On November 14, Tucker Carlson released an investigative video, exposing new details about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who nearly succeeded in assassinating President Donald Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13, 2024.
In the 34-minute video, Carlson made three bombshell claims:
1. The FBI spent months falsely claiming Crooks had no online footprint while hiding a years-long digital trail of extremist posts across multiple platforms, including Discord, Snapchat, and YouTube, as well as an extensive search history in the days leading up to the assassination attempt.
2. Crooks began as a pro-Trump, far-right teen advocating dictatorship and racial violence, then dramatically flipped in 2020 to virulent anti-Trump rhetoric and explicit threats of assassination, decapitations, and terrorism-style bombings.
3. Crooks was groomed online by a neo-Nazi handler linked to a U.S.-designated terrorist group, yet the FBI — under both Christopher Wray and now Trump appointee Kash Patel — continues to cover up Crooks’ full history, motive, and evidence, including physically scrubbing the crime scene.
After these revelations, Glenn Beck says there are six critical questions the American public must demand answers to.
FBI slept on Crooks’ kill list
For starters, Glenn is highly skeptical about the FBI’s dismissal of Crooks’ disturbing online activity.
During his pro-Trump era, Crooks directed violent comments almost exclusively toward Democrat officials — overtly calling for their gruesome deaths. This was happening under Joe Biden’s FBI — “a period when the U.S. government … was monitoring social media more aggressively than any other point in U.S. history,” says Glenn.
“People were arrested for memes at this time, but Crooks? Nothing … not a warning, not a knock on the door, not one single action,” he says.
Crooks’ 2020 plot twist: MAGA → Trump assassin
Sometime in 2020, Crooks’ digital footprint, per Carlson’s documentary, reveals an abrupt ideological flip. His comments were just as violent, but suddenly, they were directed at Trump and his supporters. He began mocking Trump’s handling of COVID-19, anti-lockdown protests, and conservative media figures, including Carlson himself, for downplaying the virus.
The FBI in its post-assassination attempt report, however, revealed only half of Crooks’ political leanings, omitting the anti-Trump part.
Neo-Nazi Discord daddy groomed him — crickets from FBI
Around the same time Crooks’ political leanings reversed, a shadowy online figure under the alias Willy Tepes, whom Carlson posits is a neo-Nazi Discord groomer affiliated with the U.S.-designated terrorist group Nordic Resistance Movement, began interacting with Crooks. According to the exposé, Tepes encouraged Crooks’ violent rhetoric, openly approving of his barbaric ideations aimed at government officials.
“So now you have our state department” and “our intelligence community that is monitoring people online, especially Nazis in the rest of the world and Nazis here, and yet there’s nothing. Not a single red flag is triggered, not a single investigation, no monitoring, no intervention,” says Glenn, noting that this same FBI was monitoring “Catholic churches and priests.”
Further, in the days leading up to the assassination attempt, Crooks, Carlson alleged, searched Trump’s name hundreds of times, as well as Jack Ruby, bomb-making, car and sniper attacks, successful assassinations, and how to evade police gunfire.
“All of these things should ring every NSA alarm bell. Nothing — again,” says Glenn.
“They didn’t stop him. They didn’t prevent or try to prevent. They didn’t warn anyone. Instead, as soon as he was shot, they rushed out a narrative — a very specific narrative — and then they shut down anything that conflicted with it.”
Trump’s FBI still running cover?
Perhaps the most head-scratching revelation in Carlson’s exposé is that Trump’s own FBI has continued to keep Crooks’ shocking history under wraps.
“I understand it when it’s Biden’s FBI, but now Trump’s FBI? Now, why didn’t Trump’s FBI immediately come out [with this information]?” asks Glenn, noting that Dan Bongino is on record reiterating the narrative that Crooks had virtually no digital footprint.
He uses the metaphor of an iceberg for the FBI. “You see an iceberg, and you just see just the top of it. Two-thirds of that is under the water, so we’re seeing the tops change,” he says.
“I’m questioning: Does anyone know how deep this goes? Because I don’t think it matters who’s running it.”
FBI: Fast cremation
The FBI also approved and coordinated the release of Crooks’ body for cremation just 10 days after the shooting.
“You don’t do that in a presidential assassination attempt. You don’t do that in a local homicide case unless you want something gone,” says Glenn.
The essential questions
1. Why did the FBI push the narrative that Crooks had a minimal digital footprint when quite the opposite is true?
2. Why did the FBI present only half of Crooks’ political history, hiding his era of Trump hatred? Who exactly was involved in the decision?
3. After the election and the appointment of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, why did the FBI continue to uphold the original narrative? Who made that decision?
4. Given that the government constantly monitors potentially dangerous online activity, why did Crooks’ violent comments, suspicious search history, and consorting with a known Swedish Nazi group go ignored?
5. Why did the FBI clean the scene prematurely by allowing Crooks to be cremated shortly after the crime?
6. Why is it that every time our FBI and government make a mistake, it seems to point in the direction of “ignorance, negligence, hiding inconvenient data, shaping a political narrative”?
“There’s something very wrong. The official story is impossible to believe,” says Glenn, calling these questions not partisan but “self-preservation” inquiries.
“You can feel the republic slipping through your fingers. If we do not correct these things, we do not have a government of, by, and for the people.”
To hear more of Glenn’s commentary and analysis, watch the video above.
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