The final internet search of wannabe Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was for porn, a law enforcement official has told The Daily Beast.
The FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Virginia finally accessed the gunman’s encrypted Samsung phone after it was flown on an FBI plane from the Pittsburgh field office where attempts to access its contents failed.
A law enforcement official told the outlet that the only other recent activity on the gunman’s phone was texts from his parents, asking about his whereabouts. The texts from Crooks’ parents started at about 1pm and continued during the afternoon, according to the report.
They reportedly thought he had gone to the shooting range. Instead, he had taken his father’s AR-style rifle to try to assassinate Donald Trump.
The former president was shot in the ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last Saturday but survived the attack.
Rally attendee Corey Comperatore, 50, was shot and killed as he shielded his family from the gunfire. Trump paid tribute to Comperatore in his Thursday night speech at the Republican National Convention, kissing the late fire chief’s helmet.
Two other men were injured in the attack. Crooks was killed by a Secret Service sniper, soon after he began shooting.
The FBI has mostly finished its review of the phone’s contents and is now working on the gunman’s laptop and several hard drives that were found in his bedroom. No motive for the shooting has been found and Crooks had no known psychiatric disorders.
Next to his body, law enforcement found four rifle magazines as well as a remote control which could detonate explosive devices located in his vehicle.
The source told The Daily Beast that the porn discovery was “not unusual,” adding that Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook elementary school shooter, had child abuse images on his phone and that a number of al Qaeda suspects have searched for extreme pornography alongside tracts for Islamist purity.
Crooks, 20, lived with his parents 40 miles from Butler and had graduated from community college. He was working in a nursing and rehabilitation center.
It has been previously reported that Crooks searched for both Trump and President Joe Biden, as well as information about the Democratic National Convention and the British Royal Family.
He had also searched for Ethan Crumbley, a mass shooter who killed four students at a Michigan high school in 2021, as well as the prosecution of Crumbley’s parents, who were both sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in jail for not safely storing the firearm used in the shooting.