FBI says assistant director Janeen DiGuiseppi wasn’t at fatal Butler rally

Was a top FBI official seated behind former President Donald Trump during his assassination attempt wearing MAGA gear? Social media is flush with claims that say so.  

"Here is Janeen Diguiseppi, assistant director to the FBI sitting directly behind Trump at the Butler rally when he was hit!" a July 19 Facebook post said. "She never budged when he went to the ground but took pics."

The post featured zoomed-in images from the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, showing a woman wearing large sunglasses and a black baseball cap with writing on it. It also showed a screengrab of a website that had a woman’s image next to the words, "Janeen DiGuiseppi, Assistant Director Federal Bureau of Investigation."

An Instagram post that used the same images said, asked, "What was an FBI assistant director doing sitting directly behind President Trump before he was almost shot?"

"You’ll never convince me otherwise that it was an inside job," the post’s caption said. "It’s long overdue for the three letter agencies to be dismantled." 

The Facebook and Instagram posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.) We saw similar claims posted on X.

Janeen DiGuiseppi is a real FBI employee. In 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray promoted DiGuiseppi from ​​special agent in charge of the Albany field office in New York to the assistant director of the agency’s Insider Threat Office in Washington, D.C.

One photo in the Instagram post is DiGuiseppi’s official professional portrait released by the FBI to announce her 2023 promotion. The screengrab showing her portrait is from a news outlet that covers the federal government. It used the official photo in their reporting of DiGuiseppi’s promotion.

The other photo appeared alongside a 2021 interview DiGuiseppi gave to a public radio journalist in Albany, New York, shortly after she assumed leadership of the FBI’s operations in the city.

But is DiGuiseppi the woman in the video? The FBI said no.

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"The allegations circulating on social media about an FBI executive and the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania are categorically false," an FBI spokesperson told PolitiFact in an emailed statement. "To be clear, the person depicted is not her and she did not attend the rally."

The FBI is investigating the attempted assassination and has conducted nearly 100 eyewitness interviews with rally attendees, according to the last public update on July 15. We asked whether investigators knew the identity of the woman in the images, but the agency’s press office did not address that question.

We also asked a Trump campaign spokesperson about the woman’s identity but got no response.

One person died and two others were injured in the attempted assassination. PolitiFact has checked several false narratives about the incident, including viral claims that misidentified the person authorities say fired a gun aimed at Trump.

We rate the claim images show FBI agent Janeen DiGuiseppi at the July 13 Trump rally False.

RELATED: Claims that the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump was staged are baseless