FBI Hits Back at Tucker Carlson After Former Fox Host Accuses Agency of Lying About Trump Shooter

YouTube/The Tucker Carlson Show

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) hit back at Tucker Carlson on Thursday after the former Fox News host accused the agency of lying about President Donald Trump’s attempted assassin, Thomas Crooks.

“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,” wrote Carlson in a social media post. “The question is why? Story tomorrow.”

After Carlson’s post received thousands of likes, the FBI’s Rapid Response department replied, “This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint. Ever.”

FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate claimed in July 2024 that the agency had found “a social media account which is believed to be associated with the shooter.”

“There were over 700 comments posted from this account,” Abbate said, adding, however, that they were “still working to verify this account to determine if it did in fact belong to the shooter.”

Apart from the suspected social media account, Abbate claimed 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.”

While some social media users praised the FBI’s response to Carlson, others questioned why the agency had not yet shared Crooks’s online footprint with the public.

Carlson has repeatedly criticized the FBI, including under the leadership of Trump-appointed director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino – a former colleague of Carlson’s at Fox News.

The FBI launched its rapid response social media account on Thursday, declaring that “the days of bad-faith attacks and fake-news narratives are over.”

“Under Director Patel, Deputy Director Bongino and Co-Deputy Bailey, your FBI is in a new era – one where we communicate more than any FBI ever before and more directly with the American people about the important work we’re doing,” the agency announced. “But that’s only a piece of what we are doing.”

The FBI continued, “Our team continues to face an avalanche of lies, smears, and falsehoods from the fake news and others seeking to undermine our work and national security. No FBI has had the temerity to put truth as we have, they bent the knee to lies and DC swamp. We changed that on day 1, and now will go even further and more direct. The days of bad-faith attacks and fake-news narratives are over. Welcome to FBI Rapid Response.”