Fiend’s dirty biz: porn then slay bid
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, Va., 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 HS shooter Ethan Crumbley and other mass shooters, law-enforcement sources told The Post.