Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. So the White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said,
Americans deserve answers on Thomas Crooks, the Dickenzian named would
be assassin of Donald Trump from last year, Butler Pennsylvania,
the whack job that took a shot at Donald Trump
while he was giving a speech and but for a
millimeter gust of wind or something or a turn of
the head, miss Donald Trump and struck Corey comparatory volunteer firefighter,
killed him, seriously wounded two others. So Caroline Levitt was
asked about well, the question came from Miranda Divine from
the New York Post during the White House Press briefing,
and Divine just did this big story where she uncovered
a lot of the social media posts that Thomas Crooks
had been making in the years prior to essentially twenty twenty,
when he went sort of social media silent, so Levitt said, quote,
those questions are definitely deserving of answers, and I understand
why the public wants those answers, and I believe the
president does too. Okay. So that's what happened yesterday. It
was during the press briefing. And here is the original
reporting from Miranda Divine, which was then also followed up
by reporting by Tucker Carlson, although that got pushed back
from Cash Bettel because of the sloppy way that it
was written up. I think, so Okay. Miranda Divine's piece
New York Post, she says, we are all owed a
better explanation from the FBI and the Secret Service about
the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Sixteen months ago at
a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, twenty year old Thomas
Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper, but
not before we killed one of the rally attendees, Corey Comparatory,
who was fifty years old, also seriously wounded David Dutch
fifty eight, and James Copenhager seventy five, who were sitting
in the bleachers behind Trump. There is something very wrong
with the official story that invites conspiracy theories, right, And
this is the problem. When you don't disclose all of
the information, when you appear to be hiding things in
obvious ways, it invites conspiracy theories. Even if you are
completely you know, transparent in everything, it still invites conspiracy theories,
to be sure. But the problem is when there are
things that are obviously suspect or being covered up, or
being lied about or something, then it makes those conspiracy
theories gain traction. So the President, you'll recall, had demanded
answers on this month's ago. Then FBI Director Christopher Ray
told Congress after the July thirteenth, twenty twenty four, attack,
that the bureau had found nothing in Crooks's online history
that pointed to a motive or political ideology. A week later,
Raised Deputy Paul Abody told Congress that comments posted on
one of Crooks's social media accounts appear to reflect anti
Semitic and anti immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and
are described as extreme in nature. Okay, so the implication
there is that oh, anti Semitic, anti immigration, he must
be a right winger, which never made sense. It never
made sense, But that's all we really got. But now,
thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks's hidden digital footprint,
we can now see that a body misled Congress by
omission because he left out an entire sou action of
Crooks's online interactions from January through August of twenty twenty,
when he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly
pro Trump to rabidly anti Trump, and then he went dark,
never seeming to post again, which I'm not so sure
about that either. There were also questions that I have
about how he funded his arsenal right, where he got
the funds for this stuff, the contact in Ukraine and
all of this because his parents were not particularly well off,
so where was he getting his money? Among He had
seventeen accounts, which I say that like it's a lot,
but I probably have, like I probably have twice as many,
but not that I post on. But he had seventeen
different accounts across YouTube, Snapchat, venmo Zell, group, me, discord,
Oh there's a red flag, Play, Google Play, quizlt chest
dot com and qua ok so we had among others.
So obviously the one that stands out to me, or
I guess probably two of them is well okay three, YouTube,
Snapchat and discord. Those would be the places I'd be
surprised if he doesn't have a Reddit profile. He apparently
posted under two different names, but kind of variations on
the same name. And I would be surprised if he
went completely dark in twenty twenty. If he was just
simply you know, crazy, then you would have you would
you would still want to have the outlet for expressing
your lunacy. So that's kind of suspicious to me that
he went dark in twenty twenty, never to post another
thing again after posting all of these comments in up
until twenty twenty. But apparently even Miranda Divine and Tucker
Carlson their investigations all say the same thing as the FBI's,
which is that his digital footprint went cold in twenty twenty.
So the source that worked with Miranda Divine at The
New York Post says that the danger Crooks posed was
visible for years in public online spaces. His radicalization, violent rhetoric,
and obsession with political violence were all documented under his
real name. The threat was not hidden. The official narrative
claimed that he acted alone and without a clear motive
or ideology or digital footprint. Yet the source per Source
found reams of information that shows Crooks was quote not
simply some unknowable loan actor. He left a digital trail
of violent threats, extremist ideology, and admiration for mass violence.
He spoke openly of political assassination. He posted under his
real name, and was even flagged by other users who
mentioned law enforcement in their replies. You may have seen
stuff like this occur. I see it pretty regularly on Twitter,
where people will tag like DHS on like with all
of the Customs and Border Patrol operations going on in
Charlotte this week, people are like, you need to go
do these bad things, you know, and people will tag
DHS or FBI or something. People were doing that to
his comments, did the and law enforcement had no idea.
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All Right, so from Miranda Divine's piece at the New
York Post, where apparently a source of her has uncovered
the digital footprint, a lot of the digital footprint of
one Thomas Crooks, the man who attempted to assassinate Donald
Trump last summer. In this document dump, he spoke on
these platforms openly of political assassination. He posted under his
real name. He was flagged by other users. Despite this,
his account remained active for more than five years and
was only removed the day after the shooting. None of
this online activity was referenced in the final congressional report
that was released in December twenty twenty four, which makes
it all the more troubling. Why wasn't any of this
in the congressional report? You know? Did they not know?
Did they know? And they are trying to protect some
other investigation. That seems kind of odd unless they're going
to unless they're trying to track down some other network,
And that might be possible here based on one piece
of information that I'll get to in a bit. So
Crooks's trajectory from pro Trump to anti Trump is evident.
He referred to Trump as the literal definition of patriotism
in a comment on July twentieth, twenty nineteen. He also
issued several targeted threats against the Democratic congressional representatives that
make up the squad right. Those are the uber leftist Democrats.
But then something happened in early twenty twenty. His online
behavior flips one hundred and eighty degrees and he became
very critical of Trump. This was in January of twenty
two because one might take a guess here that, okay,
maybe the guy went nuts during the COVID lockdowns or something,
but no, this happened right after or right before COVID,
and I know, like January twenty third, that's when he
made this post where he was talking about He was
commenting on a video posted about Jonathan Turley where Turley
was talking about Trump's first impeachment, and Crooks wrote, keep
in mind, the only reason we may know about any
of this is because of Trump's stupidity. And then he
started calling Trump's supporters a cult. What happened? Don't know
what changed this guy? What flipped him. By April twenty twenty,
Crooks was constantly criticizing Trump's pandemic response, saying he was
too slow and everything he's doing now should have been done.
So Trump's behavior was too slow, which that was the
narrative adopted by the Democrats and the media. But I
repeat myself, right, That's what they were saying, is that
Trump wasn't doing enough, he wasn't acting fast enough, because remember,
Trump was like leaving it up to individual states to
determine how they would respond and whether they would declare
states of emergency and what would close and all of that.
Trump was deferring to the states. And at the time,
and I still believe this now, that was the correct
thing to do. But Democrats wanted complete lockdowns. Democrats wanted
the national government to step in and bigfoot the states.
Through the summer of twenty twenty, his online rhetoric became
increasingly radical and violent. Now, maybe that's part of being
locked in a house and you're only interactions are coming online.
It seems pretty clear that he was radicalized online. And
then there's this nugget. Just like the alleged assassin of
Charlie Kirk, Thomas Crooks appears to have been interested in
furries and exploring gender identity. There is a platform called
deviant Art. Would not recommend you google that while at
the workplace or on a work platform, and on this platform,
deviant Art, he had a profile and he describes himself
in the in the profile with the pronouns they then
deviant Art is one of the biggest online hubs for
furry art and the furry community. All Right, if you're
listening to this show, you know I try to keep
up with all sorts of current events, and I know
you do too, And you've probably heard me say get
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You can check it out at check dot ground, dot
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Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off
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my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they
make the media landscape more transparent. So people are always
asking me, Pete, what's a furry? So here's a good
explanation provided by Miranda Divine in her New York Post
article on Thomas Crooks and his digital profile, his footprint
that has now been uncovered by amateur sleuths, and it
contradicts what the FBI has been telling us, notably that
Thomas Crooks had a profile on the platform deviant Art.
He described himself with the pronouns they them, and devian
Art is one of the biggest online hubs for furry
art and the furry community. What is a furry It
is someone who has an interest in anthropomrph five. Sorry
I should have just Rea, I should have just said
it really quickly instead of trying to sound it out.
ANTHROPOMORPHI animal characters in other words, animals. But they're people
kind of like you when you dress up your dog
for Halloween. No, no, I'm kidding, it's it's not quite
that deranged. No, I kid, I kid. Look, if I
had a pet that ever suffered getting dressed up like,
I would totally do it. But every time I try
to put like a hat or something on any animal
I've ever owned, it runs away, and I'm not going
to force the issue. So a furry is someone who
has an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a
sexual fetish. Right, So these are people that really really,
really really enjoy getting dressed up in sort of mascot
kind of costumes and then engaging in carnal relations. I
don't know how you would dry clean the uh the
outfits afterwards, but it has crossed my mind, like ew, Now,
not every furry is into the sexual fetish side of
the furriness. Okay, so it's not. They're like, there's a
like to tap into my inner Kamala Harris. Like there's
a then diagram here where you've you know, there's some
overlap to be sure, but it's not a perfect circle. Okay,
you got two circles there and they overlap, so you
may just really be you know, digging on the furry art,
Like oh, look this lion. It's like a lion but
looks like a person with a lion's head, you know,
and not like a like a sagittarius looking thing or
a minotaur. Was that? No, what's the Yeah, a minotaur
is another one with a half man and then the
half beast or whatever. Like the bottom of it's like
a deer or something. I think that's a centaur. That's it,
thank you. Minotaur is like the bull. But that's a
good like somebody were to dress up like that. Anyway,
I've spent too much time talking about furries. Two accounts
linked to Crooks's primary email were found on devian art.
Because you always got to have a burner account, I guess,
or maybe he just forgot his user passwords so he
created a new profile or something. I don't know. Maybe
he used it to click like on his own comments,
because that's what a deranged person would do. He used
the user names Epic Microwave and the Epic Microwave, And
I'm sure there's a whole psychology behind why you would
come up with that name. You know what it sounds like.
You never get one of the the Wi Fi Internet
boxes from the cable company or something, and they you know,
they have an auto default password and in the old days,
it used to be like a jumble of numbers and
stuff and letters and you can never remember it. And
then they started doing like like phrases like this adjective
noun phrases. That's what this sounds like. Like this was
the name of his Wi Fi router, you know, Epic
microwave or something. Anyway, the account suggests that he had
an obsession. I'm sorry for this, but an obsession with
scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle bound male bodies and
female heads. Like, at some point, doesn't this stuff, like
this imagery, doesn't it conjure up like some of the
some of the art from you know, long time ago,
with people sacrificing babies on altars to Moloch, Like, doesn't
some of this stuff kind of conjure any connection to
that stuff? So is it possible that he started to
become radicalized in the furry community. We know that Tyler Robinson,
the murderer of Charlie Kirk, he was all into this
stuff too. Spent hours and hours and hours on these games.
And one of the games was like where you like
a virtual reality game where you put the goggles on
and then you're immersed and you're like, you're a furry
except you're like a cartoon video generated animal of some kind,
but you're a person still, And then you would have
virtual relations with these other virtual cartoon characters, which I
don't even know how that works, but nor do I. No,
do not send me links. I do not care to know. Also,
both of these guys were on dish scored, which is
a messaging app. It's used a lot in the gamer
community and has been for a long long time. It
was like this sort of secondary app that gamers would
use and still do. They use as a separate chat
box basically while they're playing a game with other people.
And then like, if you're doing like a first person
shooter game, you can be texting like coordinates or whatever.
You can be talking in those chat boxes. You can
be texting, you can be talking whatever. It's a messaging app.
Is that where his radicalization occurred? Did he too find
love in the furry community and did the furries convince
him that he had to take out Trump like Robinson
had to take out Kirk. But wait, there's more. You know,
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so what have we learned? Thanks to the amateur sluthering
by some source that went to Miranda Divine at the
New York Post, found all of these profile matches with
Thomas Crooks that would be assassin of Donald Trump. From
last summer he was very anti left pro Trump, then
flipped like on a dime and became very anti Trump
and then goes dark in late January of twenty twenty.
So what happened, Well, we found out that now apparently
he had multiple profiles on this furry platform he called himself.
They them, But there's more. One of the people that
Crooks interacted with online was a member of the Norwegian
neo Nazi group called the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has
since been designated a terrorist organist by the State Department.
He was interacting with someone that went by the name
Willie Tepys Tepees or TEPS. Teps encouraged violence and encouraged
Crooks's extremism, and he would use the phrase sorry, political
power comes from the barrel of a gun. That is
from Mao, communist Chinese. Right, everyone's favorite kami over there Mao.
Crooks would then repeat that line several times in his
own posts. Shortly after his interactions with Teps, Crooks disappeared offline.
Did his brush with the Norwegian and his own violent
rhetoric win him a visit from the FBI or the
Secret Service. If not, why not? If so, why was
that not disclosed? The FBI refused to comment when asked
on Sunday whether Crooks was ever investigated, visited, or in
some way brought to the attention of the agency before
he tried to assassinate Trump, or whether there was an
FBI file on Crooks before Butler Pennsylvania. And that's kind
of odd. Sometimes I will tell you something in journalism,
sometimes a no comment is just as good as a comment.
The FBI also refused to comment on why it has
not been forthcoming on congressional oversight requests. Former FBI Director
Christopher Ray told Congress in July of twenty twenty four,
eleven days after the shooting, that the bureau quote did
not have any prior information about the shooter and that
he was not in our holdings before the shooting. He
said the FBI ran a search for Crooks through its
databases and he was not found. Susan Crabtree, an investigative
reporter at Real Clear Politics who has broken multiple stories
about the failures at Butler, says her key Secret Service
from the twenty twenty time period told her that quote
Crooks was not a person of record at the Secret
Service in twenty twenty and was not known to Secret
Service until Butler Pennsylvania. So something here doesn't add up.
How can he be making all these comments? How could
other people see the comments? Tag law enforcement? And he
never was on anyone's radar. He was talking to this
guy in Norway, that is this neo Nazi guy. And
by the way, the Secret Service after action report on
the assassination attempt is still classified. Requests for information from
the FBI by Senator Ron Johnson have been rebuffed, including
under the current director, Cash Bettel. Johnson had to issue
a subpoena back in July on the first anniversary of
the Butler attack, and has complained that he's being stonewalled
by the FBI and the Secret Service in his efforts
to request the security camera footage, along with forensic reports
and other documents related to the case. Trump and those
close to him are skeptical about the official story, and
they questioned the impoverished parents of Crooks, who had to
ask for money from neighbors to pay for their son's funeral,
how they could afford to hire a high priced white
shoe law firm called Quinn Loeg out of Pittsburgh. Where
did they get that money from. It's hard to believe
the FBI and or the Secret Service missed Crooks. It
does seem that way, doesn't it. It seems hard to believe.
On the text line driven by Liberty Buick GMC seven
oh four number, says Pete. More importantly, who covered up
Crooks's online profile? Don't know. Sean wants to know if
you dress your dog like a person? Is he a fleshy?
That's that's a good question. We'll do a three part
series next week. Maybe. All right, that'll do it for
this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could
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