Just hours before opening fire, the gunman in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump flew a drone roughly 200 yards (180 meters) from the rally stage where the Republican former president would later stand, viewing and livestreaming the footage, FBI Director Christopher Wray told congressional lawmakers on Wednesday.
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00:00Now, there's a whole lot of work underway and still a lot of work to do, and our understanding
00:05of what happened and why will continue to evolve, but we're going to leave no stone
00:11unturned.
00:13The shooter may be deceased, but the FBI's investigation is very much ongoing.
00:19A lot of the usual repositories of information have not yielded anything notable in terms
00:28of motive or like ideology.
00:32Having said that, it does appear fairly clear that he was interested in public figures kind
00:38of more broadly, and, and I think this is important, that starting somewhere around
00:47July 6th or so, he became very focused on former President Trump on this rally.
00:56Analysis of a laptop that the investigation ties to the shooter reveals that on July 6th,
01:04he did a Google search for, quote, how far away was Oswald from Kennedy?
01:16And so that's a search that obviously is significant in terms of his state of mind.
01:23That is the same day that it appears that he registered for the Butler rally.
01:31We are in an elevated threat environment, and we have been for some time, and that comes
01:35from a variety of quarters.
01:38It is a, it is quite frankly a dangerous time to be a prominent public official.
01:42The weapon had a collapsible stock, which could explain why it might have been less
01:50easy for people to observe, you know, because one of the things that we're finding is people
01:54have observed him, the first people to observe him with the weapon were when he was already
01:59on the roof.
02:00And we haven't yet found anybody with firsthand observation of him with the weapon walking
02:06around beforehand.
02:07So that doesn't mean he wasn't, obviously, but, but the collapsible stock is, is potentially
02:13a very significant feature that might be relevant to that.
02:16We've been able to, by exploiting the drone, determine, you know, its use and flight paths.
02:23There were no pictures or videos on the drone of, of the day of the rally, for example,
02:30but we have been able to, to reverse engineer the flight path of the drone from the day
02:36of the rally.
02:37And that's how we know that for about 11 minutes from, I think it's around 3.50 PM to 4 PM,
02:43somewhere in that range, he was flying the drone and we have the flight path.
02:48It's about 200 yards away from where former president Trump would ultimately be speaking.