Is there leaked footage showing BlackRock CEO Larry Fink carrying a gun as he walks with Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman who tried to assassinate Donald Trump? No, that's not true: The still photo that's a thumbnail preview to a YouTube video is a fake AI-generated image. The scene in the photo does not appear in the YouTube video at all.
The claim appeared as a thumbnail preview of a YouTube video (archived here) on July 19, 2024, under the title "New Footage of Trump's Shooter and Blackrock's Jew CEO Goes Viral." A fake chyron at the bottom of the image reads:
LEAKED FOOTAGE
This is how the thumbnail appeared on the YouTube channel:
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Mon Aug 5 21:24:36 2024 UTC)
Crooks did appear in a 2022 BlackRock ad that was filmed at Bethel Park High School, but there is no evidence of a personal connection between him and Fink.
The image in the thumbnail is not real, and the long-haired young man in a blue T-shirt does not resemble Thomas Matthew Crooks. Instead it appears to have been fashioned after an internet troll who calls himself "@jewgazing." In the aftermath of the shootings at Trump's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, he created confusion by making posts with images and video of himself pretending to be the 20-year-old shooter and claiming to still be alive (Lead Stories fact check here).
Many copies of this image circulating on social media are of very poor quality, such as a video recording of the "Leaked Footage" image on TikTok and reposted on X (archived here) or the same image at 14 seconds into a video on Bitchute. To be able to get a good reading with AI-generated detection tools, Lead Stories extracted the 1,280 by 720 pixel maximum resolution default thumbnail image (archived here) from the YouTube video using the Video ID method described in a blog post on orbitingweb.com.
TrueMedia.org analyzed this and determined with 97 percent confidence that the image (below left) was likely to have been generated with the AI platform Stable Diffusion (full report here).
(Source: Lead Stories composite image with YouTube screenshots taken on Mon Aug 05 23:14:15 2024 UTC)
The Billionaire Chronicles (archived here) used a composite thumbnail that included two AI-generated images in a July 23, 2024, video (pictured below). The image on the left has the shirt edited to red (archived here). Both the blue shirt and the red shirt edits (compared above) bear traces of a digital color replacement tool, as the key T-shirt color has spilled into the area of the suit and tie of the purported CEO, and colored some of the highlights of the malformed AI-generated gun.
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Mon Aug 5 23:14:15 2024 UTC)
The right side of the composite, also an AI-generated image (archived here) appears as a thumbnail in another July 19, 2024, King Luxury video titled, "How Blackrock Trained Trump's Shooter?" (below). TrueMedia.org's analysis had a 98 percent confidence reading that the image was AI generated, and a 94 percent confidence score that Stable Diffusion was the program used to generate it (full report here).
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Mon Aug 05 21:24:36 2024 UTC)
One more rendition (archived here) of this AI-generated clickbait theme, purportedly showing the shooter and BlackRock's CEO together with a gun, appeared in an August 1, 2024, video thumbnail (pictured below) posted on the King Luxury France channel (archived here) titled, "Nouvelle Vidéo Du PDG Juif De BlackRock Au Rassemblement De Trump Devient Virale." This same photo with the captions in English appeared as a thumbnail in a July 26, 2024, video posted on the channel PeakMomentsTV (archived here) titled, "Leaked New Video Of BlackRock's CEO And Trump's Shooter Changes Everything." Although not as strong as the other image analysis, the TrueMedia.org verdict was there is substantial evidence of manipulation (full report here).
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Mon Aug 05 22:30:41 2024 UTC)
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on AI-generated images and claims springing from the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally shooting can be found here and here.
