(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The FBI was quick to paint peaceful Jan. 6 protestors as domestic terrorists, but it’s apparently hesitant to do so with the man who tried assassinating presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.
ABC News reported Tuesday that the FBI is investigating Saturday’s Trump rally shooting as “potential domestic terrorism.”
“After conducting more than 100 interviews, searching the suspect’s home and vehicle, and cracking into his cellphone, FBI investigators were still searching on Tuesday for the motive that led a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man to attempt to assassinate a former president,” ABC reported.
ABC also reported on an FBI/DHS bulletin sent to law enforcement across the country, warning of potential for “follow-on” or “retaliatory” acts.
“We cannot rule out the possibility that some [domestic extremists] or other actors may attempt follow-on or retaliatory acts of violence in response to this assassination attempt,” the two agencies said in a joint bulletin, according to ABC.
Crooks was reportedly a registered Republican, but previously donated money to a radical leftist organization, the Progressive Turnout Project, in 2021.
If there’s evidence of his motivations, it would likely be found in his communications from Crooks’s activity on the gaming chat app Discord. As Headline USA detailed in an article Monday, Discord has been often used by mass shooters. More disturbingly, the app is used by feds, intelligence contractors and an assortment of bad actors to target gamers.
Trump shooter Matthew Crooks reportedly had an account on the popular gamer chat app, Discord.
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Perhaps the most notorious example of this is the 2022 Buffalo massacre. In that case, shooter Payton Gendron was active on Discord in the leadup to his killing spree. Even more bizarrely, Gendron had been chatting on Discord with a “retired federal agent” moments before he killed 10 people at the Buffalo supermarket.
Last April, the FBI denied Headline USA’s request for records on the retired federal agent’s links to Gendron, citing an ongoing investigation.
More recently, mass shooter Dylan Butler—who reportedly killed a sixth grader, injured four others and fatally shot himself at a school January in Iowa—was also reported to have used Discord.
NBC reported days after the shooting that Butler was a member of a Discord chat group called “School Massacres Discussion,” which was dedicated to discussing school shootings. According to NBC, another Discord user had notified the FBI about the chatroom months before the attack.
“The Discord user said they had flagged the chatroom to the FBI in November, after which an FBI agent reached out over email and asked for more information,” NBC reported in January.
“The user emailed the FBI agent screenshots of the server but did not hear back. The user said their report to the FBI did not include mention of the user ‘took2much.’ The chatroom was closed before the shooting.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
