The FBI has gained access to the phone of the suspected gunman who opened fire on Donald Trump’s rally and is analyzing the device’s contents, the agency stated in a press release on Monday afternoon. The shooting, which killed one audience member and left Trump bleeding from one ear, is being investigated as an assassination attempt.
Authorities have been working to determine the motive behind the attack at Trump’s campaign rally on Saturday, but no clear picture has yet emerged. The gunman, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks by the FBI, was shot and killed in the incident.
Federal investigators announced on Sunday that they had obtained Crooks’s cellphone, but had issues with bypassing its password protections to access the data within. FBI investigators then shipped the phone to a lab in Virginia, where agents successfully gained access, per the bureau’s press release.
As investigators and media begin to piece together what happened in the attack, relatively little has come out about Crooks, who left behind no immediately available manifesto or record of the attack, unlike many other modern assassination plots or mass shootings. He was registered as a Republican voter and donated $15 to a Democratic-allied organization but did not maintain a large online presence.
It is not clear how authorities gained access to Crooks’s phone and what kind of device he was using. Law enforcement agencies have in the past fought with tech companies over accessing the private data of their customers during investigations, including a high-profile battle between the FBI and Apple following the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. Apple resisted demands to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the attackers, citing privacy and security concerns, and the FBI ultimately turned to a small Australian hacking firm to successfully break into the phone.
In addition to announcing on Monday that investigators had gained access to Crooks’s phone, the FBI stated that it had completed nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees and other witnesses. The agency stated that it had also completed a search of the suspect’s car and residence.
