By Ceres
This morning, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump by Thomas Crooks to the House Judiciary Committee. During his testimony, he told lawmakers that the FBI did not yet have a clear picture about Crooks’ motivations. He lied.
Later today, the owner of alt-tech social media platform Gab, Andrew Torba, revealed that he had received an emergency disclosure request from a law enforcement agency about an account on Gab. This account, @epicMicrowave, is believed to have belonged to Thomas Crooks. This account had only nine posts, but most of them were in defence of Joe Biden’s policies regarding the migration crisis at the Southern border and the response to COVID.
Multiple suspicious aspects of this case exist. The failure of the Secret Service to stop Crooks despite observing him for 30 minutes, and only engaging after he had already fired multiple shots, the fact that he was in possession of an encrypted phone and was in contact with encrypted accounts abroad, and, as reported earlier by AHN, the fact that mobile data showed that a frequent visitor to Crooks’ home was also visiting a building in DC near the FBI headquarters, are just some of the many discrepancies about this case.
Since the assassination, there has been a coordinated effort by the media and law enforcement to claim that Crooks’ was a Trump supporter, that he had no social media history, that no political motivation could be found, etc. But this new disclosure by Mr. Torba reveals that law enforcement may indeed by aware of Mr. Crooks’ leftist political leanings.
This correspondent has been extremely critical of Andrew Torba in the past, namely over some of the business decisions he’s made regarding his platform. However, it is to Mr. Torba’s great credit that he publicly revealed this data request about Crooks’ account, at risk of legal retaliation. As Gab user NeonRevolt pointed out, this sort of transparency is a justified response to media attempts to tar their opponents as right-wing extremists.
Hold the line, Mr. Torba