(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Last week, FBI Director Chris Wray walked back previous disinformation the bureau provided to Congress about Trump shooter Thomas Crooks having “previewed” his attack on a gaming platform called Steam.
Given Wray’s admission that his bureau briefed Congress with phony evidence—on top of a denial under oath that former President Donald Trump was actually shot—one would think the FBI had learned its lesson about giving lawmakers unconfirmed information.
However, the FBI did so again at a Tuesday congressional hearing, with Deputy Director Paul Abbate telling lawmakers about social media posts believed to be linked to Crooks—but which haven’t been verified.
🚨BREAKING: Gab founder @basedtorba just released an FBI Emergency Disclosure Request (EDR) that names Thomas Matthew Crooks's Biden-supporting social media account after FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate falsely testified under oath to Congress.
According to his Gab account,… pic.twitter.com/Uqs7riUxLC
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) July 30, 2024
“Something just very recently uncovered is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with the shooter in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe,” Abbate claimed.
“There were over 700 comments posted from this account,” he added. “Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature.”
The FBI's Paul Abbate says they may have found a social media account belonging to the Republican Trump shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, where he espoused antisemitic and anti-immigration rhetoric.pic.twitter.com/jQTHYbRMoH
— thee nasty rougarou in the machine (@theerougarou) July 30, 2024
The disclosure fueled immediate suspicion from conservatives who suspected the agency was, once again, trying to push a psy-op narrative that Trump was somehow to blame for his own assassination attempt and that Crooks—who donated to a far-left cause when he was 18, harbored right-wing attitudes.
“While the investigative team is still working to verify this account to determine if it did belong to the shooter, we believe it important to note, particularly given the general absence of information to date reflecting on the shooter’s potential motive,” Abbate claimed.
The deputy director was asked again about the social-media posts later in the hearing, and he reiterated that the FBI hadn’t confirmed that they indeed belonged to Crooks.
“This was just discovered, and it’s being closely analyzed right now,” he said.
“We need to verify that it in fact belonged to the now-deceased shooter, and that he made those comments,” he continued. “So that’s why I felt it important, in the interest of transparency, to share that here—but to add the caveat that we still have work to do.”
Among those who criticized the baseless innuendo was Gab CEO Andrew Torba, who has claimed that Crooks may have had an account on his platform, and that the shooter posted comments indicating he was a leftist.
BREAKING: The FBI is now claiming that the Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks had an unspecified "social media account" in 2019/2020 (when he was 14/15 years old) that posted "anti-immigrant and anti-semitic" content.
This is not consistent with Gab's understanding of the… pic.twitter.com/UPPJSAkPqp
— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) July 30, 2024
However, it’s still unclear whether Crooks’s Gab account is authentic. While Gab received an Emergency Disclosure Request from the FBI, Headline USA understands that those are common: The FBI often sends numerous EDRs during investigations, and often those EDRs don’t yield useful evidence.
Furthermore, an open-source intelligence research who’s provided this publication with reliable information in the past said she investigated the “EpicMicrowave” account linked to Crooks. The researcher, “BX,” said she does not believe that account belonged to Crooks.
We already did, and we decided it was unlikely to be his account.
— Bx (@bx_on_x) July 30, 2024
Abbate also told Congress on Tuesday that the authenticity of Crooks’s Gab account has yet to be verified.
“With the Gab account, though that’s been publicly revealed, we’re still working to cerify and verify that’s his account,” Abbate said in response to questions from Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
