A top FBI official said on July 30 that investigators have discovered that a social media account possibly linked to former President Donald Trump’s would-be assassin featured hundreds of comments reflecting anti-Semitic and anti-immigration views.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman who fired multiple shots in the former president’s direction at a July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, is believed to have made multiple posts on social media between 2019 and 2020 that revealed anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes.
“There were over 700 comments posted from this account,” Mr. Abbate said. “Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and are described as extreme in nature.”
Mr. Abbate said the FBI is still working to verify that the account belonged to Mr. Crooks, who was shot dead by a counter-sniper after firing eight rounds, including one that hit former President Trump in the ear, left two other men injured, and killed a former fire chief.
During the hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked the FBI’s deputy director whether the agency had managed to break into some of the gunman’s encrypted apps.
“We’ve experienced a range of returns,” Mr. Abbate replied. “Some of the applications that he was using online were encrypted in nature.”
Mr. Graham interjected, asking again if they had been successfully broken into.
“We’ve received returns, there are some that we have not been able to get information back because of their encrypted nature,” Mr. Abbate said.
Asked by the South Carolina senator whether there was a way to “solve that problem,” referring to the difficulty of breaking into encrypted apps, Mr. Abbate called for legislation that would allow just that.
“We need a solution that provides lawful access to law enforcement,” he said.
Mr. Graham concurred, saying: “We have encrypted apps of an assassin, a murderer, and we can’t get into them all these days after. That needs to be fixed, folks. I’m all for privacy, but to a point.”
The South Carolina senator supported his call for a legislative solution by noting the hypothetical situation in which someone with ill intentions would use encrypted apps to communicate with a hostile foreign power.
“I think we need to know these things and we need to know them in real-time,” Mr. Graham said.
There have been debates about whether such legislation would be constitutional.
The would-be Trump assassin’s digital footprint has been in focus since FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers last week that Mr. Crooks did a Google search for “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy,” in reference to the circumstances of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“That’s obviously significant in terms of his state of mind,” Mr. Wray said. “That is the same day that he registered for the Butler rally.”
