Claim:
The suspect in an alleged assassination attempt on Donald Trump in September 2024, Ryan Routh, appeared in a BlackRock commercial.
Rating:
False ( About this rating? )
On Sept. 15, 2024, an armed man got within 400 yards of former U.S. President Donald Trump as he golfed before Secret Service agents spotted the suspect and eventually captured him. Following this second apparent attempted assassination in less than three months on Trump, online rumors about the subject traveled far and wide.
One such rumor was that the suspect, Ryan Routh, appeared in a BlackRock commercial. This rumor references the fact that Thomas Crooks, who fired at and hit Trump during a July 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, did indeed appear in a commercial for BlackRock — a massive multinational investment company . The claim that a second would-be assassin had this same biographical background, social media posts claimed , left "zero chance of coincidence"
Videos shared in support of this claim appear to genuinely show Routh briefly, but the video has no connection whatsoever to BlackRock.
This video was made on behalf of Ukraine's Azov Battalion three months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to thank people who had supported them and spread their message. The battalion defended the city of Mariupol in the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war.
According to 2023 reporting in The New York Times, Routh had traveled to Ukraine and attempted to insert himself into the affairs of Ukraine's International Legion.
Because Routh appears in a video designed to raise money for the Azoz Battalion and not a commercial made for BlackRock, we rate the claim as "False."
Sources:
"About BlackRock - What We Do, Who We Are & Our Purpose." BlackRock, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/about-us . Accessed 16 Sept. 2024.
Factbox: Last Defenders of Mariupol: What Is Ukraine's Azov Regiment? | Reuters. 17 May 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20220517121641/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/last-defenders-mariupol-what-is-ukraines-azov-regiment-2022-05-17/ .
Scheck, Justin, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff. "Stolen Valor: The U.S. Volunteers in Ukraine Who Lie, Waste and Bicker." The New York Times, 25 Mar. 2023. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/world/europe/volunteers-us-ukraine-lies.html .
Thomas Matthew Crooks Appeared in a 2022 BlackRock Ad - CBS News. 15 July 2024, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thomas-matthew-crooks-blackrock-ad-pulled/.
Local News
