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FBI director says gunman at Trump rally searched for info on JFK assassination
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The gunman who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump conducted an online search a week before the shooting about the killing of former President John F. Kennedy, the FBI director said Wednesday.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Christopher Wray gave lawmakers an update on the investigation into the July 13 shooting targeting Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa.
That includes information pulled from a computer linked to the 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks, that suggests he spent at least a week planning the attack.
“An analysis of a laptop that the investigation ties to the shooter reveals that on July 6 he did a Google search for ‘How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?’ ” Wray said. “That’s a search that obviously is significant in terms of his state of mind. That is the same day that it appears that he registered for the Butler rally.”
Lee Harvey Oswald is the gunman who shot former President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, in 1963.
In his testimony, which comes 11 days after the attempt on Trump’s life, Wray filled in some of the details about the gunman and the timeline ahead of the shooting.
The FBI has gained access to Crooks' digital devices, Wray said, but investigators still have not found anything that points to a motive or political ideology.
"Sometimes in these kinds of situations, you find a manifesto or something like that. It’s frustrating to us and I’m sure it’s frustrating to you and the American people that we haven’t found anything quite like that," Wray said.
"We’d love to have a roadmap and know exactly what he was thinking. We haven’t found that yet. That doesn’t mean we won’t. We're looking all over the place and we’re going to leave no stone unturned."
But Wray said it does appear that Crooks was interested in public figures broadly, and that starting around July 6, he became very focused on Trump and the Butler rally.
Investigators believe Crooks visited the site of the Butler rally on three occasions, Wray said.
The first time was a week before the event, when he spent roughly 20 minutes there. The second time was the morning of the Trump rally, when he appears to have been on site for roughly 70 minutes, Wray said.
After leaving, he went to a gun store and purchased 50 rounds of ammunition.
His third visit to the rally site was later that afternoon, a few hours before the event — and he never left.
During that last visit, Wray said, Crooks flew a drone at the rally grounds for 11 minutes around 4 p.m., about 200 yards from the stage.
Investigators recovered the drone in the gunman’s vehicle along with its controller. They have been able to reverse engineer the device’s flight path, Wray said, but they don’t know exactly what Crooks was able to see or why.
Explosive devices turned off
Wray also discussed the three explosive devices that investigators recovered: two from Crooks’ vehicle and one at his residence. Wray described the devices as “relatively crude,” but said they did have the ability to be detonated remotely.
A transmitter was found on Crooks’ body, he said, but it appears that the receivers on the explosive devices were not turned on so he wouldn’t have been able to detonate them.
Investigators now believe, Wray said, that Crooks climbed up onto the roof where he fired from by using "some mechanical equipment on the ground and vertical piping" on the side of the building. The bureau still has not determined, however, when the gunman got onto the roof.
Wray did say that Crooks' AR-style rifle had a collapsible stock, which Wray said "could explain why it might have been less easy for people to observe."
The day before the shooting, Crooks went to a shooting range and fired an AR-style rifle, Wray said. The director described Crooks as a "fairly avid shooting hobbyist."
The gun used in the shooting, Wray said, was originally purchased in 2013 by Crooks' father, who then sold in last year to his son.
Described as loner, few contacts
Investigators have conducted more than 400 interviews so far of a wide range of people, he said, which has helped provide a picture of who Crooks was.
"From everything we’ve seen, which is consistent with what we’ve learned in interviews—a lot of people describe him as a loner," Wray said. "That does kind of fit with what we’re seeing in his devices. His list of contacts, for example, is very short compared to what you would normally see from most people. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of interaction between him face-to-face or digital with a lot of people.”
NPR and other media outlets have previously reported that investigators found images of President Biden, former President Trump, the attorney general and the FBI director on Crooks' phone.
Wray said the photos found were stored automatically from online searches and from reading news articles.
"This does not appear to be some sort of target list," he said.
"This is cached images from running searches, so news stories. And again, there is nothing, no pattern, from that particular piece of information that is overly remarkable so far."
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