Trump's Shooter Wanted For JFK Assassination, FBI Director SaysExBulletin

FBI Director Christopher Wray, pictured here in December 2023, gave lawmakers an update Wednesday on the investigation into the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images .

. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump searched online a week before the shooting about the killing of former President John F. Kennedy, the FBI director said Wednesday.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Christopher Wray provided an update on the investigation into the July 13 shooting of Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. That includes information extracted from a computer linked to 20-year-old shooter Thomas Crooks that suggests he spent at least a week planning the attack.

Analysis of a laptop computer that the investigation links to the shooter reveals that on July 6, he did a Google search for “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?” Wray said. That’s a search that’s obviously significant in terms of his state of mind. That’s the same day he appears to have registered for the Butler rally.

Lee Harvey Oswald was the man who shot former President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas in 1963.

In his testimony, which comes 11 days after the attempted assassination of Trump, Wray provided few details about the shooter and the timeline leading up to the shooting.

The FBI has had access to Crooks' digital devices, Wray said, but investigators have yet to find anything that indicates a political motive or ideology.

“That said, it seems pretty clear that he was interested in public figures more generally and, I think importantly, starting around July 6, he was very focused on former President Trump and this rally,” he told lawmakers.

Investigators believe Crooks visited the Butler rally site three times, Wray said.

The first time was a week before the event, and he was there for about 20 minutes. The second time was the morning of the Trump rally, and he appears to have been there for about 70 minutes, Wray said. The third time was later that afternoon, a few hours before the event, and he never left.

During that last visit, Wray said, Crooks flew a drone over the rally grounds for 11 minutes around 4 p.m., about 200 yards from the scene.

Investigators found the drone in the shooter's vehicle, along with its controller. They were able to reconstruct the aircraft's flight path, Wray said, but they don't know exactly what Crooks saw or why.

Explosive devices deactivated

Wray also discussed the three explosive devices recovered by investigators: two in Crooks' vehicle and one at his home. Wray described the devices as relatively crude, but said they could be detonated remotely.

A transmitter was found on Crooks' body, he said, but it appears the receivers on the explosive devices were not turned on, so he could not have detonated them.

Investigators now believe, Wray said, that Crooks climbed to the roof from where he fired using “mechanical equipment on the ground and vertical piping” on the side of the building. The FBI has not yet determined when the shooter climbed to the roof.

Wray said Crooks' AR-style rifle had a collapsible stock, which Wray said “might explain why it would 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 “pretty avid shooting enthusiast.”

Described as solitary, few contacts

Investigators have conducted more than 400 interviews with a wide range of people so far, he said, which has helped form a picture of Crooks' identity.

“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’s kind of consistent with what we see on his devices. His contact list, for example, is very short compared to what you would normally see for most people. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of interaction between him face-to-face or digitally with a lot of people.”

NPR and other 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 automatically stored from online searches and reading news articles.

“It doesn't appear to be any kind of target list,” he said.

“These are cached images from ongoing searches, so from news articles. And again, there's nothing, no pattern, in this particular piece of information that's particularly remarkable so far.”

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