Online users shared a picture in July 2024 purporting to show a photo of former U.S. President Donald Trump, gunman Thomas Crooks and at least one FBI agent planning Trump's assassination attempt. The apparent implication behind the image pertained to a baseless conspiracy theory that Trump himself organized the attempt on his life in order to gain political momentum ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Snopes received emails from readers inquiring about the picture. For example, one reader attached the image to their message and asked, "Is the picture depicting Donald Trump and Thomas Crooks real?"
Following an examination of the evidence, we determined an unknown person — possibly the owner or owners of the YouTube channels The Fugitive Crime and The Fugitive Crime Español — generated the fake picture using an unknown artificial-intelligence tool. We will update this story if we successfully establish contact with someone associated with the channels.
First, the facts without the misinformation: A U.S. Secret Service sniper shot and killed Crooks on July 13, seconds after he opened fire from a rooftop at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Crooks' gunfire killed one rally attendee and injured two others. The FBI confirmed one of Crooks' bullets struck Trump's right ear, which led to blood pouring down his face.
Examining the Fake Photo of Trump and Crooks
The fake picture showing representations of Trump, Crooks and a man wearing an FBI jacket displayed several oddities revealing someone created it with AI. For our examination, we studied the largest publicly available version of the image, found on the YouTube channel The Fugitive Crime Español — a channel for which we'll provide details later in this story.
First, the right hand of the man with the long hair who represents Crooks appears to have six fingers, with one finger apparently tucked under his index finger. Brittanica.com previously described AI image-generation tools' difficulties in creating realistic hands.
The representation of Crooks appears to show six fingers on his right hand.
On the wall behind the two AI-generated people representing Crooks and Trump is a picture showing four people with odd faces. As we previously reported, odd faces and weird-looking mouths also can be signs of AI-generated images.
Unclear faces can be a sign someone generated an image with AI.
A closer look at the representation of Trump displayed facial features slightly different from the authentic Trump. The representation of Crooks also did not closely resemble the real Crooks.
The AI-generated nose and lips representing Trump's face displayed imperfections compared to the real Trump.
Further, consider for a moment the idea behind the fake picture: Crooks and Trump sat down at a table, under dramatic lighting, to plan a fake assassination attempt with a camera pointed right at them. The men had this discussion while seated across from a man wearing an FBI jacket showing the giant, obvious letters "FBI." In other words, an AI tool generated all this information into a picture after receiving a prompt from a creative-thinking human being.
The Origins of the Fake Trump-Crooks Picture
A reverse-image search for the picture displayed results showing that TikTok users shared it with the caption, "Hey FBI. We need answers now. Why is Trump with the shooter?"
The reverse-image search also displayed a result for a Reddit post (archived) from July 19, 2024. That post featured a cropped screenshot of a YouTube video titled, "How Trump's Shooter Really Planned The Attack."
The very bottom of this screenshot from the Reddit post displays the YouTube video title, "How Trump's Shooter Really Planned The Attack."
After a Google search failed to find helpful information about the YouTube video title, a Bing search displayed a result for a video posted on the channel The Fugitive Crime on July 19.
Source: Bing
As of July 31, that YouTube video page (archived) linked in Bing search results showed the channel's owner had changed its visibility from public to private.
On The Fugitive Crime's apparent sister channel, The Fugitive Crime Español, we found the same thumbnail image and video title, and likely the same video, too, translated to Spanish.
As of Aug. 1, 2024, this Spanish-language video had nearly 400,000 views.
The Fugitive Crime YouTube Channels
A quick study of The Fugitive Crime's YouTube channel showed it features fake, AI-generated pictures seemingly for all of its videos' misinformation-filled thumbnail images.
For example, recent thumbnail images showed fake pictures of former first lady Melania Trump with a vulgar quote, Donald Trump holding onto a younger Crooks, Tucker Carlson hosting a TV show with CNN graphics and former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle holding a rifle while standing next to Crooks, just to name a few.
The Fugitive Crime/YouTube
The similar channel The Fugitive Crime Español also displayed the same kinds of AI-generated, misinformation-filled thumbnail images.
For further reading, we previously reported about rumors claiming Crooks was a registered Republican and once donated money to a Democratic Party cause. Both rumors were true.