(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Headline USA has obtained a partial internet search history of alleged would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks. Read it here for the first time.
The search history comes from a trove of data from the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC), where Crooks attended from 2022 to 2024—graduating in the spring of last year with an associate degree in engineering science. The search history is only for the times Crooks was using CCAC wifi, which was about three days per week when school was in session. The vast majority of his internet footprint, including the countless hours he spent online at his house, is still a mystery.
CBS News and The New York Times also obtained the CCAC search history, and both outlets published stories about it last month. However, they didn’t publish the raw data.
When this author saw the CBS article, he asked the CCAC for the same search history information. In response, a CCAC official provided four files of “Graylog” data, which appeared in files as jumbled-up code. The CCAC official said that CBS and New York Times both “reversed engineered” the Graylog code to make it readable.
Eventually, this reporter was able to find a computer whiz to do the same. Apparently, deciphering the data was simple—just a matter of renaming the files and running the script again.
While CBS reported many of the pertinent facts about Crooks’s search history, the raw data does reveal previously unreported information.
For instance, Crooks visited mainstream news sites such as The Hill, Aljazeera, CNBS, The Wall Street Journal and CNN, along with more niche sites such as compositesworld.com and foodsafetynews.com. He also visited the State Department’s website, www.state.gov, once on Oct. 10 at 12:50 p.m.—a visit that wasn’t reported by CBS or the Times. That visit occurred right after Crooks was browsing winteriscoming.net, which is a Game of Thrones fan site.
Well, well well, Thomas. What do we have here? pic.twitter.com/nxIsMjxHiF
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) August 5, 2025
Even at the college campus, Crooks seemed most interested in gaming sites. He visited PlaySimple, Discord, and Xbox Game Pass frequently. Meanwhile, when he wasn’t on YouTube, his social media activity included Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Crooks was apparently a sports fan, too, visiting sites such as ESPN and a Pittsburgh Steelers fan site. One seemingly bizarre site is the South African-based sports betting service appclap.org. Crooks visited that site on Jan. 24, 2024, which was one of his busiest days on the CCAC network. As CBS News noted, Crooks conducted at least 1,364 searches that day. After that, he consistently used a VPN and other privacy tools that hid his footprint.
“After Jan. 24, 2024, there are 25 days with activity, but nearly all of them have just a few requests, all of them to Mullvad. Whatever he was viewing on those days is not in the logs,” CBS noted last month, also reporting on the use of his encrypted email service: Mailfence.com.
While Headline USA has yet to uncover any new trends that could shed light on Crooks’s mindset and actions leading up to his death, this publication is releasing the data in full so readers can conduct their own research. Note the files are numbered 1, 2, 3 and 5. A CCAC official said File 4 didn’t have any data, while File 6 only reflected his use of a VPN.
Headline USA is also the outlet that published Crooks’s CCAC emails—which can be downloaded here—his toxicology and autopsy reports, and the 911 call his father made to police on the day of the Trump shooting.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
