Christopher Wray, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for the first time confirmed that former President Donald J. Trump was the intended target of would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks. According to Wray, the images of Joe Biden, Fani Willis, and other public officials found on Crooks’s electronic devices were merely cached images from news articles the 20-year-old gunman had read, and do not seem to be part of a target list.
In the week following the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Trump, multiple corporate media outlets, including CNN and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reported that law enforcement had photos of Biden, Willis, and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Crooks’s cell phone. The reports insinuated that these public officials were also likely targets of the shooter and that the attack on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was merely one of opportunity.
CACHED IMAGES AND JFK’S ASSASSINATION.
However, the FBI director’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday has thrown cold water on the media’s misconstrual of Crooks’s intentions.
“The images that we’ve recovered so far from… appeared to be what we call cached images from searches of news articles,” Wray told the committee. “So if you do a news article search, of course, images—if there are photos on it—those photos get stored automatically in your cache, as opposed to… him searching for a specific person and getting up images of that person.”
Wray also noted that the shooter had searched how far Lee Harvey Oswald was positioned from President John F. Kennedy when fatally shot the late president in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), citing the reports of additional photos of public officials found on Crooks’s devices, still pressed Wray as to whether there were more targets.
“From that, any indication of any other particular target that is someone who was not just the subject of the search issue you just described but for which there was more of an interest than others?” asked Schiff, who was a ringleader of the Russia hoax scandal.
Wray responded, shaking his head ‘no,’ that the “information I just described, at the moment, does not appear particularly indicative of targeting in its own right.”
WATCH:
Shortly after the assassination attempt against Trump, the media reported the gunman had images of Democrats on his devices, implying they were targets – but FBI Director Wray says these were just images cached from news stories. pic.twitter.com/9bmdbLcGTT
— Jack Montgomery (@JackBMontgomery) July 24, 2024