EXCLUSIVE: Remember Thomas Crooks? The man who shot President Donald Trump in a failed 2024 assassination attempt? Big Tech wants you to forget about him.
New reporting has exposed Crooks’s violent threats, his involvement in furry and trans online communities and his potential ties to a neo-Nazi group. This reporting also suggests that then-FBI Christopher Wray misled Congress, testifying that Crooks’s little presence on social media did not reveal a political motivation. However, the Media Research Center can exclusively report that Big Tech’s news aggregators shrugged off the bombshell revelations, erasing the story from public view.
Findings: The MRC found that not a single one of the nearly 1,000 stories pushed by Big Tech news giants, Google News, MSN, MSN News, Yahoo News, AOL, and Apple News, covered New York Post columnist Miranda Devine’s bombshell exposé revealing how the FBI botched the Crooks probe. Specifically, Big Tech’s gatekeepers found no space for Devine’s story on Nov. 17 through Nov. 24, a full eight-day window.
Big Tech’s media blackout on the story was consequential, given Crooks’ historical notoriety for nearly assassinating Trump, one of the most prominent political figures in recent history. The attempt came just months before Trump became the 47th president and was followed by a second attempt on his life and the killing of Charlie Kirk.
These facts made the censorship even more troubling. Google, MSN, Yahoo News, AOL and Apple News have become the largest clearinghouses of news in America, where they cherry-pick which narratives reach the public. They operate like shadow media organizations, feeding millions of people only the information they choose. Some, like Apple News, are even baked into hundreds of millions of devices.
Devine’s report, sourced from someone who uncovered Crooks’ hidden digital footprint, exposed major discrepancies in the bureau’s explanation of the assassination attempt. It revealed Crooks maintained an extensive social media footprint, including posts expressing violent thoughts.
Her findings directly contradicted those of former FBI Director Chris Wray, who reportedly told lawmakers that Crooks had “almost no” ideological presence online. They also undermined former FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, who implied Crooks held right-leaning views.
Devine asserted that the FBI already knew the opposite was true. Crooks once expressed support for Trump but flipped in early 2020, when he was 16 years old, and began berating Trump on social media.
Before Devine’s report, the bureau also never disclosed to Congress or told Americans that Crooks may have been fascinated with “furries” and gender ideology. Crooks used “they/them” pronouns in his account on DeviantArt, a platform known for its furry art centered on anthropomorphism.
The FBI has since said there was no evidence Crooks directly engaged with furry content, noting instead that he was interested in cartoons featuring muscular male bodies with female heads, as Devine reported.
Unbeknownst to Americans, Crooks also openly talked about terrorism and political assassinations in YouTube comment sections and was linked to a member of a Norwegian neo-Nazi group, the Nordic Resistance Movement. The State Department has designated this entity as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
The FBI has since released information largely corroborating Devine’s findings while blaming the Biden-era bureau for failing to properly communicate its findings to Congress or with the public.
Methodology: The Media Research Center tracked the homepages of major news aggregators, AOL News, Google News, MSN, MSN News, Yahoo News, and Apple News, from Nov. 17 through Nov. 24, 2025. MRC recorded the top 20 stories on each site daily, totaling 960 stories across the week.
