Trump shooter searched "how far away was Oswald from Kennedy?" a week before rally, FBI director says

Washington — The gunman who nearly assassinated former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13 conducted a chilling Google search about the killing of President John F. Kennedy one week before the shooting, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers during a hearing on Wednesday.

Speaking before the House Judiciary Committee, Wray said the FBI is still trying to determine the motive of 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, who fired at least eight shots that killed one attendee and wounded Trump and two others. Wray said investigators have gained access to some of Crooks' electronic devices, including his cellphone, but the "usual repositories of information have not yielded anything notable in terms of motive or ideology."

One search found on a laptop tied to Crooks stood out, however. On July 6, one week before the Trump rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, Crooks searched "how far away was Oswald from Kennedy?" 

The search was a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin who shot and killed Kennedy from a perch on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository in Dallas in 1963. The Warren Commission determined that Oswald was 265.3 feet from Kennedy when he fired the fatal shot. 

"That's a search that's obviously significant in terms of his state of mind," Wray said. "That is the same day that it appears that he registered for the Butler rally."

Wray said Crooks seemed to become "very focused on" Trump and the Butler rally around that time.

Crooks was on a roof roughly 400 feet from Trump when he fired the shots that struck Trump in the ear and hit the rally attendees. He used an AR-style rifle and investigators found eight cartridges from spent bullets on the roof, Wray confirmed at Wednesday's hearing.