Failed Donald Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’ final online search before the Pennsylvania rally shooting last weekend was for pornography, according to a report.
Crooks’ last search was found when the FBI gained access to the 20-year-old’s encrypted Samsung phone, a senior law enforcement official told the Daily Beast.
Initial attempts to bust into the Android device at the Pittsburgh field office failed, and the phone had to be flown to Quantico for agents to take a look at it, the source explained.
The only other recent activity the FBI found on the phone was texts from Crooks’ parents asking where he was.
The messages started around 1 p.m. and continued through the afternoon.
Crooks’ parents apparently believed their son had taken one of his father’s AR-15 rifles and gone to a local shooting range.
Around 6 p.m., Crooks opened fire on the Trump rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds — grazing Trump’s ear, killing one rally attendee and critically wounding two others.
Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.
“By 6 p.m., he was dead,” the source told the Daily Beast.
Agents found four rifle magazines by his body, as well as a remote control that could detonate the explosives found in his car nearby.
Six days after the assassination attempt, the FBI has mostly finished looking at Crooks’ phone and is now focused on his laptop and hard drives that were found in his bedroom, they added.
So far, investigators have found a troubling online history that included searches for Oxford High School shooter Ethan Crumbley and other mass shooters, law enforcement sources told The Post.
Here’s the latest on the assassination attempt against Donald Trump:
Crooks had a photo on his phone of the mass shooter just after his arrest — and also had information about Crumbley’s parents, who were both convicted of involuntary manslaughter for failing to stop their son’s carnage, a CNN report said.
In the days leading up to the shooting, Crooks had looked up Trump and President Biden, as well as other elected figures.
Authorities are looking into the possibility that Crooks was focused on a mass-casualty event — and that Trump’s rally close to his home in Pennsylvania was a convenient target.
Everything we know about the Trump assassination attempt
- 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks was identified as the shooter who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
- Crooks was shot dead by Secret Service agents.
- The gunman grazed Trump’s ear, killed a 50-year-old retired fire chief, and injured two other rally-goers.
- Investigators detailed Crooks’ search history to lawmakers, revealing that he looked for the dates of Trump’s appearances and the Democratic National Convention.
- Crooks’ search history also revealed a broad interest in high-profile people and celebrities, regardless of their political affiliation, FBI officials reportedly said.
- Trump exclusively recounted surviving the “surreal” assassination attempt with The Post at the rally, remarking, “I’m supposed to be dead.”
- High-profile politicians, including President Biden and Vice President Harris, addressed the nation about the shooting, calling it “a heinous, horrible and cowardly act.”
The discovery of porn searches on Crooks’ phone was “not unusual,” the source told the Daily Beast.
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza, for example, had images of child abuse on his phone, and al Qaeda suspects have been found to have made extremely disturbing pornography searches, they noted.
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