The 20-year-old who tried to assassinate the former president of the United States Donald Trump during a campaign event for the upcoming elections had previously searched the Internet for material on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) in 1963, as revealed by the FBI director on Wednesday.
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Christopher Wray, head of the federal law enforcement agency, testified before a special congressional committee and said the investigation into the July 13 attack had not yet been able to determine the motive that led Thomas Matthew Crooks to commit the failed attack.
He said Crooks “seems to have done a lot of research on public figures in general” but has not been able to detect “anything remarkable” in terms of motives or ideology.
“So far there doesn’t seem to be much reason for that,” he said.
“On July 6, (Crooks) “I did a Google search asking, ‘How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?'” he said, referring to the assassination of Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.
“So that’s a search (of data) that is obviously significant in terms of his mental state,” he noted.
He did a Google search asking ‘How far was Oswald from Kennedy?
Wray also maintained that The individual flew a drone over the event area for about 11 minutes – between 3:50 p.m. and 4 p.m. local time – on the day of the shooting, passing about 200 meters from the stage where Trump was scheduled to speak ahead of the elections next November.
Crooks opened fire on Trump with an AR-style assault rifle shortly after 6 p.m. as the Republican presidential candidate was addressing the crowd at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The young man was positioned on the roof of a nearby building and was shot dead by a US Secret Service sniper less than 30 seconds after firing his first shots.
Trump was wounded in the right ear but was immediately evacuated. Two rally attendees were seriously injured and a 50-year-old Pennsylvania firefighter was shot dead.
According to the FBI chief, the drone and its remote control were found in the attacker’s car.
Two “relatively crude” explosive devices were also found in the car and another at Crooks’ residence.
US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle came under heavy criticism and resigned on Tuesday, a day after acknowledging that his agency had failed in its mission to prevent the attack.
Trump will seek a second term in the White House in the November 5 elections. He had already served from 2017 to 2024.
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