Hours after a gunman attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday, videos of a person purporting to be the suspect began spreading rapidly across TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and Telegram. The videos have been shared by both verified and unverified social media accounts, as well as handles purporting to belong to the gunman, who has been identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks was shot and killed by the Secret Service at the rally.

“My name is Thomas Matthew Crooks,” said a viral clip circulating Sunday that had been liked, watched or shared thousands of times on posts across the platforms. “I hate Republicans, I hate Trump, and guess what? You got the wrong guy.” (Some versions of the video then cut to footage of President Joe Biden.) Crooks was a registered Republican, though records show he donated $15 to a liberal voters group in 2021.

BBC Verify, which uses open source intelligence and investigative techniques to track mis- and disinformation online, reported that the man in the widely-viewed videos is not the shooter. UC Berkeley professor and deepfake expert Hany Farid reviewed the clips and told Forbes they do not appear to have been AI-generated.

The videos, which have also landed on 4chan and 8chan, claim to show the 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania describing his motives, which are not yet known to the public (Biden said Sunday afternoon there is still “no information” about that). They also sow confusion over whether the man whose likeness has been used is, in fact, the actual suspect.

Photos that appear to be of the same man circulated on X on Saturday and were boosted by prominent accounts, including former CNN host Don Lemon and far-right activist Laura Loomer. Forbes found at least one blue-check account from a verified news organization with 124,000 followers on TikTok sharing the video, and nearly a dozen small but growing TikTok and Instagram accounts using that man’s name and face early Sunday. Some of the videos and accounts have since been taken down, but as fast as they are being removed, new ones showing the same person making the same claims are sprouting up.

Meanwhile, on Gab, a post has began circulating that was purportedly written by a Secret Service agent who was ordered not to fire on Crooks. Yet there is no evidence suggesting the post was actually written by a Secret Service agent.

The firestorm of false or misleading information that has followed the assassination attempt is further inflaming one of the most unprecedented moments in modern American politics. Conspiracy theories have spread rapidly across social media, blaming the so-called deep state for the attack.

With millions of people turning to the likes of TikTok and Twitter (now X) for breaking news and political commentary, social media platforms can very quickly propagate unverified claims and insert outright falsehoods into public discourse. Forbes has also discovered the same video on the internet 2.0 blogging platform LiveJournal and a Catholic social platform called Gloria.TV.

TikTok, X, YouTube, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Reddit, LiveJournal and Gloria.TV did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Telegram could not immediately be reached.

On TikTok, users have also been using so-called algospeak—code words that help to avoid detection by TikTok’s algorithm—to talk about the alleged gunman and the shooting on Saturday. Many are using the words “pew pew” to reference guns or gunshots; “unalive” or “d3ath” to describe those who were killed; and “sh00ter” or “sh0t” to discuss the suspect.

ForbesTrump Assassination Attempt: Biden Says ‘No Information’ On Motive, Calls For Independent Investigation Into Rally Shooting (Live Updates)By ForbesExplosive Materials Found In Car Of Suspected Trump ShooterBy ForbesWhy The Next President Might Be The Worst-Paid In U.S. HistoryBy ForbesThe True Story Of Trump’s $75 Million BackerBy ForbesHere’s How Much Joe Biden Is WorthBy

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

AP Photo/John Bazemore

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

AP Photo/John C. Clark

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

AP Photo/Nathan Ellgren

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

AP Photo/John Bazemore

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

ATLANTA (AP) — A raspy and sometimes halting President Joe Biden tried repeatedly to confront Donald Trump in their first debate ahead of the November election, as his Republican rival countered Biden’s criticism by leaning into falsehoods about the economy, illegal immigration and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Biden’s uneven performance, particularly early in the debate, crystallized the concerns of many Americans that, at 81, he is too old to serve as president. It sparked a fresh round of calls for the Democrat to consider stepping aside as the party’s nominee as members of his party fear a return of Trump to the White House.

Biden repeatedly tore into Trump in an apparent effort to provoke him, bringing up everything from the former president’s recent felony conviction to his alleged insult of World War I veterans to his weight. The 78-year-old Trump declined to clearly state he would accept the results of the November election, four years after he promoted conspiracy theories about his loss that culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and repeatedly misstated the record from his time in office.

But Biden’s delivery from the beginning of the debate drew the most attention afterward. Trump’s allies immediately declared victory while prominent Democrats publicly questioned whether Biden could move forward.

“I think the panic had set in,” said David Axelrod, a longtime advisor to former President Barack Obama on CNN, immediately after the debate about Biden’s performance. “And I think you’re going to hear discussions that, I don’t know will lead to anything, but there are going to be discussions about whether he should continue.”

Said Van Jones, another Democratic strategist, on CNN: “He did not do well at all.”

Rosemarie DeAngelis, a Democrat who watched the debate at a party in South Portland, Maine, said she felt Biden gave the right answers to Trump but “didn’t have the spark that we needed tonight.”

“That’s going to be the challenge going forward. This is only June, this is the first, but can he sustain?” she said. “That is going to be the challenge.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking on CNN afterward, sought to defend the president’s performance while acknowledging the criticism.

“There was a slow start, but there was a strong finish,” she said.

Asked about his performance in the debate, Biden told reporters early Friday that “I think we did well,” but said he has a “sore throat.” Pressed about Democratic concerns with his showing that he should consider stepping aside, Biden said, “No, it’s hard to debate a liar.”

Biden repeatedly lost his train of thought

Biden began the night with a hoarse voice as he tried to defend his economic record and criticize Trump. A person familiar with the matter said Biden was suffering from a cold during the debate, adding that he tested negative for COVID-19.

Biden appeared to lose his train of thought while giving one answer, drifting from an answer on tax policy to health policy, at one point using the word “COVID,” and then saying, “excuse me, with, dealing with,” and he trailed off again.

“Look, we finally beat Medicare,” Biden said, as his time ran out on his answer.

He also fumbled on abortion rights, one of the most important issues for Democrats in this year’s election. He was unable to explain Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. A conservative Supreme Court with three justices nominated by Trump overturned Roe two years ago.

When asked if he supports some restrictions on abortion, Biden said he “supports Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters. The first time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor, I mean, between the women and the state.”

He added that he thought doctors, not politicians, should make decisions about “women’s health.”

Biden began to give clearer answers as the debate progressed, still with a rasp, and attacked Trump’s record on issues like fighting climate change.

“The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and he didn’t do a damn thing about it,” he said.

Trump sought to deflect blame for Jan. 6

The current president and his predecessor hadn’t spoken since their last debate weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Trump skipped Biden’s inauguration after leading an unprecedented and unsuccessful effort to overturn his loss that culminated in the Capitol riot by his supporters.

Trump equivocated on whether he would accept the results of the November election, saying he would accept them if the vote was “fair” and “legal,” repeating his baseless claims of widespread fraud and misconduct in his 2020 loss to Biden that he still denies.

Pressed on his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was unapologetic.

“On Jan. 6, we were respected all over the world, all over the world we were respected. And then he comes in and we’re now laughed at,” Trump said.

After he was prompted by a moderator to answer whether he violated his oath of office that day by rallying his supporters seeking to block the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory and not acting for hours to call them off as they raided the Capitol, Trump sought to blame then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Biden said Trump encouraged the supporters to go to the Capitol and sat in the White House without taking action as they fought with police officers.

“He didn’t do a damn thing and these people should be in jail,” Biden said. “They should be the ones that are being held accountable. And he wants to let them all out. And now he says that if he loses again, such a whiner that he is, that this could be a ‘bloodbath’?”

Trump then defended the people convicted and imprisoned for their role in the insurrection, saying to Biden, “What they’ve done to some people that are so innocent, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Trump and Biden entered the night facing stiff headwinds, including a public weary of the tumult of partisan politics and broadly dissatisfied with both, according to polling. But the debate was highlighting how they have sharply different visions on virtually every core issue — abortion, the economy and foreign policy — and deep hostility toward each other.

Their personal animus quickly came to the surface. Biden got personal in evoking his son, Beau, who served in Iraq before dying of brain cancer. The president criticized Trump for reportedly calling Americans killed in battle “suckers and losers.” Biden told Trump, “My son was not a loser, was not a sucker. You’re the sucker. You’re the loser.”

Trump said he never said that — a line attributed to Trump by his former chief of staff — and slammed Biden for the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, calling it “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life.”

Trump himself agreed to the withdrawal with the Taliban a year before he left office.

Biden directly mentioned Trump’s conviction in the New York hush money trial, saying, “You have the morals of an alley cat,” and referencing the allegations in the case that Trump had sex with a porn actress.

“I did not have sex with a porn star,” replied Trump, who chose not to testify at his trial.

Pressed to defend rising inflation since he took office, Biden pinned it on the situation he inherited from Trump amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biden said that when Trump left office, “things were in chaos.” Trump disagreed, declaring that during his term in the White House, “Everything was rocking good.”

By the time Trump left office, America was still grappling with the pandemic and during his final hours in office, the death toll eclipsed 400,000. The virus continued to ravage the country and the death toll hit 1 million over a year later.

Trump was asked what he would do to make childcare more affordable. He used his answer to instead boast about how many people he fired during his term, including former FBI Director James Comey, and criticized Biden for not firing people from his administration.

The age question roars back

Prior to the debate, about 6 in 10 U.S. adults (59%) said they were “very concerned” that Biden is too old to be president, according to Gallup data collected in June. Only 18% had the same level of concern about Trump. The poll found Biden’s age was also causing alarm among some Democrats: 31% said they were very concerned.

Trump allies entered the post-debate spin room triumphant. Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita called it “the most lopsided win in debate history” and mocked the Biden campaign for saying the president had a cold.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a high-profile Democratic supporter of Biden, was pressed on whether he would consider stepping in for Biden. He dismissed the questions, saying, “I will never turn my back on him.”

He said he knows Biden and what he’s capable of and said, “I have no trepidation.”

Biden spent nearly a week at the Camp David presidential retreat preparing for the debate. Shortly before the debate, Biden started selling cans of water labeled, “Dark Brandon’s Secret Sauce,” on his campaign website, mocking the suggestions from Trump and his advisors that he would use drugs to enhance his performance.

Addressing supporters briefly at a watch party near the debate venue, Biden didn’t address his performance directly, but said, “let’s keep going,” and indicated he has no plans to leave the race.

“See you at the next one,” he said.

___

Miller, Price and Weissert reported from Washington.

Copyright
© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

Washington
CNN
 — 

Former President Donald Trump said he was going to hold a “press conference” on Friday in the wake of his Thursday conviction in Manhattan on felony charges of falsifying business records.

Instead, Trump delivered a rambling monologue that was filled with false claims on subjects ranging from the Manhattan trial to immigration to tax policy.

Here is a fact check of some of the inaccurate or unsubstantiated claims he made.

Trump repeated his familiar claim that, while Manhattan prosecutors have been focusing on him, New York City has been experiencing record-high violent crime. He said this time that “you have violent crime all over this city at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is not even close to true. Violent crime in New York City – and violent crime in Manhattan in particular – has plummeted since the early 1990s and is today nowhere near record levels.

New York City recorded 391 murders in 2023, down about 83% from the 2,262 in 1990; 1,455 rapes in 2023, down about 53% from the 3,126 in 1990; and 16,910 robberies in 2023, down about 83% from the 100,280 in 1990.

Criticizing key prosecution witness Michael Cohen, Trump repeated a claim he made during the trial in April. He asserted that Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, “got into trouble not because of me” but because of “outside deals” and “something to do with taxicabs and medallions, and he borrowed money, and that’s why he went.” He added that Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations to try to get himself a lighter penalty.

Trump continued: “He got in trouble for a very simple reason: because he was involved with borrowing a lot of money and he did something with the banks – I don’t know, defrauded the banks, but something happened.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that Cohen got into trouble simply because of his non-Trump-related activities, such as those related to taxis and loans, is not true. First, Cohen’s case was referred to federal prosecutors in New York by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who was appointed to investigate any connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Second, Cohen’s three-year prison sentence in 2018 was for multiple crimes, some of which were directly related to Trump. 

Most notably, Cohen was sentenced for campaign finance offenses connected to a hush money scheme during the 2016 presidential campaign to conceal Trump’s alleged extramarital relationships – the same hush money scheme that was central to this prosecution against Trump. Cohen was also sentenced to two months in prison, to run concurrently with the three-year sentence, for lying to Congress in 2017 in relation to previous talks about the possibility of building a Trump Tower in Moscow, Russia, including about the extent of Trump’s involvement in the aborted Moscow initiative and about when in 2016 the discussions ended. (The discussions continued into June 2016, the month after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and did not conclude in January 2016 before the first votes were cast, as Cohen had claimed.)

Referring to Trump as “Individual-1,” Cohen said at the time of his 2018 guilty plea for making false statements to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: “I made these statements to be consistent with Individual-1’s political messaging and out of loyalty to Individual-1.” When Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to the campaign finance violations, he said he broke the law “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” Trump.

Biden and the case

Trump repeated his frequent claim that the Manhattan case in which Trump was convicted “is all done by Biden and his people” and “in total conjunction with white house and the DOJ,” the federal Department of Justice.

Facts First: There is no basis for Trump’s claim. There is no evidence that President Joe Biden, his White House aides or the federal Justice Department had any role in launching or running Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution – and Bragg, a Democrat, is a locally elected official who does not report to the federal government. The indictment in the case was approved by a grand jury of ordinary citizens.

Trump has repeatedly invoked a lawyer on Bragg’s team, Matthew Colangelo, while making such claims; Colangelo left the Justice Department in 2022 to join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel to Bragg. But there is no evidence that Biden had anything to do with Colangelo’s employment decision. Colangelo and Bragg had been colleagues before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney in 2021.

Before Colangelo worked at the Justice Department, he and Bragg worked at the same time in the office of New York’s state attorney general, where Colangelo investigated Trump’s charity and Trump’s financial practices and was involved in bringing various lawsuits against the Trump administration.

The judge and an expert in election law

Trump claimed that, because of Judge Juan Merchan, “we weren’t allowed to use our election expert under any circumstances.” He claimed that this expert on election law was ready to testify “and the judge knocked him out, said you can’t testify.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that Merchan refused to allow Trump’s team to use this witness “under any circumstances” is false. Merchan did not prohibit the potential witness, former Federal Election Commission chairman Bradley Smith, from testifying. Rather, Merchan limited what Smith was allowed to testify about. Merchan decided in March that Smith could provide background information about the FEC and define certain terms relevant to this case but could not opine on whether Trump broke federal election laws or offer opinions about how to interpret or apply those laws. After Merchan refused last week to change his mind, Trump’s defense decided not to call Smith as a witness. 

Smith wrote on social media last week: “Judge Merchan has so restricted my testimony that defense has decided not to call me.”

Trump, offering a hint of a clarification, did proceed to say on Friday that Smith “essentially” was not able to testify. But his earlier comments made it sound like Merchan had imposed a total ban on Smith’s testimony.

Immigration and ‘the Congo’

Trump repeated a claim he has made before about “the Congo” and migration, again without specifying whether he was referring to the Democratic Republic of Congo or the neighboring Republic of Congo. He said: “The Congo has just released a lot of people from jail – Congo, Africa – just released a lot of people, a lot of people, from their prisons and jails, and brought them into the United States of America.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is baseless. Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo, plus both pro-immigration and anti-immigration organizations in the US, told CNN they have not seen any evidence of Congolese prisons being emptied, let alone evidence of either country somehow having “brought” ex-prisoners into the US. Trump’s presidential campaign and an allied super PAC did not respond to requests to provide any evidence. A CNN search of two media databases turned up no evidence. And federal figures show that there is no “very big” influx of Congolese migrants of any kind, let alone former prisoners in particular.

“Everything he is saying isn’t true,” Democratic Republic of Congo spokesperson Patrick Muyaya Katembwe told CNN in a text message in March. Asked specifically about Trump’s claims about Congolese prisons being emptied of violent criminals, he said, “Never ever, it’s not true.” And, he said, “we want him to stop” telling these stories, since “it’s very bad for the country.”

Serge Mombouli, the Republic of Congo’s ambassador to the US, said in an email to CNN in March: “There is no truth or any sign nor a single fact supporting such a claim or statement.”

You can read more here.

Trump and Nord Stream 2

Trump repeated his claim that he had ended a key Russian project – the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. He said: “You know, I ended the Russian pipeline. It was dead.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not “end” Nord Stream nor render it “dead.” While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine in early 2022. The pipeline was damaged later that year in what has been described as a likely act of sabotage.

Trump claimed while denouncing the Biden administration: “They want to raise your taxes by four times.”

Facts First: This is false, just as it was when Trump made the same claim during the 2020 election campaign and in early 2024. Biden has not proposed to quadruple Americans’ taxes, and there has never been any indication that he is seeking to do so.

The nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center think tank, which analyzed Biden’s never-implemented budget proposals for fiscal 2024, found this: “His plan would raise average after-tax incomes for low-income households in 2024, leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households, and lower after-tax incomes significantly for the highest-income taxpayers.”