Trump gunman searched for info on JFK’s assassin and other new details we learned from this week’s hearings on the attack

Thomas Matthew Crooks came to Donald Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., prepared for violence. The authorities charged with protecting the former president weren’t adequately prepared to stop him.

Those twin conclusions emerged this week during a series of congressional oversight hearings into the circumstances of, motivations for, and security failures surrounding the attempt on Trump’s life — the most serious threat to a president or presidential nominee since a gunman shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

And as lawmakers heard testimony from U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Christopher Paris in a series of proceedings over the last three days, several new details about the shooting and the investigation emerged.

Here are some of the highlights:

Roughly a week before his attack on Trump, Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa., had searched online for details of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Wray told members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during a hearing Wednesday.

The FBI director said agents scouring Crooks’ search history discovered that he’d made such queries as “How far away was [Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey] Oswald from Kennedy,” the same day he registered to attend the Butler rally.

“That’s a search that is significant in terms of his state of mind,” Wray said, adding that about the same time his search history had become “very focused on former President Trump and this rally.”

Crooks had also taken other steps to prepare, including visiting the rally site — on the grounds of the Butler Farm Show, about an hour away from Crooks’ home — at least twice before unleashing his attack.

Wray testified that Crooks visited the site for roughly 20 minutes about a week before the rally, and then spent roughly 70 minutes there on the morning of July 13. During that later visit, Wray said, Crooks surveilled the grounds with a drone he flew over an area about 200 yards above the rally stage.

The day before Trump’s stop in Western Pennsylvania, Crooks, who Wray described as a “fairly avid shooting hobbyist,” went to a shooting range near his home to practice with the AR-15-style rifle that investigators believe he used in the attack.

That weapon, complete with a collapsible scope that Wray said may have helped Crooks hide that he was carrying a firearm on July 13, was originally purchased by his father more than a decade ago. And while investigators initially said that the firearm was still registered to him, Wray told lawmakers Wednesday that the son had legally purchased the gun from his father.

The morning of the rally Crooks bought 50 rounds of ammunition from a local gun store, then drove to the fairgrounds with two “relatively crude” explosive devices found in his car, Wray said.

Both were capable of being remotely detonated with a switch Crooks was carrying with him as he carried out his attack.

However, Wray said, “because of the on/off position on the receivers, if he had tried to detonate those devices from [the rooftop perch from where he opened fire] it would not have worked.”

The FBI director added: “That doesn’t mean the explosives weren’t dangerous.”

Nearly two weeks after the shooting, investigators have made little progress in identifying Crooks’ motive in attacking Trump. Wray told lawmakers Wednesday that agents have conducted dozens of interviews and spent countless hours examining the gunman’s digital footprint both online and on his personal devices.

“We’d love to have a roadmap that tells us exactly what he was thinking. We haven’t found that yet,” he said. “Doesn’t mean we won’t. We’re looking all over the place, and we’re going to leave no stone unturned.”

Crooks’ parents have been cooperative so far in the investigation, Wray said, but from what agents have been able to discern so far, their son largely kept his own counsel.

“There doesn’t appear to [have been] a whole lot of interactions between him, face-to-face or digital, with a lot of people,” Wray said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not any.”

» READ MORE: What Thomas Matthew Crooks’ ex-classmates and employer have said about the Trump shooting suspect

Meanwhile, members of the House Oversight Committee roasted Cheatle, the U.S. Secret Service director, for hours on Monday over her agency’s failure to adequately secure the rally site before Trump’s speech.

The bipartisan criticism she received throughout the most contentious of the week’s proceedings culminated in her resignation a day later.

Cheatle acknowledged during her testimony that the Secret Service had turned down requests over the two years before the attack to beef up Trump’s security detail. But she insisted that on July 13 “there were not requests that were denied” for the Butler rally.

Cheatle also told lawmakers that her agency had identified the building from which Crooks carried out his attack — an agricultural toolmakers’ warehouse roughly 150 yards from the stage — as a potential security vulnerability as they reviewed the location before the rally.

And yet because it fell outside a security perimeter the Secret Service had established, it had tasked local authorities — specifically, the Butler County Emergency Services Unit — with securing the building.

Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger, whose office oversees the unit, has previously said it informed the Secret Service that local police did not have the manpower to secure that building.

Cheatle told lawmakers that the Secret Service received “two to five” reports the day of the rally of a suspicious person lingering outside the security perimeter.

Initially, she said, local officers had noticed him using a rangefinder — used by marksmen to measure distances to remote objects. Wray told lawmakers Wednesday that those reports came about an hour before Crooks opened fire.

Another local officer positioned outside the venue reported Crooks skulking around the rally site and crawling on the ground, Cheatle said. That officer disseminated his photo to others involved in the security effort.

About a half-hour before the shooting, yet another officer spotted Crooks again, scoping out the roof of the building from which he would eventually open fire and circulated his photo among other law enforcement.

During that period, two local officers — members of the Butler County Emergency Services Unit — left their assigned posts in a building with a vantage-point view of the roof from where Crooks would eventually fire, to join the search for him on the ground, said Paris, the Pennsylvania State Police commissioner, in testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday. It was not clear, Paris said, whether those officers would have been able to spot Crooks on the roof had they remained at their duty posts.

But Cheatle and Paris both stressed that no one reported seeing Crooks with a firearm until seconds before he opened fire. And despite the early reports of Crooks’ suspicious activity, authorities had no reason to deem him an imminent security threat, they said.

Paris told lawmakers that Crooks was one of several individuals in the crowd that day whose behavior authorities had flagged as potentially suspicious.

The first time anyone reported spotting Crooks with a gun came just seconds before he opened fire, Wray told lawmakers in his testimony Wednesday.

He, Paris, and Cheatle all described how moments before the shooting a local officer, responding to reports from other spectators of an armed man on the roof, tried to hoist himself up on top of the building to confront him.

As he “dangled” from the edge, Crooks pointed his rifle at the officer, prompting him to fall from his position, Paris said. Crooks fired off eight shots in the six seconds that followed — hitting Trump, killing one rally spectator and injuring two others.

A Secret Service sniper shot and killed him moments later.

This week’s congressional hearings were only the start of what is shaping up to be an exhaustive review by multiple agencies of Crooks’ shooting that day and the multiple security failures that allowed it to happen.

In addition to the ongoing FBI investigation into Crooks’ preparation and motivation, the Pennsylvania State Police are conducting a parallel probe into the shooting of the three spectators hit by the gunman as well as the Secret Service sniper’s use of force that ultimately killed Crooks.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Secret Service and the Inspector General’s Office for the Department of Homeland Security are conducting their own internal reviews. Cheatle told lawmakers her agency’s probe would not be complete before September — a timeline several members of Congress balked at Monday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) also announced plans to form a bipartisan task force to continue Congress’ investigation of the incident. Lawmakers are expected to vote on that proposal later this week.

“The security failures that allowed an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life are shocking,” they said in a joint statement Tuesday. “The task force will be empowered with subpoena authority and will move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability, and make certain such failures never happen again.”