Former president Donald Trump’s would-be assassin is believed to have shared anti-Semitic posts online the FBI described to the Senate Tuesday as "extreme in nature."
In its ongoing investigation into Thomas Matthew Crooks’s attempted assassination of Republican nominee Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally in July, the FBI "very recently uncovered" a social media account "believed to be associated with the shooter in about the 2019-2020 timeframe," FBI deputy director Paul Abbate told a joint hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee and Judiciary Committee.
Some of the over 700 comments from the social media account, Abbate told senators, "appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature."
Abbate reiterated that the investigation is ongoing and the team is still working to verify the account. He noted "the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter’s potential motive and mindset." Twenty-year-old Crooks was killed at the scene by a Secret Service sniper.
"While the shooter is dead, our work is very much ongoing and urgent," Abbate told senators. The FBI continues to investigate Crooks while the USSS is conducting its own internal review to determine how such an attack occurred.
Alongside Abbate at the Senate hearing was Ronald Rowe, the acting director of the Secret Service. Rowe replaced Kimberly Cheatle, the embattled former director of the Secret Service who resigned last week, a day after her disastrous testimony in front of the House Oversight Committee.
Rowe told senators he was "ashamed," saying, "as a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year veteran with the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured to prevent similar lapses from occurring in the future." He also called the shooting a "failure on multiple levels."