Donald Trump’s would-be assassin searched for details of the John F. Kennedy shooting from his laptop and flew a drone in the area near the rally just two hours before the former president took the stage, FBI director Christopher Wray said Wednesday.
The stunning revelations are the latest details about the investigation to emerge this week in congressional hearings about the Trump rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
At the wide-ranging House Judiciary Committee hearing, Wray also shared that investigators believe that Thomas Matthew Crooks used a gun with a collapsible stock and that he accessed the roof of the building by climbing, not with a ladder.
The hearing included a large share of politics, as Republicans repeatedly mentioned Vice President Kamala Harris as they sought to tie the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to border policy and other actions, and Democrats asked Wray repeatedly about Project 2025.
According to the FBI’s analysis of Crooks’ laptop, Crooks searched how far Lee Harvey Oswald was when he shot and killed Kennedy in 1963. The search was on July 6, the same day he registered to attend the rally.
“On July 6, he did a Google search for: ‘how far away was Oswald from Kennedy,’” Wray told the House Judiciary Committee.
“That’s a search that’s obviously significant in terms of his state of mind,” the FBI director added.
“That is the same day that it appears that he registered for the Butler rally.”
Wray revealed that “around 4 p.m.,” Crooks “was flying the drone around the area” of the rally, approximately 200 yards from the stage.
The drone was in the air for approximately 11 minutes, and investigators believe Crooks watched a live feed from the drone on his phone. CNN previously reported that the drone was found in his car following the shooting.
In addition, Crooks had two explosives in his car at the time of the shooting and one in his home, but likely did not have the ability to detonate them from the roof where he was killed, Wray testified.
“It looks like because of the on/off position on the receivers, that if he had tried to detonate those devices from the roof, it would not have worked,” Wray said.
Wray said that investigators have been able to “reverse-engineer the flight path of the drone from the day of the rally,” and now think that the drone footage “would have shown [the shooter] what would have been behind him.”
