Posted on 07/24/24
| News Source: The Hill
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 President John F. 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 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.”