Two hours before he shot former President Donald Trump, Thomas Matthew Crooks scouted the Trump rally venue in an 11-minute drone flight, FBI Director Chrisopher Wray said Wednesday.
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Wray said Crooks flew the drown from about 3:50 p.m. to about 4 p.m. about 200 yards from the stage where Trump would speak, according to the New York Post. Crooks shot Trump and three other people from a rooftop about 140 yards away from the stage.
Wray said the FBI is trying to determine why the drone was sent up and what it told Crooks, according to CBS.
“It would have shown the shooter, we think — again, we’re still doing more work on this, I really want to qualify what I’m saying, but I’m trying to be transparent and lenient here. We think it would have shown him, kind of, what would have been behind him when he was shooting,” Wray said.
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“In other words, almost like giving him a rear-view mirror of the scene behind him. Except again, he wasn’t flying it overhead while he was later back for the assassination,” Wray said.
“We’re still trying to figure out exactly what he saw, because we’re having to, in effect — because there’s no recording of what he saw during those 11 minutes, our hypothesis at this point, our experts think he would have been live-streaming it,” Wray said.
“And so we’re trying to in effect say, OK, if this is the flight pattern, given these capabilities of the drone, what would you have seen, what could you have seen in these 11 minutes?” he said.
During his testimony, Wray revealed that on July 6, Crooks conducted a Google search for “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy.” Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.
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“That’s a search that obviously is significant in terms of his state of mind,” Wray said.
On the day of that search, Crooks registered to attend the July 13 rally, Wray said.
He said that after the July 6 search, Crooks became “very focused on” Trump.
During his testimony, Wray said Crooks used encrypted messaging apps on his devices and said that while the FBI was able to crack his phone, it is still searching other devices for a clue as to Crooks’s motive.
Wray added that “it is, quite frankly, a dangerous time to be a prominent public official,” according to CNN.
Wray said the incident supports his concerns about a rise in domestic terrorism, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
He said, it was “another example, particularly heinous and very public one of what I have been talking about.’”
Wray said he feared “passion and heated rhetoric turning into actual violence.”
“We’ve seen it against public officials of all sorts. We’ve seen it against law enforcements. The number of officers shot and killed in the line of duty is alarming. It’s almost every five days that a law enforcement officer is killed in the line of duty. That is an example of the kinds of ways passion and heated rhetoric can bubble over into violence,” he said.
