Internet Troll, Old Video: People Being Misidentified as Donald Trump's Shooter

A person shot at former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump during a rally at Butler, Pennsylvania on Sunday, 14 July.

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park in the state.

• Ever since the shooting, several social media users shared various visuals, claiming to show old videos or videos Crooks filmed before the shooting.

(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here, here, here, and here.)

But...?: Neither of the visuals show Crooks.

• The first video of a man speaking directly to the camera shows X user 'jewgazing', whose identity we were unable to independently verify.

• The second video dates back to 2020 and shows a person at Arizona State University (ASU).

How did we find out the truth?: First, we looked into the video of a man speaking to the camera, identifying himself as Crooks and saying, "I hate Republicans, I hate Trump."

• We ran a reverse image search on a frame from the video using Google Lens, which led us to several posts which mentioned that he was not actually Crooks.

Some users pointed out that the person in the video might be X (formerly Twitter) user '@jewgazing'.

I don't know if this guy is actually Thomas Matthew Crooks but apparently he's @jewgazing on X and he started this hoax pretending like he was the shooter.

You have to be an absolute loser and terrible person to do something like this. pic.twitter.com/z4aBfIlBkx

— Ashton Forbes (@JustXAshton) July 14, 2024

When we looked for this profile on X, we saw that most of its posts had been deleted and only had six posts.

Since some users had shared screenshots of '@jewgazing''s older posts, we looked for archived versions of the account's older posts.

One of them showed a video similar to the viral video in claim.

Other archives of the user's profile showed a recent repost, which appeared to confirm that it was indeed this user's video which was being shared as one of Crooks, the shooter.

Additionally, we came across other archived posts which carried a side profile of this person — which is also being shared in some claims — along with posts calling it "jokes" and speaking to a lawyer.

(Swipe to view the posts.)

What about the other video?: We followed a similar search for this video, too, which took us to a news report by American channel News 12.

• The report, published on 6 February 2020, mentioned that the Arizona State University police were looking for a person who carried out a "disturbing rant" at people from a pro-Trump organisation called 'Students for Trump' on campus.

• The media organisation also published a video report, which can be seen here.

• Taking a cue from these reports, we looked for social media posts about the incident, shared by ASU's Students For Trump's account.

• Here, we saw that the pro-Republican body had shared two angles of this video on their X accounts.

Conclusion: The two videos which have gone viral on social media do not show the person who shot at former US President Donald Trump.

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