One week before a gunman attempted to kill former President Trump, he conducted a Google search for “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy,” a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot and killed former President Kennedy in 1963, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
That same day, the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, registered for Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa., Wray told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Wray said the FBI conducted an analysis of a laptop tied to Crooks and found that on July 6, “he became very focused” on Trump and the July 13 rally.
“We’ve, just in the last couple days, found that … [the] laptop that the investigation ties to the shooter reveals that on July 6 he did a Google search ‘how far away was Oswald from Kennedy?’” Wray said.
Wray said the search is “significant” in terms of the shooter’s state of mind, and that it was done “the same day that it appears that he registered for the Butler rally.”
Authorities so far have struggled to find a motive as to why Crooks climbed onto a roof about 150 yards away from Trump as he was speaking on stage and fired at least eight shots at the presidential nominee, grazing his ear, killing an attendee and critically injuring two others at the rally.
Wray also sought to clarify reports that Crooks had searched online for images of specific public officials, saying that it appears he was searching for news articles.
“The images that we’ve recovered so far … appear to be what we call cached images from searches of news articles,” he told lawmakers. “If you do a news article search … if there are photos on it, those photos get stored automatically in your cache, as opposed to him searching for a specific images of that person.”
Wray added “there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason” to Crooks’s search history, other than it all includes prominent U.S. public figures across both parties and even some foreign public officials.
“That one repository of information doesn’t appear to be overly indicative of motive other than interest in public figures,” he said.
Earlier in the hearing, Wray confirmed Crooks used a drone , apparently to survey the rally site in the hours before Trump took the stage, and said the FBI is now analyzing that device.
The FBI also recovered two “relatively crude” explosive devices in the Crooks’s car and one other at his home, he told lawmakers.
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