FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the agency will leave “no stone unturned” as he faced questions from United States lawmakers about this month’s assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.
During his opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Wray said the shooting at Trump’s July 13 rally in Pennsylvania was “an attack on our democracy and our democratic process”.
“We will not and do not tolerate political violence of any kind, especially a despicable account of this magnitude,” he said.
“And I want to assure you and the American people that the men and women of the FBI will continue to work tirelessly to get to the bottom of what happened.”
Wray’s testimony comes a day after US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned amid widespread criticism over the security protocols deployed for the Trump rally.
The former president and current Republican Party presidential nominee was shot in the ear by a gunman who witnesses said had taken up a position on a rooftop with a direct line of sight to the rally stage.
One rally attendee was killed and two were seriously injured in the incident.
The FBI said it is investigating the shooting as an act of “domestic terrorism” and an attempted assassination.
But the agency has not yet determined the motive of the suspected shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, fuelling questions for Wray from lawmakers.
The FBI director and other senior officials privately briefed members of Congress last week, telling them that Crooks had photos on his phone of Trump, President Joe Biden and other officials and had looked up the dates for the Democratic National Convention and Trump’s appearances.
A law enforcement official told The Associated Press news agency last week that Crooks had also flown a drone above the rally site before the event in an apparent effort to scope out the scene in advance.
On Wednesday morning, Wray told lawmakers that the FBI had recovered a drone in Crooks’s vehicle. He said the agency believes the suspect flew the drone about 180 metres (200 yards) from the rally stage before the event began.
“We’re going to leave no stone unturned. The shooter might be deceased, but the FBI’s investigation is very much ongoing,” the director said.
Wray also said the gunman is believed to have done a Google search one week before the shooting of “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?”.
That is a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed former US President John F Kennedy from a sniper’s perch in Dallas, Texas, in 1963.
But the FBI director reiterated that while the agency has built out a detailed timeline of Crooks’s movements and online activity, the precise motive — or why Trump was singled out — remains undetermined.
“A lot of the usual repositories of information have not yielded, anything notable in terms of motive or ideology,” Wray said.
Unanswered questions
Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had said at the start of the hearing that multiple questions remained unanswered, including why all the buildings near the rally stage were not secured.
“We hope to learn more today from Director Wray about the shooter: his use of the drone, the explosives that were in his car, how he got on the roof and a host of other questions,” Jordan said.
“It is our hope that Director Wray’s testimony can begin to give answers to the American people about all these questions and concerns.”
Representative Jerry Nadler, the panel’s top Democrat, condemned the Trump shooting “unequivocally and unabashedly” but pointed to years of political threats and violence and violent rhetoric from Republicans, including Trump himself.
“If you think that this one assassin’s bullet was a bolt out of the blue and not part of a wave of violence that has threatened this nation for years, then you have missed the point,” Nadler said.
The FBI has largely avoided the same level of scrutiny directed at the Secret Service over security lapses that preceded the Trump rally shooting.
But some US lawmakers have been sceptical of the bureau’s assessment that Crooks left behind no obvious ideological motive that could explain his actions.
The FBI director has long faced opposition from hardline Republicans, some angered over the arrest of Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as Congress certified Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.
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