In the 11 days since former President Donald Trump nearly lost his life to a would-be assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, officials have released information about the attack at a speed one can only describe as a slow trickle.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray provided one more drip.
In response to questioning from Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, Wray revealed that on July 6, would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks both registered for the July 13 Trump rally and sought a chilling piece of information dating back more than six decades.
The FBI director began by acknowledging that the FBI had yet to discover why Crooks decided to shoot the former president.
“A lot of the usual repositories of information have not yielded anything notable in terms of motive,” Wray said.
Crooks, it seems, simply had an unusual fixation on famous people. In fact, the director very generically described the shooter as “interested in public figures.”
Then came a revelation that Wray hyped as “important.”
“Starting somewhere around July 6 or so, he became very focused on former President Trump and this rally,” he said of Crooks.
“And, so, one of the things that I can share here today that has not been shared yet is that we just in the last couple days found that, from our review — to your point about devices — analysis of a laptop that the investigation ties to the shooter reveals that on July 6 he did a Google search for, quote, how far away was Oswald from Kennedy,” the director said.
Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated then-President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 24, 1963, according to the FBI.
Wray described Crooks’ JFK-related search as “significant in terms of his state of mind.”
That search, he added, occurred on the same day the would-be assassin apparently registered for the Butler rally.
FBI Director Wray on Crooks’: “On July 6th, he did a Google search for ‘How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?’ and so 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.” pic.twitter.com/bsygFiTLYu
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 24, 2024
In light of the FBI’s history, both recent and distant, readers may decide for themselves whether to trust its director.
The Oswald-JFK search revelation did establish that Crooks contemplated his attempted assassination of Trump at least a week beforehand.
On the whole, however, Wray’s remarks illustrated how much disdain he and other federal bureaucrats feel toward the American people.
Finding a search history on a laptop takes a matter of seconds.
Do you trust Christopher Wray?
Thus, imagine appearing before Congress and describing a Google search as if it constituted some breathtaking discovery. To do something like that, how much contempt would you have to feel for your audience?
In short, federal officials like Wray seem to have no interest in telling the public much of anything. Nor do they seem to care if you know it.
