Tucker Carlson Says Trump Shut Down His Own Assassination Investigation. Bongino Says Tucker Is Lying.

There is a claim sitting in public now that nobody in official Washington has answered cleanly. Tucker Carlson says Dan Bongino told him, in early December of last year, that Donald Trump personally shut down the federal investigation into the Butler assassination attempt. Bongino says Carlson is lying. Trump's White House has said nothing on the record. And the FBI has not released any public accounting of the investigation's current status.

That is the situation as of June 12, 2026. One claim, one denial, and a government silence that answers nothing.

Carlson made the allegation on June 12, 2026, appearing on Mario Nawfal's program. His account was specific in a way that makes it harder to simply dismiss. He said he came into possession of social media posts made by Thomas Crooks in the months and years before the July 2024 Butler shooting. Posts, he said, that the FBI had claimed did not exist. He brought this material to FBI Director Kash Patel and then to Bongino, who was at the time a senior FBI official serving in the Trump administration. That conversation, Carlson said, went badly.

"Dan Bongino became hysterical with me on the phone, " Carlson said. "He was clearly terrified."

What followed, according to Carlson, was a series of text exchanges and phone calls that ended with Bongino telling him to take the matter up with Trump directly. And then Bongino told him, Carlson claims, that Trump was the one who shut down the investigation. Carlson says he has the texts.

Bongino denied it the same morning, on X, calling Carlson a "nepo baby" and promising "more receipts" on his show. He did not address the substance of the investigation's status. He did not say the investigation is ongoing. He did not say Trump did not shut it down. He said Carlson is lying.

That distinction matters.

A denial of a person's truthfulness is not the same as a denial of the underlying fact. Bongino's response, as of this writing, attacks the messenger. It does not provide an affirmative account of what actually happened to the Butler investigation. If the investigation is active and proceeding, that is something Bongino or the FBI could say plainly. They have not said it.

The White House news page, reviewed for this article, contains no statement addressing the Butler investigation's status. No press briefing transcript, no statement from the press secretary, no presidential communication of any kind touches the subject. That is not proof of anything. But it is a notable absence given the severity of the underlying allegation.

Here is what the public record does establish. Thomas Crooks, 20 years old, fired on Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania campaign rally on July 13, 2024. He wounded Trump, killed one attendee, and wounded two others before being shot and killed by Secret Service. The FBI subsequently said Crooks had no identifiable motive, no manifesto, and no significant social media presence pointing toward radicalization or a broader conspiracy. The Secret Service and FBI faced immediate criticism for the security failures that allowed Crooks to take a position on a rooftop with a clear sightline to the stage.

The claim that Crooks had no meaningful social media presence became, in the months that followed, one of the focal points of skepticism about the official account. Carlson is now saying he has evidence the FBI lied about that specific point. He has not released the posts publicly. He has described them as social media content posted by Crooks in the period before the shooting. The public cannot evaluate what he says he has.

This is where the evidentiary situation currently sits: one person's account of a private conversation, denied by the other party, with documentary evidence the accuser says he holds but has not shown.

That is a thin evidentiary record for a very large claim. Carlson is alleging that a sitting president suppressed a federal investigation into an attempt on his own life. If true, that would be among the more significant acts of potential obstruction in recent American political history, and it would raise questions about what Trump feared an investigation would find. Carlson himself flagged the strangeness of the logic: "There is no good explanation for shutting down an investigation into your own attempted murder."

That sentence is doing a lot of work. The logic is sound on its face. A president who genuinely had nothing to hide from a full investigation into who tried to kill him would have every political and personal incentive to let that investigation run. The only reasons to stop it would be that the investigation was leading somewhere the president found more threatening than the alternative, or that the president believed the investigation was unnecessary because he already knew the full picture, or that some other institutional or political consideration outweighed the transparency value. None of those explanations are exculpatory.

But the logic of "no good explanation" is not the same as proof that the thing happened. Carlson is asking us to reason backward from the implausibility of a motive to the existence of the act. That is an argument. It is a serious argument. It is not a documented fact.

What makes this harder to dismiss than most media-world feuds between former allies is the institutional position Bongino held when the alleged conversation took place. He was not a pundit. He was a senior official at the FBI. If Carlson's account is accurate, this was not a private citizen speculating about what Trump might have done. It was a federal law enforcement official telling a journalist, in a panicked phone call, that the president had ordered the investigation stopped. That is a materially different kind of claim.

Carlson says he has the texts from that exchange. The most direct resolution of this dispute would be their release. He has not released them. Until he does, the public is being asked to choose between his word and Bongino's.

The Carlson who is making this claim is not the Carlson of 2023. He has spent months criticizing Trump over the Iran conflict, the Epstein files, and what he has described as Trump's transformation into a tool of Israeli government interests after Butler. He has said explicitly that the Butler shooting changed Trump, that the man who ran against regime-change wars became an enthusiastic supporter of one shortly after surviving an assassination attempt. The Butler investigation is, in Carlson's current framing, the thread that explains the transformation.

That framing gives Carlson a motive to emphasize this story. It also gives him a coherent theory that goes beyond the assassination attempt itself. He is arguing that whoever was behind Butler, or whatever Butler revealed to Trump privately, is the key to understanding the foreign policy of the second Trump term. That is a significant interpretive claim, and it is presented without the documentary record that would let a reader evaluate it independently.

Bongino, for his part, is no longer in government. He departed the FBI and returned to media. His denial of Carlson's account was delivered in the language of a media personality, not a former official providing an institutional clarification. He called Carlson a "nepo baby" and compared him to a talking toy. He promised receipts. As of this writing, those receipts have not been made public in a form this article can evaluate.

The federal government's posture on Butler has been passive since the initial post-shooting period. There has been no public final report. There has been no public statement from the current FBI leadership on the investigation's status. There has been no congressional hearing, under the current majority, pressing for answers. The absence of official accounting is not evidence of a cover-up. But it is evidence that official Washington has made a collective decision not to force the question into the open.

That decision has consequences. When the government declines to produce a clear public record, it creates the information vacuum that claims like Carlson's fill. The Butler shooting was an attack on a president of the United States. The public record of what happened, why it happened, and what was done to investigate it is a matter of democratic accountability, independent of any partisan interest in the answer.

Carlson has put a specific allegation into the public record. Bongino has denied it in personal terms. Trump's government has said nothing. The texts Carlson says he has would either confirm or destroy his account, and he has not released them.

The investigation into the Butler assassination attempt is either ongoing, closed, or was never what it was presented to be. The current administration knows which of those is true. The American public does not. That gap is not Tucker Carlson's fault, and it is not resolved by calling him a liar. It is resolved by a government that answers the question directly.

Nobody has done that yet.