Trump gunman searched about JFK assassination, FBI director says : NPR

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.

Wray’s testimony comes 11 days after the attempt on Trump’s life. He said the FBI still has found no indication of a motive or political ideology for Crooks, but he did fill in some of the details about him and the timeline ahead of the shooting.

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. 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 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.

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.