FBI director Christopher Wray said on Wednesday that the person who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump searched the web for “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” one week before the rally shooting, as reported by the The New York Times.
Investigators recovered the search from a laptop linked to 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, which refers to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. “That’s a search that’s obviously significant in terms of his state of mind,” Wray said during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. “That is the same day that it appears that he registered for the Butler rally.”
As reported by the NYT, Wray said Crooks visited the site of the Butler, Pennslyvania rally two times on the morning of July 13th. During his second visit, the shooter appears to have flown a drone around the showground for about 11 minutes. The drone was made by DJI, according to a report from CNBC.
The FBI also broke into the shooter’s phone last week, but his motive remains unclear. “A lot of the usual repositories of information have not yielded, anything notable in terms of motive or ideology,” Wray said.
