The FBI got access to the phone of the person they think opened fire at Donald Trump’s event and is now looking at what’s on it, the agency said in a press release on Monday afternoon. One person in the crowd was killed in the shooting, and Trump was left bleeding from one ear. The shooting is being looked into as an attempt to kill Trump.
The police have been trying to figure out why the attack at Trump’s campaign event on Saturday happened, but they still don’t have a clear picture. The FBI named the gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. He was shot and killed in the event.
On Sunday, federal investigators said they had gotten Crooks’s cellphone but were having trouble getting past its password protections to access the information stored on it. According to a news release from the FBI, the phone was then sent to a lab in Virginia, where agents were able to get into it.
As authorities and the media start to put together what happened in the attack, not much is known about Crooks. Unlike many other modern assassination plots or mass shootings, Crooks did not leave behind a manifesto or record of the attack. He was a registered Republican voter and gave $15 to a group that supported Democrats, but he wasn’t very active online.
It’s not clear how the police got into Crooks’s phone or what kind of phone he was using. In the past, law enforcement agencies have fought with tech companies over getting to their customers’ private data during investigations. One of the most well-known fights was between the FBI and Apple after the 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, California. Because Apple was worried about privacy and security, they refused to open an attacker’s iPhone. In the end, the FBI had to hire a small Australian hacking firm to break into the phone.
The FBI said on Monday that it had successfully accessed Crooks’s phone and had also conducted nearly 100 interviews with law enforcement officers, event guests, and other witnesses. The police officer said that they had also searched the suspect’s home and car.
