Staff Reports
Tucker Carlson finally broke his long silence this week, releasing a forceful video and a string of posts alleging the FBI lied about the online footprint of Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who opened fire at a Trump rally in July 2024. Carlson says he has direct access to Crooks’ posts and that those posts paint a very different picture than the one the bureau fed the public, and he’s daring the powers that be to explain why.
Within hours the FBI’s newly minted “rapid response” account pushed back, insisting the agency never said Crooks had no online footprint and pointing to a social media account investigators had previously identified as possibly linked to the shooter. Bureau officials have emphasized the scale of the probe, noting interviews, device seizures, and extensive file reviews while arguing there’s no evidence Crooks shared a plot with collaborators.
Even FBI Director Kash Patel — who now bears the impossible task of defending the bureau — released a public accounting of the investigation, saying hundreds of personnel reviewed hundreds of thousands of files and concluded Crooks acted alone; conservative outlets like Benny Johnson, however, immediately demanded to see the underlying evidence and called Patel’s explanation incomplete. The clash lays bare a new reality: when official answers don’t satisfy, independent journalists will pry, publish, and force transparency.
The underlying facts of the July 2024 attack are brutal and clear: the shooter took position on a rooftop at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally, fired on the president and the crowd, was killed by Secret Service counter-snipers, and a bystander died in the chaos. That event should have produced an open, unassailable forensic record — not a tidy PR narrative that leaves ordinary Americans with more questions than answers.
Conservatives aren’t reflexively distrusting for sport; we watch the same tapes and read the same reports and see contradictions that demand investigation, such as the rapid cremation of the shooter and the shifting timelines from agency spokesmen. Tucker’s message tapped into a real vein of frustration: if institutions are going to demand our faith, they must earn it with unvarnished facts, not spin.
If the FBI wants its credibility back it should stop treating transparency as an afterthought and start treating it as a mandate — release the raw files, explain the decision-making, and allow outside experts to audit conclusions. Until then patriots, conservative journalists, and everyday Americans will keep pushing, because a free nation can’t survive when the powerful get to decide which facts the public may see.
