It has been more than a year since a would-be assassin attempted to kill President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, but very little substantive information about the shooter has been officially released by the government in that time.

The apparent lack of transparency prompted right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson to conduct a deep dive into Thomas Crooks, the suspected anti-Trump sniper, and what he uncovered has seemingly undermined the narrative crafted by the FBI and mainstream media, according to the Daily Mail.

While Crooks may have initially been a Trump supporter as a young teenager, as the FBI and media have maintained, his since-deleted social media activity strongly suggests a sharp ideological change between 2019-2020 that transformed him into a bona fide Trump hater who embraced political violence.

Scrubbed online activity of anti-Trump shooter recovered

Aside from the assertion that attempted Trump assassin Crooks was a right-wing Trump supporter, the FBI and the media have also repeatedly insisted that he had little or no online footprint or social media usage, which Carlson just exposed as untrue.

In a 34-minute special released this week, Carlson revealed that Crooks was actually quite active on social media as a teen, and often left comments on the posts of others in which he seemingly endorsed the use of violence and targeted assassinations to achieve certain political goals.

Despite Crooks' online footprint being largely wiped clean almost immediately after the July 2024 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, Carlson said he'd received an anonymous tip from someone who'd viewed the online activity before it was erased that helped to direct his search for more information that was not forthcoming from federal officials.

Following that tip, Carlson was able to identify and partially access Crooks' Gmail account, which led to the discovery of multiple social media accounts, including YouTube and Snapchat, along with a wide assortment of data about his since-deleted online activity, some of which was recoverable through internet archives.

Noticeable partisan shift in social media commentary

Carlson's special on Crooks exposed how the would-be assassin, between the ages of 15-17, was indeed an initial supporter of President Trump in his first term, and was willing to espouse the use of violence against the president's perceived political enemies.

Between 2019-2020, however, beginning with the first impeachment of Trump and continuing through the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a noticeable shift in Crooks' partisan rhetoric, as he increasingly expressed his disillusionment with the Republican president and gravitated toward left-wing ideals.

Then, suddenly, years before he ultimately fired a rifle in anger toward Trump, all of Crooks' online activity appears to have simply stopped, with virtually no explanation for the cessation.

Pushback from FBI Director Patel

Carlson's informative special on Crooks appears to significantly undermine the prevailing narratives from the FBI and the media about the attempted assassination of President Trump, and that was seemingly enough to prompt an indirect public response from FBI Director Kash Patel about the Crooks investigation, according to the Daily Mail.

Making no mention of Carlson's video, Patel wrote in an X post that the FBI "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."

"The FBI’s investigation into Thomas Crooks identified and examined over 20 online accounts, data extracted from over a dozen electronic devices, examination of numerous financial accounts, and over 1,000 interviews and 2,000 public tips," he continued.

Patel concluded, "The investigation, conducted by over 480 FBI employees, 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."