Facebook photo … we know nothing about this guy,” Bongino said at the time. “No one’s got him with an online search history in a library saying, ‘How do I build this?’ He’s 20 years old. It just defies logic.”

Bongino has since publicly praised the FBI and Secret Service response in Butler, saying agents “followed proper protocol” when Crooks opened fire from a nearby rooftop, killing one rally attendee and grazing Trump’s ear before being fatally shot by Secret Service.

Carlson’s new video highlighted a May Fox News interview featuring both Patel and Bongino in which they declined to discuss granular details of the case, citing a “trial” as the reason they could not elaborate, even though Crooks was killed at the scene and no criminal case is pending. At the time, a criminal case involving another assassination attempt by Ryan Routh was awaiting a jury trial. Routh has since been found guilty on five felony counts surrounding his attempt to assassinate Trump at a Florida golf course in September 2024.

Bureau stands by lone-actor conclusion

The FBI has maintained that Crooks acted alone when he carried out the July 13, 2024, attack, a conclusion Patel repeated in his post summarizing the investigation’s findings.

“The investigation … 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,” Patel wrote.

Patel’s statement did not directly address the specific posts Carlson says his team obtained, nor did it explain any tension between those materials and early public descriptions of Crooks’s political motives. The FBI has not announced plans to release additional investigative files in response to Carlson’s claims.

Carlson, for his part, ended his video by challenging the bureau to provide Congress with more documentation about the case.

“If there’s nothing there, if they tell you this is just a lone nut who gave no indication he might do this, then what is stopping the FBI from at least giving the facts to Congress?” Carlson asked. “Because if there’s nothing there, these should be very easy questions to answer.”