Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 11/14/2025 7:45:09 AM PST by Miami Rebel
Tucker Carlson is now openly alleging that the Trump-era FBI — not just Biden’s — is lying about critical details of the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
That is the core, explosive thrust of his just-released video (embedded below): that the very federal law-enforcement leadership now serving in Trump’s second term — including his newly installed FBI team led by Kash Patel and Dan Bongino — is obscuring what really happened on the rooftop where Thomas Crooks nearly killed a former president.
Carlson isn’t just challenging federal law enforcement; he is accusing Trump’s own handpicked security leadership of helping shield the truth.
The FBI saw it coming. Hours before Carlson’s video dropped, the bureau released a preemptive statement insisting there was “no evidence of advance warnings” and urging the public to “avoid speculation.” Whether that was simple bureaucratic defensiveness or genuine concern about misinformation is almost beside the point — Carlson had forced the FBI to respond to him before he even made his case public.
Before Carlson even gets to the timeline, he spends several minutes reframing who Thomas Crooks actually was — and here, his case is surprisingly strong. Drawing from Crooks’ online comments, saved posts, and archived forum activity, Carlson argues that the 20-year-old wasn’t a covert leftist or an Antifa radical, but a deeply alienated young man steeped in hard-right conspiratorial culture.
He points to Crooks’ repeated praise for fringe-right influencers, his fixation on “Deep State traitors,” and posts describing Trump as “the only one fighting for us,” a pattern Carlson says directly contradicts the early media framing that Crooks was politically “unclear.”
Whatever else remains murky about the rooftop in Butler, Carlson insists Crooks’ digital footprint shows a classic right-wing grievance spiral, not a partisan mystery. And that, in Carlson’s telling, only makes the FBI’s rush to downplay motive more suspicious. He then builds his argument chronologically.
He first focuses on the missed rooftop warnings. Multiple rallygoers reported seeing a young man on a nearby building with a backpack and rangefinder minutes before Trump took the stage. “People saw him,” Carlson says. “They told authorities. And nothing happened.” This becomes Carlson’s foundational claim: that federal officials didn’t just fail to protect Trump — they immediately began concealing how badly they’d failed.
He then highlights shifting early FBI descriptions of Crooks’ motives and background. Initial statements suggested no political motivation; later ones acknowledged searches for both Trump and Biden. Carlson reads these shifts as evidence that the FBI is reverse-engineering a narrative rather than disclosing one.
Third, he attacks the FBI’s timeline, saying it omits witnesses who reported Crooks before the shooting. “Why does the FBI timeline pretend these witnesses don’t exist?” he asks. As usual, Carlson deploys questions as weapons — interrogatives that function as accusations while allowing him to disclaim that he’s making any.
What elevates this installment beyond Carlson’s familiar institutional suspicion is who he’s accusing. Carlson directly targets Trump-appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray and two Trump-aligned national-security veterans: Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. Both have publicly defended the Secret Service and FBI’s handling of the incident — Patel saying agencies “followed proper protocol,” Bongino arguing the rooftop “may not have been a legitimate threat at the time.”
Their defenses matter politically. Both men are fixtures in conservative media and seen as institutional truth-tellers precisely because they served under Trump — which makes their endorsement of the official story particularly valuable to the FBI, and particularly troubling to Carlson. His core implication is unmistakable: if the narrative is flawed, then Trump’s own team helped build it.
This is the fulcrum of the video — Carlson turning his suspicion inward at Trump’s security apparatus. It is rare for him to suggest that Trump’s DOJ mishandled something this consequential. Here, he implies the opposite of what his audience is accustomed to hearing: the system did not break in 2021. It was already breaking.
Carlson closes with his signature rhetorical device of asking five pointed questions, presented here exactly as he asks them:
“If the Secret Service had advance warnings about a suspicious individual on a rooftop, why were those warnings ignored?” “If multiple witnesses saw Crooks before the shooting, why does the FBI timeline pretend they didn’t exist?” “If local law enforcement raised concerns, why were they overridden — and by whom?” “If the FBI is confident in its account, why has that account changed so many times?” “And most obvious of all: Who benefited from the security failure that nearly killed a former president?”
These are framed as neutral inquiries, but the allegation is clear: the federal government — under Trump and Biden — concealed or distorted critical facts about how a 20-year-old gunman got within firing distance of Donald Trump.
Carlson has now done something unusual. He has turned his fire on Trump’s own DOJ, suggesting the rot he sees did not begin in 2021 and did not end when Trump left office. Whether this represents ideological consistency or simply another mechanism to keep his audience in a state of permanent distrust is the open question — but the implication is unmistakable.
In Carlson’s telling, no administration can be trusted. Not even Trump’s.
Watch the full video below:
Who is Thomas Crooks? pic.twitter.com/WwjvPGGRwS
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 14, 2025
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Exactly, and this highlights the reason why I absolutely detest Carlson. He is a very smart guy, and knows how to mislead people to his preferred conclusions while maintaining a facade of objectivity. Carlson knows perfectly well how old all those quotes were, but repeats them anyway without ever informing his listeners how dated they are, or of more recent information that contradicts his conclusions.
He is intentionally dishonest, and on multiple topics. He's so blatant about it that it feels like he is mocking his audience sometimes.
TUCKER needs to stop drinking TAP WATER!
I think some of these commentators are searching the niche. There’s too much competition in the long-time conservative talkers and maga is pretty much set—the well is shallow at this point.
I also suspect loyal talk show patrons have waned with the loss of Rush.
I believe conspiracy angles and some of the other outlying pockets shimmer with potential. They’re hoping that by exploiting fractures and such they’ll find an audience to mine. My opinion of it and we know what they say about opinions. :p
I wonder if Crooks, being a right wing conspiracy theorist, was an avid follower of Tucker?
Honestly, I don’t care about Crooks ideology. I care that he got close to killing a candidate for President/Former President.
I am not sure that what Tucker is saying if really relevant to anything.
Really. Watch the program. The guy STARTED OUT as a Trump supporter but had swung to the far Left and hated Trump by the time he took a shot at him.
Get a grip indeed.
Weird. Tucker is starting to sound like chris cristy. Didn’t get a position in Trump’s court and is a sore loser.
Imho folks in this thread totally buried the lead.
The lead is that—regardless of the details and regardless of the reasons—Kash and Bongino have not come clean.
“He points to Crooks’ repeated praise for fringe-right influencers, his fixation on “Deep State traitors,”’
Tucker is among the fringe right influencers. Maybe Tucker has implicated himself?
Tucker is a kook. He’s making the wrong friends and making a lot of enemies. IDK who’s paying him but even if he’s making money, I don’t think it’ll end well for him.
clearly the two former Biden heads of the SS were incompetents, that's what I know for sure from observation. The rest is conjecture at this point.
Tucker has either been possessed by evil or he and his family have been threatened with their lives by someone who has made him an offer that he cannot refuse. No one can do a 180 on truth unless they have serious incentive to do so.
I am listening to this now. This article is cherry picked bullshit to cause anger and division.
Crooks was a real whackjob, perfect patsy for the left.
This is nothing like this article presents.
Crazy people alternate between various crazy obsessions. If they weren’t crazy and had more fixed convictions they might not be trying to kill people. Still there’s a lot that we don’t know about the recent assassin and would-be assassins.
Has the FBI decoded Crook’s encrypted email accounts? Were those the “foreign accounts” that were discussed after the assassination attempt? Foreign email accounts, rather than foreign bank accounts?
We know more about Kirk’s shooter than Trump’s.
Tucker has GONE ROUND THE BEND!!!!! CANDACE ALSO!!! WEIRD AND EVIL!
*ucker Carlson has lost all my respect.
marcusmaximus, you were right.
I agree with your assessment. The mainstream conservative movement lacks what it had with William Buckley from the late 1950s to the turn of the century and Rush Limbaugh from 1990 to 2020: an effective voice that can drive the rank and file away from the fringes of conspiracism, white supremacy, and libertarianism. No one among the conservative talkers filled the void after Limbaugh's death, and frankly, they are aging.
You must remember that conservative talk radio was largely a Boomer phenomenon, and to some extent, the Silent Generation. Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Alex Jones are Gen. X, a group that was squeezed between the larger Millennial and Boomer contingents. Candace Owens is a Millennial (born 1989). The late Charlie Kirk, born in 1993, who had the greatest chance of filling the Buckley/Limbaugh role, was a Millennial as well.
It is worthy to note that the recent right wing celebrity is Nick Fuentes, who is Gen. Z. The problem is that as the Left grows more extreme and as the Biden Administration and the Deep State were heavy handed between 2021 and 2024, it is difficult to pull people away from conspiracy theories and toward interventionist foreign policy and pro-business economic policy. That is why Fuentes has been so successful. Railing against the groypers' hostility to Israel and supporting the Trump Administration unconditionally will not swing them toward Buckley/Limbaugh type conservatism.
Go listen to this. Since when to people around here play along with leftwing Mediaite?
If you listen to this Tucker video, it is not what this article is reporting. It is leaving out the important parts.
Looks like Crooks was a perfect patsy for the DS to me.
The dead shooter on the roof did not resemble Thomas Crooks at all.
S
perfect patsy...
Wasn’t Crooks just that.....
Watch the video and it answers those questions through investigation.
Explains things we are not hearing about.
The mental capacity of the members of this site have sunk to the level of a manure worm.
And there is wonder why it has been failing to meet funding targets?
Rabid stupidity on display.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.