(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Trump shooter Thomas Crooks was reportedly a “strikingly intelligent man” who scored higher than 1500 on his SAT pre-college exam. But he also may have been struggling for years with an undiagnosed disorder, according to the FBI.
ABC News reported the FBI’s suspicions about Crooks’s mental health on Friday, citing unnamed sources who were briefed on the FBI’s interview with Donald Trump. The FBI reportedly interviewed Trump in his capacity as a victim of the July 13 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, but the former president ended up asking more questions than he answered, ABC reported.
According to ABC, “Trump was told that, through interviews with Crooks’ family and others who knew him, investigators learned that throughout high school, Crooks would routinely sway back and forth while standing at the bus stop—but that Crooks never received any sort of formal diagnosis related to it.”
The FBI agents also reportedly told Trump that they were able to access three foreign email accounts used by Crooks because the shooter’s passwords were stored on his computer. However, the FBI still claims Crooks’s motives are a mystery, and they say they’ve found no indications that anyone else was involved in the attack, according to ABC.
“The information gleaned from the foreign email accounts largely related to weapons and ammunition purchases, offering little insight into what drove Crooks to launch his attack, Trump was told,” ABC reported.
CBS initially reported information about Crooks’s possible mental health disorders on July 18, citing sources from a private congressional briefing with federal law enforcement officials.
According to CBS, the FBI purportedly found more than 14,000 images on Crooks’ primary phone. Among those images was a screenshot of an online live feed of the July 13 rally, saved at 6:01 p.m.—just 10 minutes before he allegedly opened fire.
“He searched online in April about major depressive disorder. In the days after the rally was announced, he made searches related to Trump, President Biden, the former president’s whereabouts on July 13 and the Democratic National Convention,” CBS reported—indicating that Crooks may have been suffering from mental ailments.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
