There’s a plague rotting away at the FBI. The secretive Thomas Crooks probe is at the very center… here are the whispers from the inside: Special Agent JONATHAN GILLIAM

A former FBI Special Agent and Navy SEAL has unleashed a blistering attack on his old agency – accusing federal officials of bungling, blustering and confusing the public over the young man who tried to kill Donald Trump on the campaign trail last summer.

Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, Jonathan Gilliam – who served in the Bureau from 2005 to 2013 – delivered a withering assessment of what he called a chaotic investigation and an even more frenzied information war surrounding it.

His comments come just days after Tucker Carlson released a bombshell online investigation claiming the FBI has hidden critical details about the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who opened fire on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024.

Carlson said he accessed the would-be assassin’s Google Drive. His conclusion: Crooks wasn’t a lone wolf at all, but a radicalized Trump supporter who spiraled in the pandemic era. He also challenged the information released about Crooks’s online presence.

The FBI – now led by MAGA figures Kash Patel and Dan Bongino – shot back with its new Rapid Response account on X, declaring: ‘This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint. Ever.’ On November 14, Patel further insisted Crooks acted alone and had only a ‘limited online persona’.

For Gilliam, the back-and-forth isn’t just a disagreement. It’s a symptom of something deeply wrong.

‘Investigative reporting has become clickbait, and federal law enforcement is having arguments online like they’re trying to get clicks,’ Gilliam told the Daily Mail. ‘It is just… a failure all the way around.’

What disturbed him most was watching FBI leaders trade insults with Carlson and other pundits online. ‘When I see Kash Patel and Dan Bongino arguing with media figures on X, it does not validate what they have to say,’ he told the Daily Mail.

‘It actually cheapens what they have to say.’ Last week, Carlson’s investigative team dropped a 34-minute video tracing YouTube comments apparently posted by Crooks from 2019 to 2020. Carlson claimed Crooks’s politics shifted dramatically from early support for Trump to radical opposition during COVID lockdowns.

His central argument was that the gunman wasn’t a solitary, unhinged shooter. He believes witnesses saw signs of a bigger operation, and that the FBI ignored them.

Carlson accused Patel and Bongino of withholding details and misleading the public about Crooks’ online footprint.

Carlson went as far as framing the entire case as a cover-up – suggesting someone, somewhere, stood to gain from downplaying Crooks’s motives, history and digital life.

Patel responded by providing an overview of the FBI’s extensive investigation. He said agents examined at least 20 online accounts, over a dozen electronic devices, and thousands of tips and digital files.

Meanwhile, critics say Carlson is not a trustworthy source of reporting. He is regularly accused of promoting conspiracy theories, racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric and having both a lack of objectivity and disregard for the truth.

He was fired from Fox News in April 2023, and has since courted controversy by hosting guests such as Russian president Vladimir Putin and white nationalist Nick Fuentes without pressing them hard enough on certain issues.

In the search to identify what motived Crooks to shoot at Trump, conservative news outlets have reported that he maintained several anonymous accounts linked to cartoon ‘furry’ fetish art, gender-related fantasy content and LGBTQ-related communities. Extremism experts say the material may indicate Crooks was ‘acting out a fantasy,’ not pursuing a coherent political agenda.

Still, the online trail prompted a new round of speculation – this time from conspiracy theorists who were convinced Crooks had been ‘programmed’ or manipulated, perhaps by extremist or trans-ideology networks.

FactCheck.org and PolitiFact have stepped in, warning the swirl of misinformation surrounding Crooks – especially claims about gender identity – is both unverified and dangerous.

They cite the FBI’s own statement that no clear motive has been confirmed. Experts caution that lumping trans identity and violence together without evidence fuels moral panic and risks harming already targeted communities.

Gilliam said the online chaos is partly the FBI’s own doing. He told the Daily Mail that officials rushed out statements insisting Crooks had little online presence, acted alone and showed no ideological signals, long before those claims could be backed by a full investigation.

In his years in federal service, he said, premature public assurances were routine – often issued not to inform the public, but to ‘calm them down’ or protect careers.

He called this a ‘plague’ of careerism and incompetency inside federal agencies. The FBI has maintained that its investigation into Crooks was a work in progress, and that its conclusions were based on the available evidence.

Now, Gilliam warned, Americans are watching something alarming: an FBI that seems defensive, politicized and distracted by social media theatrics rather than a Bureau focused solely on facts.

Gilliam said that instead of projecting authority, Patel, Bongino, Attorney General Pam Bondi and others are acting like content creators, he added.

He said they have carried their online habits directly into federal leadership. And in his view, that is poisoning the agency’s credibility.

Posting online ‘does nothing to further an investigation,’ he said. ‘They never let go of their daily focus as social media personalities – and that has to stop.’ The FBI and the Justice Department did not answer the Daily Mail’s request for comment.

Gilliam served the public for more than 20 years, first as an Arkansas police officer, then a SEAL Team FOUR officer, a Federal Air Marshal and with the FBI in New York, on crime and terrorism beats.

In the end, Gilliam said he is looking at a nation trapped between sensational media, defensive institutions and a flood of half-formed narratives.

‘The line between fact and speculation is blurred,’ he said. Gilliam points to that blurring as the reason Crooks’s case remains so confusing to the public.

‘Too many soundbites are out there – premature soundbites, career soundbites – and the American people can’t tell what’s true and what’s not,’ he said.

Gilliam’s is an assessment not just of how the FBI handled a would-be presidential assassin, but of how modern America tries, and increasingly fails, to make sense of its own crises.