Pod Insights The Tucker Carlson Show Who Is Thomas Crooks? About this episode The FBI claimed the man who shot Donald Trump was a lone actor with no online presence and no motive. It was a lie.
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Transcript 5,993 words · 18 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:34 Tucker Carlson? These are videos the FBI has worked hard to make sure you haven't seen. They're from the Google Drive account of Thomas Crooks, the man who on July 13th, 2024, showed up at the Butler County, Pennsylvania Fairgrounds and tried to assassinate the frontrunner, Donald Trump.
0:52 Speaker 02 And look what happened to our country. Probably 20 million people. And you know, that's a little bit old, that chart. That chart's a couple of months old. And if you want to really see something that's sad, take a look at what happened.
1:16 Tucker Carlson? That day, Thomas Crooks came within a quarter inch of destroying this country. And yet, a year and a half later, we still know almost nothing about him or why he did it. That's because, for some reason, the FBI, even the current FBI, doesn't want us to know.
1:43 Tucker Carlson? Since the start of their investigation, the FBI has claimed that Thomas Crooks acted alone and that he was a virtual ghost online with no presence at all. Their only substantive claim about Crooks's motive was that he was a right-winger. We learned that from FBI Deputy Director Paula Bate, who said this to Congress just one month after the attempted assassination.
2:06 Speaker 03 Something just very recently uncovered that I want to share is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with the shooter in about the 2019-2020 timeframe. There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.
2:34 Tucker Carlson? The social media account Abate was describing was Crooks's YouTube comments. When the FBI made that claim, we had to take his word for it. We have no way to check, but now we do. In September, we obtained hundreds of comments from Thomas Crooks's YouTube account. Since then, we've gone to great lengths to verify that they're real. We can now confidently say they are. These are genuine, written by Thomas Crooks. But although Crooks's comments are interesting and give tremendous insight into why he did it, they're not the only story. The other story, in fact, the far more significant story, involves the government, the DOJ,
3:14 Tucker Carlson? and the FBI, which have hidden from the public what they know about Thomas Crooks. The purpose of this report is to reveal details of Crooks's social media accounts and to confront a series of key questions. Why is the FBI keeping Crooks's views a secret? Why are they ignoring congressional subpoenas to divulge information? Why are they pretending that there's nothing to see here? And more than anything, what are they hiding? Before we present our findings, it's critical to establish how we obtained the comments and how we know they're real. In late September, we received a tip from a source.
3:56 Tucker Carlson? He told us he'd gained access to some of Thomas Crooks's accounts. He'd found these accounts by utilizing tools commonly used by private investigators.
4:06 Tucker Carlson? The key lead was Thomas Crooks's phone number. That was published in documents obtained by America First Legal. That phone number led our source to Thomas Crooks's primary email account: [email protected] . That in turn, he linked with more than a dozen other accounts. That list includes two foreign encrypted email accounts: [email protected] , a German website, and B. [email protected] , a Belgian website. Crooks had a Snapchat, @tom__crooks19, a Venmo account, @thomas__crooks12, a PayPal account, under the alias Rod Swanson, a Zelle, registered as Thomas Crooks, as well as accounts on Discord,
4:50 Tucker Carlson? a Google Play account called "Colossal Microwave", a Quizlet, titled "Thomas__Crooks", a Chess.com, with the same name, and two disabled Quora accounts, under the handles ThomasCrooks8 and ThomasCrooks3. It turns out that Thomas Crooks was hardly an online ghost. He was active. And yet, federal investigators lied, and told us there was no trace of him online. Some of Crooks's accounts, like his Snapchat, appear to have been fully deactivated and completely taken out of use. Some of them may have been unused or cleared by federal officials during the investigation. We don't know, because the FBI wouldn't tell us. However, our source was able to retrieve all data from Thomas Crooks's deactivated YouTube account,
5:33 Tucker Carlson? @thomaccrooks2178. Visible to other users as @thomaccrooks, this account includes his search history, his watch history, and 737 public comments. Another critical account, his Google Drive, is linked to an archive of Crooks's YouTube account. That's where our source obtained the videos of Crooks dry-firing a handgun in his bedroom, with paper targets on the wall behind him. But aside from the video evidence, the email addresses and the phone number tying Crooks to the account, or the fact that most of these accounts use his actual name, there are other key details that support the authenticity of what we found. For example, this video's metadata shows it was filmed at Thomas Crooks's parents' home.
6:17 Tucker Carlson? And some of Crooks's YouTube comments are still available on Internet Archive sites. Crooks's YouTube channel was suspended on July 14th, 2024. That's the day after the shooting. It's offense, quote, "violating YouTube's policy on violent criminal organizations." And though Crooks's comments are no longer available on YouTube, in many cases, the commenters who responded to Crooks are still there, and they match what we see on the Internet Archive sites. When you click on their tags of Crooks's accounts, YouTube takes you to a page that says, "This channel was removed because it violated our community guidelines." In other words, there is ample evidence to support the authenticity of these posts. Our source figured it out.
7:02 Tucker Carlson? So did we. But when we reached out directly to the FBI to ask why the Bureau hadn't shared any details from the account with the public, the FBI responded by questioning whether we could verify the authenticity of the account. We were confused by this, considering the authenticity is self-evident. And of course, the FBI would have known that since the day of the shooting. What exactly is the FBI hiding?
7:30 Tucker Carlson? Here's what we do know. The digital comments we obtained were posted between 2019 and 2020, when Thomas Crooks was between 15 and 17 years old. They show two things. First, that Thomas Crooks was not some secretive lone wolf who never warned anyone that he was planning violence. Just the opposite. Years before he showed up in Butler, Crooks was leaving a detailed digital trail of violent threats, including calls for assassinations and political violence. Second, they show a man who started out as a radical Trump supporter, whose views on the president transformed, changed completely during COVID. The FBI lied about that fact and pretended that Crooks was a right-winger.
8:11 Tucker Carlson? At 11:35 PM on July 19th, 2019, in response to an MSNBC video, Crooks wrote, quote, "Ilhan Omar and others are invaders and should honestly be killed and their dead bodies sent back." At 1:17 AM on July 20th, 2019, Crooks commented on a CNN video. He said Donald Trump was the "literal definition of patriotism." Seven hours later, he commented on an MSNBC video. He wrote, "I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-Trump congresswomen who don't deserve anything this country has given them." That evening, on a separate MSNBC video, he wrote, quote, "Every one of the Trump-hating Democrats deserved to have their heads chopped off and put on stakes for the world to see
8:54 Tucker Carlson? what happens when you fuck with America." These sorts of comments continued for months and became increasingly violent. The following day, Crooks responded to a CBS Evening News video about the Squad, saying this, quote, "This is going to be blatantly racist, but I hope Trump has these people murdered." Crooks openly called for dictatorship and putting, quote, "Hispanics back in their place." He warned that if Democrats win in 2020, quote, "They won't be in there for long because unlike the Dems, we have guns and lots of them." In one comment, Crooks noted that, quote, "50 million Americans with AR-15s will make quick work of any blockades the government can put in to protect the White House."
9:35 Tucker Carlson? He left multiple references to Mao Zedong's famous line, "The only real political power comes from the barrel of a gun." On September 30th, 2019, Crooks responded to comments about a potential civil war, saying this, "Most rioters don't bring assault rifles and body armor like we would. And we wouldn't be going to the streets, we'd be going to Washington." At this point, one user named HyperPandas responded, saying, quote, "Law enforcement will thank you for grouping up and being so visible. It'll make your arrest so much simpler." Crooks responded, saying, “Cops can't arrest me if they're all dead,” before adding, “Even an untrained man with an AR-15 is dangerous. You think Adam Lanza or any school shooter trained? Nope.”
10:19 Tucker Carlson? If you navigate to that YouTube page today, you can still see identical contextual comments and people referring to Thomas Crooks, including one user who wrote this: “You're on YouTube threatening to shoot government officials. I sure hope the FBI is monitoring social media for violent nutcases.” That exchange is still available on Internet Archive websites. But the FBI didn't see that before the shooting? That's hard to believe. On various occasions, Crooks openly said things like, “Mueller should be hanged along with the rest of the Democrats involved in that witch hunt,” and “I always believed being patriotic was lining up a bunch of socialist Jews like the ones who booed Trump and blasting their useless brains out with an AR.”
11:02 Tucker Carlson? And yet, in early 2020, Crooks seemed to change, radically. On January 23 of that year, he referred to “Trump's stupidity.” He began to mock the concept of “the deep state.” He suggested it was a code word used by Trump supporters for “anyone who disagrees with the right wing.” Suddenly, he sounded like an MSNBC commentator. In February of 2020, he called out Trump supporters as “too brainwashed to realize how dumb you are. I mean, literally, you guys sound like a cult at times.” That same day, he called Trump and his supporters “racist.” It was an amazing transformation. That April, during the peak phase of the coronavirus lockdowns, Crooks wrote, “It seems that you people don't understand that sometimes, public safety comes before
11:47 Tucker Carlson? your personal rights. Are you not willing to quarantine one member of your family to save the rest? If so, you are not a patriot, and you aren't protecting anything.” Around this time, the new “left-wing” version of Thomas Crooks became very critical of conservative media. He said at one point, “Going to a Chinese New Year's party in America isn't putting you at risk for coronavirus, because, believe it or not, viruses don't spread through race like Tucker Carlson probably told you.” That May, as state officials across the country overhauled election systems to promote mail-in voting, Crooks attacked Republican concerns about voter fraud as “ignorant.” Four months later, in August 2020, his tone had shifted even further to the left.
12:29 Tucker Carlson? He said, “I believe the outcome will be irrelevant.” In response to the same video, Thomas Crooks issued what sounds a lot like a digital manifesto. “In my opinion, the only way to fight the government is with terrorism-style attacks. Sneak a bomb into an essential building and set it off before anyone sees you. Track down any important people or politicians, military leaders, etc., and try to assassinate them. Any sort of head-to-head fight is suicide, and even ambush or surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well.” These remarks were especially notable because they came at the final phase of Crooks’s YouTube commenting.
13:09 Tucker Carlson? At that point, a new character emerged into the conversation: a user named Willie Tepes, who started pressuring Crooks to commit violence. For example, “If a gun and a badge is all that is needed, then authority obviously comes from the barrel of a gun. We have more guns than they do. There is no way we can avoid a war at this point, so you better just get used to the idea. We have nothing to lose and everything to win. And the alternative, a global police state, is unacceptable. Nothing in life is simple, but that is no argument against doing it.” So who is this Willie Tepes? Unfortunately, we don’t know. The FBI hasn’t made any mention of him in public, although they certainly know he exists.
13:52 Tucker Carlson? Just days after the shooting, somebody screenshotted Tepes’s YouTube account page, despite the fact he had very few followers. To the extent that he can be traced online now, you can find his username being used on a foreign Antifa website. Those sites link him to the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. That’s all we know. We do know, however, that Crooks's online footprint abruptly ends after his encounter with his mysterious figure, Willie Tepes. Regardless whoever Willie Tepes is or was, and what his motives may have been, who he may have been working for, there is no doubt that Crooks was ripe for recruitment by someone.
14:32 Tucker Carlson? From early 2019 to mid 2020, as his political views were evolving, Crooks searched for Trump more than 700 times online. He also searched for Jack Ruby, the man who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald. He then submitted queries for craziest chemical reactions, cars running over protesters, best places for mass shooting, mass shooting El Paso, Trump Civil War, Orlando shooting reaction, firing an AR-15 as fast as possible, fertilizer bomb, how to make napalm, how to make Molotov cocktail, mass shooting Canada, Oklahoma bombing, and sniper in Dallas shooting. He also searched for American Nazi Party, German National Anthem, 1933, 1945, Hitler's
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18:47 Tucker Carlson? So here you have a volatile, troubled, possibly mentally ill young man with a long record of espousing violence in public. The FBI clearly knew he existed. And then you have, at the very end of his years commenting in public espousing violence, in exchange with a mysterious figure affiliated with a group that we know is being monitored by the US State Department. Hmm. It turns out that around the same time that Thomas Crooks was making these searches and posting overt threats of violence against public figures on YouTube, the FBI was issuing contracts to private sector tech surveillance firms to harness the power of mass data collection
19:30 Tucker Carlson? tools that would monitor social media for people just like Thomas Crooks. It's hard to imagine that Thomas Crooks, who was making these posts publicly and in his own name, had not been identified and looked at closely by federal law enforcement. In fact, it's impossible to imagine. What do we know? Well, we know that the FBI had access to these YouTube comments, and rather than giving us valuable information about them, giving us a sense of why Thomas Crooks did what he did, they used a selective read of those comments to lie about what Thomas Crooks was thinking. Two and a half weeks after the attack on July 30th, a source familiar with the investigation
20:11 Tucker Carlson? told CNN that, quote, "Federal investigators are looking into a YouTube account possibly connected to Crooks, in which the user espoused political violence, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes." Well, of course, it wasn't possibly connected to Thomas Crooks, as the FBI knew full well it was Thomas Crooks's account. There was never any question about that. And yet, the same day, the FBI's then deputy director made the same dishonest claim before Congress. The week previous, then FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly questioned whether Trump was even shot.
20:44 Speaker 06 With respect to former President Trump,
20:48 Speaker 06 there's some question about whether or not it's a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.
20:54 Tucker Carlson? In February 2025, The New York Post reported that, "The FBI has obstructed efforts to solve the mystery of why Thomas Matthew Crooks, who left no manifesto, did what he did. And this fact," said The Post, "left local law enforcement, as well as Crooks's former friends, classmates, and teachers frustrated. The level of lying and obstruction is shocking. Less than a month after the shooting, Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a former police officer, traveled to Butler to conduct his own investigation into what happened. When he arrived, he discovered a disturbing fact: The FBI released Crooks's body for cremation 10 days after July 13. This wasn't known to the public until Higgins arrived in Butler on August 5,
21:39 Tucker Carlson? when the coroner told the congressman, "He would never have released Crooks's body to the family for cremation or burial without specific permission from the FBI." The timing of Crooks's cremation is notable. The day Crooks's body was burned was also the day the House Homeland Security and Oversight Committees had begun their investigations into the shooting. The fact the body was cremated made it impossible for investigators outside the FBI to verify the coroner and autopsy report. You can't do a new tox screen because the body doesn't exist. According to Higgins, "This action by the FBI can only be described by any reasonable man as an obstruction to any following investigative effort."
22:22 Tucker Carlson? Another notable detail is that photos from the day after the shooting show an FBI agent hosing down the site where Crooks died. High-level intelligence officials and congressional sources told us this is very strange, that the FBI usually hires out crime scene cleanup to third-party contractors. But in this case, they did it themselves, leaving no blood and no tissue for anyone else to analyze. In the photo, the agent shirt says he's from the Technical Hazards Response Unit, a unit that collects traditional forensic evidence contaminated with hazardous materials. After the shooting, the FBI sent Crooks's phone to the Bureau's laboratory at Quantico, Virginia. Agents there were able to open it in less than 40 minutes using technology from an
23:07 Tucker Carlson? Israeli tech firm called Celebrate. According to The Post, FBI officials who served under President Joe Biden accessed Crooks's phone, computer, and his encrypted messaging apps in Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany. Yet, none of the online activity the FBI has discovered was referred to in any way in the final congressional report that was released in December of 2024.
23:30 Speaker 07 By the way, why do we still know nothing about that guy in Butler? What's going on?
23:35 Tucker Carlson? That was a good question, a question that most people thought would be answered by the new administration. Within weeks of retaking office, Donald Trump told the New York Post's Miranda Devine that he had, quote, "ordered the Secret Service on Friday to provide him every bit of information about his two would-be assassins."
23:51 Speaker 08 You've had two assassination attempts, one, obviously, where you got hit by that bullet in Butler. There's a lot of frustration that we still don't know about that shooter in Butler. And we don't know about his communications. We get stonewalled all the time, asking questions about it. Is there frustration on your part? Will we get transparency? Will we know the bottom-line story?
24:13 Speaker 09 It's very interesting, because we are great people. I think Pam is incredible. I think Cash is incredible. And they're doing a great job. They're being recognized as doing a great job.
24:23 Speaker 08 But you're the president. Can't you find out?
24:25 Speaker 09 No, no, I know, I know, I know. I'm relying on my people to tell me what it is.
24:32 Tucker Carlson? But his people insist there's nothing there, and they don't seem interested in finding out more.
24:36 Speaker 10 How come we don't have more information on the assassination attempts on President Trump?
24:41 Speaker 11 There's two reasons to open ongoing prosecutions. But we have personally invested our time in making sure that we have looked at all the, any possible international connections to terrorism and adversaries alike. And we've both been down to Quantico, we've both done the laboratory testing, we've both seen the explosives analysis, we've both seen the firearm and physically held it. We are all in on these investigations.
25:06 Speaker 10 Are we going to be surprised at what you learned?
25:09 Speaker 12 You know what, Maria? Cash is not kidding. We've been personally briefed extensively on every single detail, nugget, tendril of this case. One is actively in court right now, so out of respect for the case, it's probably more appropriate that I stay quiet on that. However, I'm not going to tell people what they want to hear. I'm going to tell you the truth, and whether you like it or not is up to you. If there was a big explosive there, there, right? Given my history as a Secret Service agent and my personal friendship as a director does with the President, give me one logical, sensible reason we would not have... If you can think of one, there isn't. There isn't...
25:52 Speaker 12 There, in some of these cases, the "there" you're looking for is not there.
25:56 Tucker Carlson? What a baffling thing to say. Thomas Crooks is dead, of course. There was no trial against Thomas Crooks. And by the way, they weren't misspeaking, this wasn't an accident. We know that because the Director of the FBI said the same thing once again, under oath, in front of Congress in September.
26:14 Speaker 13 When your presence was set right there in that seat, a couple of years, last year in a committee hearing, I asked him a very detailed question about Matthew Thomas Crooks, the shooter responsible for the assassination attempt on President Trump's life. I didn't get an answer from Chris Wray that day, and I submitted written questions to the FBI and into the record of this committee. And I want to resubmit those questions today because I think we are still awaiting answers to those questions. So, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to submit some for the record, please. I'd like to ask you, sir, and the FBI, under your leadership, would you please respond to these questions and can you commit to doing that? As soon as the trial's over.
26:51 Tucker Carlson? But if it's true that there's nothing here, then the FBI has a very strange way of showing it. In July of 2024, a bipartisan group of senators led by Republican Senator Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, sent a letter, quote, "requesting records related to the July 13th, 2024 assassination attempt." Fully a year later, the FBI still had not responded. What is this about? This summer, Senator Johnson issued a new subpoena, noting that, quote, "nearly a year after the assassination attempt and the initiation of the subcommittee's investigation, the FBI has repeatedly failed to produce the subcommittee records and information critical to its investigation." In the subpoena, they demanded pictures and images related to the assassination, video footage, forensic reports, records related to FBI interviews,
27:36 Tucker Carlson? and notably, all records referring or relating to any of Thomas Crooks's electronic devices, digital or financial accounts, or online search history.
27:44 Speaker 14 What are you telling us?
27:47 Speaker 15 I am totally unsatisfied. I am totally unsatisfied. You had a person with a modern rifle, modern scoped rifle, at 130 yards, who shot at the former Commander in Chief of the United States, and a guy who was going to be, by all accounts at that point, the future Commander in Chief. And then they tried to kill my father eight weeks later, you know, at his golf course in Palm Beach County, a golf course that I run every single day. I am totally unsatisfied that we have one picture of that shooter. The guy looks like he was 14 years old in the picture. We know nothing about him. We know nothing about him. Right? And I am totally unsatisfied with the result, and I think a lot of America is unsatisfied with the result, and I think we'd better get to the bottom of exactly what happened.
28:24 Speaker 14 Are you telling me there's a conspiracy here that you believe, that Eric Trump believes resulted in the assassination attempt?
28:32 Speaker 15 Yes, I think they tried to kill my father because they did not want his voice on that stage.
28:40 Tucker Carlson? Unfortunately, the reality is that the FBI, as of today, is not only stonewalling, but is actively preventing an honest look at what happened in Butler. Within days of the shooting, FBI agents collected all the relevant surveillance footage. That includes footage from local businesses, the state police, and critically, the gun range where Thomas Crooks trained. Did he train alone? We don't know. Because to this day, the FBI refuses to release the footage. They confirmed it exists. They confirmed the existence of one gaming account. And then publicly said a few days later the account wasn't real. Was that incompetence? Or are they lying? Within a day of the shooting, the social media companies that hosted Crooks's comments
29:24 Tucker Carlson? took his accounts offline. In some cases, the records of those comments in the Internet Archive were also erased. Did the FBI order that too? What we do know is that on the day of the attacks, Thomas Crooks got extremely lucky. Miraculously lucky. After he arrived at the Butler County Fairgrounds on the morning of the shooting, Thomas Crooks conducted surveillance by flying his drone over the rally site. He flew that drone for 11 minutes. It just so happened that the Secret Service's anti-drone system were down at exactly the same moment. What are the odds? Later that afternoon, police officers saw Crooks loitering with a backpack and a rangefinder. They identified him as a suspicious person, which he clearly was,
30:08 Tucker Carlson? but quickly lost track of him. And so, Crooks climbed to the top of the American Glass Research Building. That happened to be the only building in the area that did not have a video surveillance system. It was also remarkably, inexplicably, outside the Secret Service's security perimeter, despite the fact it was very close to the stage. Two local police officers assigned to the building saw Crooks, but they didn't report him. A third officer, who was supposed to be there, left early. At 6:11 PM, Crooks opened fire from the rooftop.
30:41 Speaker 02 Take a look at what happened.
30:46 Tucker Carlson? Within the vacuum left by the FBI and its total unwillingness to explain what had happened, the media were able to leverage the shooting to serve its own political ends. On ABC, we learned that this happened because white men own guns.
31:01 Speaker 16 It was, you know, a 20-year-old lone wolf, white, whack-job with EC-Access toy gun. And we have to have a conversation about that.
31:12 Tucker Carlson? And within days of the shooting, US intelligence officials started leaking about a supposed plot by the Iranian government to kill Trump. There was never any evidence that if you were planning a regime-change war against Iran, you might claim otherwise.
31:27 Speaker 17 Let me read to you this breaking news that we are reporting from three US officials who have been briefed on the matter. The US obtained intelligence in recent weeks about an Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump.
31:41 Tucker Carlson? The stonewalling, the lying, the persistent unwillingness to explain anything. All of it makes you wonder, what are they hiding? If the leadership of the FBI and the DOJ had any desire whatsoever to prove to the public that there is in fact nothing there, they could do that. But first, they would have to answer these questions. Was Thomas Crooks known to federal law enforcement before the shooting? Was he known to local law enforcement before the shooting? And if not, why not? Who is Willie Tepes? And was he known to federal law enforcement? Is Willie Tepes linked to any violent organizations? Is he linked to any governments? And if so, then around the time of the shooting, did the FBI have assets inside those organizations?
32:25 Tucker Carlson? If Crooks wasn't known to anyone in authority before the shooting, how was he able to post hundreds of violent extremist comments under his real name between 2019 and 2020 without being detected by law enforcement or intel agencies at a time we know they were monitoring social media? Were those comments, including specific assassination threats against specific public officials, ever reported to YouTube? Other users complained about them. Did YouTube know? Why is the FBI telling us that they'll release this information, quote, "after the trial", when there is no trial? Why did an FBI agent from the Technical Hazards Response Unit hose down the crime scene the day after the attack? That seems very strange.
33:09 Tucker Carlson? What happened on the roof of the American Glass Research Building for the 10 seconds after Crooks's last shot until he was killed by the Secret Service? Does the FBI have surveillance footage of Thomas Crooks's shooting that day? Was the FBI present at the medical examiner's autopsy? Are there still blood samples? Can they be examined by outside authorities? When Congress demanded the autopsy, did the FBI restrict what the examiner could tell the Congress? When the FBI cleared the coroner to release Crooks's body for cremation, did they keep tissue samples, brain tissue samples, spinal cord samples, or spinal fluid samples? Law enforcement sources told us that in a typical investigation in a crime of this
33:52 Tucker Carlson? nature, it would be normal to preserve all of that, those samples. If the FBI didn't, why not? And who made that decision to destroy what could be critical evidence in an attempted murder case? FBI agents went to the same gun range that Thomas Crooks was using. Who were those agents? And did any of them at any time have any contact with Thomas Crooks? Who did he train with exactly? And why can't we know? Was Thomas Crooks taking drugs that might have turned up on the toxicology report, but that weren't listed somehow? On what date specifically did FBI agents stop investigating Thomas Crooks's online presence? Why did the former deputy director of the FBI, Paula Bate, suggest to Congress that
34:36 Tucker Carlson? Crooks was a right-winger, when he clearly wasn't? Was the FBI aware of Crooks's public comments before the shooting, many of which are openly violent, that included specific assassination attempts involving public officials? Who was Thomas Crooks in communication with in the days before the attack? What does his burner phone show? And in fact, why did he have a burner phone and encrypted foreign email accounts? Who are the government officials trying to link Iran to the shooting? Why did the FBI suggest that he had no digital footprint in the first place when the FBI had a great deal of evidence, hundreds and hundreds of comments from his digital activity? And what's on the other dozen accounts that the FBI clearly had access to?
35:18 Tucker Carlson? How long had Thomas Crooks been planning to commit an assassination? If there's nothing there, if they tell you this is just a lone nut who gave no indication he might do this, then what is stopping the FBI from at least giving the facts to Congress? Because if there's nothing there, these should be very easy questions to answer.
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