Less than two hours after the FBI created a new “rapid response” account on X to respond to “bad-faith attacks” against the bureau, it was already feuding with MAGA provocateur Tucker Carlson.
The FBI Rapid Response account was launched in response to “an avalanche of lies, smears, and falsehoods from the fake news and others seeking to undermine our work in national security,” the account’s managers wrote in an introductory post.
That was at about 3 p.m. in Washington on Thursday.
At 4:36 p.m., the account slapped podcaster Carlson over a post teasing a story about Thomas Crooks, the suspect accused of trying to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in July 2024 at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“The FBI told us Thomas Crooks tried to kill Donald Trump last summer but somehow had no online footprint. The FBI lied, and we can prove it because we have his posts. The question is why? Story tomorrow,” Carlson wrote on Thursday.
“This FBI has never said Thomas Crooks had no online footprint. Ever,” the rapid response account replied.
The bureau has no suspected motive for Crooks, a registered Republican who shot at Trump from a nearby rooftop. A rallygoer was killed, and another bullet grazed Trump’s ear before Secret Service agents shot and killed Crooks.
In July 2024, then-FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told Congress that Crooks might have had a secret social media account that shared violent, antisemitic, anti-immigrant posts, but the account does not appear to have been definitely linked to the shooter.
An in-depth report from The New York Times published in June 2025 doesn’t mention it.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the FBI and Tucker Carlson for comment.
Before joining the FBI under the Trump administration, Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino were podcasters who regularly blasted the FBI.
Now their agency has an entire account dedicated to responding to Carlson and other podcasters who say things they don’t like.
The account was created shortly after Bongino clashed with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who is leading the push to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Massie had shared a letter accusing the FBI of trying to identify a whistleblower connected to the bureau’s investigation into a pair of pipe bombs planted outside the headquarters for the Republican Party and the Democratic National Committee during the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
In his post, he shared a “reminder” to Patel that federal law prohibits retaliation against whistleblowers.
Bongino replied from his own account with a diatribe calling Massie’s remarks “disgusting” and calling him a “dog barking behind a fence.”
The new rapid response account reposted the exchange. As of Friday morning, it had not shared any rebuttals to Democrats
