FBI Director Reveals Trump Shooter Searched How Far Oswald Was From Kennedy During Assassination

2 months ago

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:

https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript

Stay Connected
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com

Transcript

00:00Director, thank you for appearing. Thank you for the extraordinary job that you're doing.

00:05Please convey our thanks to the men and women at the Bureau for their incredible work.

00:10I've worked with them since I was an assistant U.S. attorney more than 30 years ago.

00:15Let me start with a threshold question I'm curious about.

00:18When I applied to be an assistant U.S. attorney, I had to go through a background check.

00:23Do candidates for the FBI have to go through background checks?

00:27Yes.

00:29Would someone with dozens of felony convictions survive a background check for the Bureau?

00:35No.

00:37So they would never be hired by the Bureau?

00:39No.

00:43Well, clearly the Bureau has—you don't have to comment on this, I know you won't—

00:46but clearly the Bureau has higher standards for their hiring than one of America's great political parties.

00:53Let me turn to the events of the tragic shooting.

01:00Have you been able to gain access to the shooters' electronic communications, social media?

01:06And with the caveats that you mentioned, that the investigation is still early,

01:10have you been able to make any deductions or are there any indications of the shooters' motivation from those electronic holdings?

01:22So in terms of our ability to access it, we have been able to get into and exploit a number of electronic devices,

01:30digital devices, but not all of them yet.

01:33And then within his various accounts, we've been able to get access to some of them,

01:37but some of them we're still waiting on.

01:39Some of them we may never get access to because of the encryption issue

01:43that presents an increasingly vexing barrier for law enforcement, not just the FBI,

01:49but for law enforcement all over the country.

01:52So we're still drilling into that.

01:54We have some information—some places we've been able to look, some places we will be able to look,

01:59some places we may never be able to see, no matter how good our legal process is.

02:03But that's what we're looking at right now.

02:05In terms of what we've been able to find so far, a lot of the usual repositories of information

02:11have not yielded anything notable in terms of motive or, like, ideology.

02:20Having said that, it does appear fairly clear that he was interested in public figures,

02:26kind of more broadly, and—and I think this is important—

02:31that starting somewhere around July 6th or so,

02:38he became very focused on former President Trump and this rally.

02:45And so one of the things that I can share here today that has not been shared yet

02:49is that we've just, in the last couple days, found that, from our review, to your point about devices,

02:57analysis of a laptop that the investigation ties to the shooter reveals that on July 6th,

03:06he did a Google search for, quote, how far away was Oswald from Kennedy?

03:17And so that's a search that obviously is significant in terms of his state of mind.

03:24We—that is the same day that it appears that he registered for the Butler rally.

03:33And when you say that his electronic holdings indicated an interest in different public figures

03:39without revealing anything you're not comfortable revealing about those public figures,

03:44can you tell us anything generally about them, either the offices they hold, their political party,

03:51or was it simply people of a high profile?

03:57Well, a couple things.

03:59First, the—the images that we've recovered so far from, I can't remember which of his various devices it were,

04:10appear to be what we call cached images from searches of news articles.

04:16So if you do a news article search, of course, image—if there are photos on it,

04:21those photos get stored automatically in your cache as opposed to me searching

04:26or him searching for a specific person and getting up images of that person.

04:31As far as the pictures that are like that, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it so far

04:39other than these are, you know, all prominent public people, but they—they cover both parties.

04:45They cover both U.S. people and even some foreign public officials.

04:54So that part doesn't appear to—that—that one repository of information doesn't appear to be overly indicative of motive

05:02other than interest in—in public figures, but that could be just because he was reading news stories.

05:08So we're still trying to drill into that.

05:10That's why all of these outstanding legal process returns that we're waiting on for various accounts, platforms, et cetera,

05:19you know, any one of them could be one that would have very indicative, very important information.

05:24If I could be permitted one very short additional question, Chairman.

05:28From that, any indication of any other particular target,

05:31that is, someone who was not just sort of generically the subject of the searches you described

05:38but for which there was more of an interest than others?

05:42There's—the information I just described at the moment does not appear particularly indicative of targeting in its own right.

05:51But again, that dot, once we get other information, could connect in a way that might be more meaningful.

05:57But I really—I'm sharing that piece of information with this committee and with the American public,

06:03but I think it's important that we put down a qualification.

06:06This does not appear to be some kind of target list or something like that.

06:09This is cached images from running searches of news stories.

06:13And again, there's nothing at the moment that—

06:16there's no pattern from that particular piece of information that is overly remarkable so far.

06:21Thank you. Thank you, Chairman.

FBI Director Reveals Trump Shooter Searched How Far Oswald Was From Kennedy During Assassination

Category

Transcript

Recommended