Why is the FBI STILL hiding the true facts from Thomas Crooks’ failed assassination attempt against President Trump? What is the FBI hiding? The American People deserve and demand the truth about what happened to lead up to that day in Butler PA, and so far we’re getting lies and half-truths, but it’s becoming very clear that Thomas Crooks had a lot of help, and that Crooks was actually recruited to assassinate President Trump.
It seems very likely that Thomas Crooks was training at the gun range with FBI or CIA agents. Since it is the FBI still actively lying and covering up the facts of the crime, I would have to say that the people who recruited Thomas Crooks were probably in the FBI.
MEGYN KELLY: The FBI is now on defense, trying to defend the breadth of its investigation, trying to suggest they’ve done everything one would want them to do, and disputing that Thomas Crooks had much of an online footprint, though they’re not specifically denying that these are his.
GLENN GREENWALD: I think that’s the main question, right? I mean, we spent many years very critical of the deep state, of the FBI, of the CIA, for their secrecy, for their refusal to inform the American people, what we have a right to know, of their propagandistic deceit of everybody for political ends. And there was a promise that when, you know, the Trump administration got elected and Dan Bongino and Kash Patel were in the FBI, everything was going to change.
And now we’re left with one of the most consequential news events that we’ll have, which is this attempted assassination on President Trump’s life that almost succeeded. We have to be we’re relying on Tucker Carlson or Miranda Divine and the New York Post to piece together little bits and pieces about what they’ve been able to determine. We don’t know how much else there is in the FBI’s possession that might affect the picture or change the picture. And yet we learned more about Thomas Crooks in the last week from Tucker and then from the New York Post than we have in the last 10 months since the Trump administration was inaugurated. Why is that?
Why haven’t they told us about Thomas Crooks? There’s no trial. He’s dead.
They’ve denied that there’s any conspiracy that he worked with anybody. So there’s no legal proceeding to impede. Why are they keeping all that a secret? Why won’t they even say if they have this or what else they have? I think that’s what we ought to be demanding.
MEGYN KELLY: Totally agree. This is very odd that Tucker has just now come out with this information. Miranda Divine, I don’t know. I have no idea, Glenn. My suspicion is that Tucker dropped this bomb on Thursday. The FBI was defending itself, you know, over the weekend, since Thursday, and then Miranda Divine got a big scoop on Monday. Do not have anything to back this up other than my suspicion that the FBI probably provided this data to Miranda. That’s my guess because she just has excellent sources inside the government. And to me, this almost seems like a head fake, like a “look over here” instead of at what Tucker did, because it’s just too coincidental that, as you point out, we’ve had nothing on this guy. Nothing.
And now, suddenly, two big information dumps. Tucker is being honest about exactly where he got it. Then comes this stuff about “he’s a furry.” You tell me why the government would not have shared that? Like, truly, why wouldn’t the FBI have been sharing the furry thing with us?
Because the FBI did share that around the Nashville shooter, the young woman who was identifying as male. Whereas Biden’s FBI wouldn’t. But this FBI did share those facts about that shooter. The FBI did share those facts about the Charlie shooter. So, I’m a little confused as to what may be going on behind the scenes.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. and and also in terms of the political trajectory that Tucker outlined and that was great reporting because it took you along the way on this political path that this shooter seemed to have traversed by virtue of analyzing his online footprint from going from somebody on the far right, you know, ranting a raving against how Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib and the squad need to be murdered, and immigrants need to be murdered, to something that resembles some someone more on the very critical of Trump for his handling of COVID by not taking seriously enough and other kinds of progressive rhetoric.
I mean, it could be that at the end of the day, this is just a very confused person, could be a nihilist. But why, why don’t we have this information in our possession? This is also something you would think Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi, and the Trump administration would want the public to know.
In other words, you could accuse them of acting politically if the person were a conservative or on the right, just thought President Trump wasn’t conservative enough. Maybe you could say, “Oh, well, they’re on the right. They didn’t want to have somebody on the right be blamed.” But what about all the reporting that undercuts that and suggests that he had a different ideology? What possible motive do they have for hiding that?
I do think that we have to be careful about embracing conspiracy theories, but ultimately, the reason people do so is because of behavior like this. You know, Tucker’s asking the question, did he go and get trained at the gun range by anybody? Who was this person online who seemed to be targeting him? How is it possible the FBI didn’t know about him beforehand, given how explicit these violent threats were? When you have the FBI hiding information and refusing to answer those basic questions, of course, conspiracy theories are going to emerge in that because that’s how trust and faith by the American public is lost in these institutions.
MEGYN KELLY: The clear implication in my view of Tucker’s piece is that the guy was recruited by somebody to conduct this horrific act. And maybe it began with this character who goes by Willy_Tepes. Maybe it was maybe somebody else. Tucker goes on to report that the FBI has made no mention of this Tepes guy in public, though they certainly know he exists, he reports. He goes on to say that just days after the shooting, somebody screenshotted Tepes’s YouTube page despite the fact that he had very few followers. They said you can now find this guy’s username being used on a foreign Antifa website.
He also reports that Thomas Crooks’s online footprint abruptly ends after his encounter with this mysterious figure, Willy_Tepes. So, he seems to me to be clearly implying that perhaps
Willy_Tepes recruited Crooks for someone, alerted someone that this is a hotthead who’s got some mental problems and is prone to violence. And where did it go from there? One of the things Tucker pointed out in this documentary is that they cremated his body, and it was done, I think 10 days after he died. Thus, getting rid of any chance to do any follow-up testing on drugs in the system, etc. And he’s suggesting that seems awfully quick on a guy you knew was attempting to assassinate the likely next president of the United States.
I don’t know, Glenn. This whole thing stinks.
I mean, we have Susan Crabtree, whom I really trust. She’s she reports for Real Clear Politics, and she covers the Secret Service for them. She’s a totally above-board reporter, and she responded as follows: “Crooks was on YouTube threatening to kill government officials, and he was called out for it by another user,” which is true. She says, “Why didn’t the FBI find these posts? Why hasn’t this ever been released? Why don’t we know who that user is who called him out? That person should at least be considered a hero,” she says.
And then she writes, “The FBI was stonewalling Senator Ron Johnson and Senator Rand Paul’s staff as of the one-year anniversary of Butler.” This is her story. Like, she’s the one who broke all the big news on the Secret Service around Butler. And she says, “The FBI was stonewalling two Senate offices as of the one-year anniversary of Butler, both Senate offices stated. One of those offices said the Trump FBI was at first cooperating this spring and even had a briefing with Senate staffers on Crooks and on Butler, etc., but then abruptly stopped doing so,” which earned a triple exclamation point from me in my notes, Glenn.
Something’s going on here. It’s not that I don’t trust Kash and Dan. It’s that I think they have something that, for whatever reason, they feel strongly they cannot tell us.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. But that is sort of a metric of trust, whether the people in government do what people in government have long done, which is hide information from the American public and feed us a story that’s untrue because they somehow think it’s for the greater good that we be deceived or kept in the dark, when in a democracy, we’re actually supposed to know these things and be treated like adults and and we’re not supposed to have information kept from us.
Or they’re protecting something that doesn’t deserve protection. And let’s just be very explicit about this. The last time there was a president who was murdered — and Trump came extremely close– it’s not like this was a fake assassination attempt, right? It was like a millimeter away from blowing his head off. The last time that happened to a president, a president who had his head blown off, was John F. Kennedy. And because of the secrecy around that, because of the lack of cander in our institutions, because of the bizarre way that the Warren Commission was constituted, where they had the head of the CIA and others who were the suspects and the minds of a lot of people on that commission decreeing the truth, 70 years later, people still suspect that our government might have had some role in that.
And when someone like President Trump, who was so hated by many factions inside the government, particularly the deep state, as he himself and his movement has long maintained, and I certainly have as well, comes very close to having their head blown off in a way that suggests at least malfecence on the part of those who are supposed to be protecting him, if not worse. Then people do start wondering if there was the involvement of government agencies or foreign or domestic ones, and that’s a natural curiosity to have.
The problem is that it gets exacerbated when the FBI does what it’s doing in this case, which is not just stonewalling us, but even the elected members of our Congress, ones from the Republican party, who can’t be accused of acting politically or with a motive to get Trump. So, to the extent their behavior is now under suspicion, they really have no one but themselves to blame. And we need an explanation. Like, why is this information being hidden? What are the answers to these questions?
