“Johnathan Willis” is a fictional Secret Service agent in a widely circulated internet hoax designed to feed a false narrative that the Biden administration was behind the Trump assassination attempt.
On July 14, 2024, a day after the Pennsylvania rally shooting that wounded Trump, a post appeared on 4chan, an online messaging board, making the following claim:
“My name is Jonathan Willis, I’m the officer in the famous photo of the two snipers on the roof at Trump’s rally. I came here to inform the public that I had the assassin in my sights for at least 3 minutes, but the head of the secret service refused to give the order to take out the perp. 100% the top brass prevented me from killing the assassin before he took the shots at president Trump.”
Within a few minutes, this post was followed by another:
“I didn’t follow the orders though, as soon as the shooter opened on Trump I returned fire despite strict orders to not engage. I had eyes on the shooter for three minutes watching him fiddle with his rifle and adjust the scope, it was obvious he was a shooter yet I wasn’t allowed to engage. After I killed the shooter I was arrested, questioned by the FBI, and just released an hour ago. Already lost my job for not following orders, but I’m glad I took the shots anyway.”
The original post was accompanied by the Associated Press news photo below, which anyone can copy and paste, as I did below. The post quickly migrated from 4chan to social media, went viral, and was reposted many times (see versions here and here). It ultimately got millions of views.
Meta flagged it, the Secret Service called it “categorically false,” and Snopes found “no evidence backing up the post’s claims” (see article here).
The Secret Service hasn’t released the names of the agents in the photo, but said it doesn’t employ anyone named Johnathan Willis. Neither does the Pennsylvania State Police or Butler Police Department, which had officers at the scene. See Politico debunking here.
So if “Johnathan Willis, Secret Service agent,” isn’t real, who is the poster? He’s some jerk screwing around on the internet to stir the pot. Politico says, “The user ID linked to the 4chan posts only appeared four times, all on July 14.” In other words, someone created a user ID just for these posts, and then disappeared like a burglar in the night.
