Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman who attempted to assassinate former president Donald Trump, searched online about former president John F. Kennedy and his killer Harvey Lee Oswald weeks before the shooting.
The revelations came on Wednesday, when Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray testified at a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee.
“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,’” said Wray.
Oswald was accused in the shooting death of Kennedy in 1963. It is alleged that Oswald fired from a window on the sixth floor of a building in Dallas, Texas. The FBI said that after a lengthy investigation, it was determined that Oswald acted alone, it says on an FBI webpage dedicated to the Kennedy assassination.
On the same day of Crooks’ Google search, it appears that he registered for the Butler rally, Wray said. He called the search “significant” in terms of Cooks’ state of mind.
Crooks seemed interested in public figures, and became “very focused” on Trump and the rally around July 6, said Wray.
The hearing on Wednesday was called to examine the FBI’s investigation into the assassination attempt on Trump and the “ongoing politicization of the nation’s preeminent law enforcement agency” under the FBI’s direction, according to a news release from the committee.
During the hearing, Wray also informed the committee that Crooks appeared to have used a drone on the day of the shooting. Around 4 p.m. on July 13, the drone was flown in the vicinity of the rally, about 200 yards away from the stage, said Wray.
Crooks was viewing the footage from the drone that would have shown what was behind him, said Wray, “almost like giving him a rear view mirror of the scene.”
There’s no recording of what Crooks saw in the 11 minutes that he flew the drone.
“The experts think he would have been live-streaming it,” said Wray.
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