Sebastian Gorka, the White House aide who Trump particularly likes seeing on TV, told MSNBC hosts on Tuesday that the recent Minnesota mosque attack could be an example of “fake hate crimes”—and that that is a good reason why President Donald Trump has not commented on and tweeted about it, yet. “There's a great rule: all initial reports are false, you have to check them, you have to find out who the perpetrators are,” Gorka said from the White House. “We've had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes by right-wing individuals in the last 6 months that turned out to actually been propagated by the left, so let's wait and see. Let's allow the local authorities to provide their assessment, and then the White House will make its comments." When asked why the president hadn’t simply tweeted that attacking mosques is bad (and why he commented so quickly on news of attacks when it seemed clear that Islamist terror was the culprit), Gorka shot back, "I'm not going to give social media advice" to Trump, adding that candidate Trump "destroyed the fake-news industrial complex's predictions" about the 2016 election. "Just hold your horses, count to ten," Gorka told the MSNBC hosts. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Gorka’s false-flag theory.

—Asawin Suebsaeng