Did Secret Service personnel grin widely, showing their teeth, while escorting former President Trump to safety after the assassination attempt at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, as a social media post claims? No, that's not true: A tool created to detect ai-generated images found substantial evidence the image had been remade with generative ai systems. The image is clearly an Associated Press image that has been digitally altered to add grins to the faces of the agents. The officers cannot be seen smiling with their teeth as seen in the original, nor in any other news outlets photos of the event.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on July 14, 2024. It opened:
Everyone here seems to be having a good time, laughing and smiling for the cameras.
This is what the post looked like on Twitter at the time of writing:
(Source: Twitter screenshot taken on Sun Jul 14 19:35:26 2024 UTC)
The image is not authentic, as it can be observed from live coverage of the event that does not show the Secret Service officers grinning while escorting former President Trump away from the podium where he was shot. None of the images captured by multiple credible news sources, from a variety of angles, shows grinning agents. The details of moving elements of the scene (flag in the wind, hairs, wrinkles in clothes) line up precisely enough for Lead Stories to conclude the fake image was built from the AP image.
The original image used to create the counterfeit, shown below, was captured by Evan Vucci, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning chief photographer for the Associated Press. It can be found on the AP website here.
(Source: AP.com screenshot taken on Sun Jul 14 19:34:45 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories reached out to Vucci and will, as appropriate, update this fact check with his or the AP's comments on the doctored image, when they reply.
Lead Stories submitted both versions of the image to online AI-detection tool True Media (maintained by a nonpartisan nonprofit), which found "substantial evidence" that the grinning agents image had been generated by popularly available image alteration tools. Below is a snapshot of True Media's summary of its findings about the two images.
(Source: TrueMedia.org screenshot taken on Sun Jul 14 22:37:36 2024 UTC)
The altered image is being used to claim the assassination attempt was staged, despite multiple independent photographic records of the shooting, hundreds of witnesses to the shooting and state and federal agency confirmations that Trump was injured, the gunman was killed and that the gunman killed one other person and injured two.
The shooter was identified by the FBI as 20-year old Thomas Matthew Crooks. He was neutralized and pronounced deceased, as reported by the U.S. Secret Service. The gun used by the shooter was confirmed as being a AR-style 556 by the FBI in a phone briefing on its assassination attempt investigation attended by Lead Stories. Trump was injured on his right ear, for which he received care in hospital. One spectator was killed, 50-year-old former firefighter Corey Comperatore, after shielding his family from the gunfire at the rally, with two more critically injured at the rally.
More fact checks by Lead Stories about the assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 can be found here, here and here.
