NBC - Trump officials have posted inaccurate info in wake of recent tragedies.
Senior administration officials released confusing, incorrect or misleading information.
Dec. 16, 2025, 4:31 AM GMT+3
The Trump administration’s public response to the mass shooting at Brown University was swift, but it included a major inaccuracy.
President Donald Trump said Saturday night that the alleged shooter was in custody. He walked back the post less than 20 minutes later, saying a suspect was not in custody.
It was the most recent example of what has become a pattern of the administration posting incorrect information at times of heightened anxiety, times when the American public is seeking accurate, factual details from authority figures.
An NBC News review found that after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the attack on two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., and this weekend’s shooting at Brown, Trump administration officials released information that was false or misleading and later had to be walked back or corrected.
Here is a look at those incidents and how some senior administration officials responded to them.
Brown University mass shooting
Less than two hours after gunfire at Brown left two people dead and nine wounded Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social: “I have been briefed on the shooting that took place at Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene. The suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and the families of the victims!”
Trump later walked back his post. “The Brown University Police reversed their previous statement — The suspect is NOT in custody,” he wrote. The school also had said a suspect was in custody and later said no suspect was in custody.
On Sunday morning, FBI Director Kash Patel posted a lengthy X message about the work the bureau had done to help detain someone he called “a person of interest in a hotel room in Coventry, RI, based off a lead by the @ProvidenceRIPD.”
About 12 hours later, law enforcement officials released that person from custody, with Providence police pushing back on Patel’s earlier post. Police said the lead about the person of interest was “picked up by” the FBI, not local authorities, as Patel had indicated.
In a statement Monday night, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “The President has full faith and confidence in his entire law enforcement team, including FBI Director Kash Patel, to bring the perpetrator of this atrocious crime to justice.”
National Guard members shot
The first official notification of the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., last month came by way of a post on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s X account.
But she then deleted it moments after it went up on the afternoon of Nov. 26.
About 10 minutes later, she reposted the previous message verbatim: “Please join me in praying for the two National Guardsmen who were just shot moments ago in Washington D.C.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, from both her personal and official X accounts, later wrote “PRAY for our DC National Guard.” But it was not members of the D.C. National Guard who had been shot — it was two members of the West Virginia National Guard. One of the two victims, Sarah Beckstrom, 20, later died. The other, Andrew Wolfe, is still recovering.
A spokesman for the Justice Department, Chad Gilmartin, said Bondi had been referring to where the two guard members were deployed and calling for the safety of guard members in D.C. “She was extremely engaged and involved on this from the start and continues to be this day,” Gilmartin told NBC News on Monday.
An Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal has been charged in the attack; he pleaded not guilty. Noem posted about him on the evening of the shooting and said he had come into the country “unvetted,” which is not accurate.
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According to reporting by NBC News and others, Lakanwal underwent extensive vetting during his time as part of a secret unit of Afghans who operated under CIA direction and hunted down Taliban commanders in highly dangerous missions during the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
A representative for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Noem’s post Monday.
At a House hearing last week, Noem acknowledged Lakanwal had been vetted by the Biden administration but suggested the vetting was not stringent enough. Lakanwal was formally granted asylum in April of this year by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of DHS.
Officials outside the administration have also shared misinformation in the early aftermath of a tragedy. On the day of the National Guard shooting, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey posted that both guard members had been killed. He posted a second message about 20 minutes later saying there were “conflicting reports” about their condition.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination
As in the Brown shooting, Patel was criticized for making premature pronouncements in the hours after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated Sept. 10 at a campus event in Utah.
Hours after the shooting, Patel said on X: “The subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.”
About 90 minutes later, he returned to X and said: “The subject in custody has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement. Our investigation continues and we will continue to release information in interest of transparency.”
Authorities later arrested Tyler Robinson, who faces multiple state charges in connection with Kirk’s death. He has not yet entered a plea.
Patel defended his posts in a Sept. 15 interview with “Fox & Friends.”
“Could I have worded it a little better in the heat of the moment? Sure. But do I regret putting it out? Absolutely not,” he said. “I was telling the world what the FBI was doing as we were doing, and I’m continuing to do that.”
Trump defended Patel’s handling of the Brown University case Monday and pointed to his work in the Kirk case as a job well done.
“It’s always difficult” identifying a shooter, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “So far, we’ve done a very good job of doing it with Charlie, with, you know, the various times this has happened, they’ve done it in pretty much record time.”
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