Andrew Torba, the founder of alt-social media site Gab, claimed on Wednesday that the site “learned” that the attempted Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks posted on his site.
Where’d they find him? In Catturd’s mentions, of course.
The Daily Dot couldn’t immediately confirm if the posts Torba shared in a post on X actually are Crooks.
However, an account the Daily Dot found that matches up with the images shared by Torba appears to have been removed from the site.
Torba later confirmed the account’s name matched the one the Daily Dot identified as @epicmicrowave. It’s since been put back up.
Torba said in a statement on X that Gab saved the account data and are ready to turn it over pending a search warrant.
In an email to supporters later, Torba revealed that they learned of the account “after receiving an emergency disclosure request from a law enforcement agency.”
“Approximately 30 minutes ago, Gab learned that Thomas Crooks, the deranged Joe Biden supporter who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump, may have had an account on our platform. We are unable to confirm that the account in question actually belonged to him,” Torba wrote at 2:34pm on Wednesday. “The account was last active on the site in 2021. As far as we are aware, the account did not use the site to send any direct messages. He posted on the site nine (9) times total.”
Torba shared two screenshots of pro-Biden comments, with the handle blacked out.
“While the account made very few posts on the site, the majority of them were in support of President Biden,” Torba claimed. “A number of posts in particular expressed support for President Biden’s COVID lockdowns, border policies and executive orders.”
In one, the poster replied to Catturd, mocking his election forecasting skills.
“Didn’t you also think Biden would lose in a landslide yeah I would not be very confident in your election predictions,” the account wrote on Feb 4, 2021.
In the other post, the poster defends Biden’s border policy by pointing to a study comparing crime stats for undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas.
“Biden executive orders don’t incentivize human trafficking as human traffickers aren’t interested in citizenships (sic), likewise the majority of illegal immigrants are not criminals and in fact some studies (such as the one linked below) show lower rates of crime committed by these individuals,” the poster wrote. “It is also unclear if the extensive path to citizenship is in fact effective at routing out potential bad actors hence why there is a review of that system.”
In a follow-up post Torba shared additional screenshots of the account replying to former Inforwars correspondent Paul Joseph Watson and Bill Mitchell.
The account also appeared to respond to Torba once.
Not everybody was buying that the poster was Crooks though.
“He wrote ‘’hence’????? Oh, c’mon. How many 20 year-olds use the word HENCE?” asked @IllinoisMomm.
Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper after firing into the crowd at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was 20 years old when he died.
If he is the Gab poster, he would have been 17 at the time the posts were made. Initial reports claim that while Crooks registered as a Republican, he made one donation to Democrats.
An email to Gab bounced back.
In a follow-up post, Torba said that he was disclosing the information “at significant personal and business risk. If the past is any guide, defying the D.C. consensus by publishing the first definitive evidence that the shooter was a Biden supporter” would lead to government harassment against the site, which Torba said it faced after the Jan. 6 2021 Capitol riot.
This post has been updated.
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