At a House Judiciary Committee hearing held last week, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) questioned FBI Director Chris Wray about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you, Director Wray, for being here, and I want to add my voice to the chorus of folks who
00:04are just devastated by the illness and passing of Sheila Jackson Lee. What a champion. What a
00:10role model. I always called her the hardest working member of Congress. She was everywhere
00:15on every issue. She'll be greatly missed. Director Wray, I thank you for what you said earlier,
00:22which is leaning in. This is such an extraordinary set of events. The attempted assassination of
00:28Donald Trump, the stealing of the life of a father, a firefighter, somebody who protected lives,
00:35Cory Comparatore, serious injuries to two others. So I thank you because you are trying to give us
00:44what you can without jeopardizing the investigation, and I think that's very helpful.
00:49Did the shooter also investigate other high profile folks? We had heard some reporting
00:56around that early on. Well, you say investigate other folks. I think this is a place where we
01:05still have a lot more work to do. Part of what we did find was a bunch of cached images of a variety
01:13of public figures. But again, cached images are those images that you get when you pull up a
01:21news story from any number of news sites. If there are photographs in the article,
01:27those images are automatically put into the cache on your computer. So it doesn't necessarily mean
01:33that you were searching for that person's image. We do have the fact that starting around,
01:45at the least around the period early July, so the search that I just mentioned
01:54related to Oswald and Kennedy, that's about July 6th, which is the same day
02:00we believe that he registered for the rally. And the day before, he traveled to the grounds
02:10for the first time. And so I think there is a certain amount of searches related to former
02:15President Trump that during that period we're seeing, consistent with some kind of planning
02:23or reconnaissance, if you want to call it that, in advance of the rally. But that's sort of
02:28confined to that, or concentrated, maybe is a better word, in that shooting.
02:35Can you speak to the conveyance of the gun? This is a 20-year-old young man. His father
02:40owned the gun originally. AR-15, am I correct? AR-style, yeah. 20-year-old man. When did the
02:47father sell the gun to him? And what documents do you have? How much money transpired? What date?
02:52Yeah, I do know that, I'd say I know, we believe based on what we've seen that his father,
02:59after purchasing the gun legally, sold the gun to his son. I don't know that I have the date
03:05of that transfer or the amount of the transfer, although we may be able to get that
03:09to you as a follow-up. I just don't have it in front of me. Do you know when the father bought it?
03:15We know. I don't, as I'm sitting here testifying in front of you, I don't have that in front of
03:19me, so I don't have it at my fingertips. I'm just wondering if it's proximate to this event.
03:25I do not believe that the gun was purchased, that is the gun that was used. I do not believe
03:31it was purchased particularly close in time to the shooting, but how far in advance. It may have
03:38been a year before, give or take, but again, we'll go back and double-check that on you. I do know
03:45that on the day of the shooting, at about 1.30 p.m., he bought 50 rounds of ammunition.
03:58So, if you think about the day of, or if you back up a little bit, so the day before he goes
04:04to the shooting range, the day of he goes to the grounds the morning of the event for, I think,
04:12around an hour. He buys the ammunition at around 1.30. At around 3.50 is when he's back on the
04:24grounds of the rally, and that's when he used the drone that I've talked about already today.
04:32And then, of course, fast forward until just after 6 o'clock when the worst happened.
04:40And we had thought maybe over the weekend there was a conversation around a classified briefing
04:44for members. I hope that will happen as soon as it's feasible for you and for the other
04:51agencies involved. And he got off eight shots, and the reporting is that that was
04:57in under six seconds. He got off eight shots, fatal to one. My question that I'll leave you
05:04with, and I know I'm over time, Mr. Chairman, is we all decry political violence. We decry any
05:10violence, but we decry the rise in political violence. What can you tell us that we could
05:16do better? What do you need for you to be able to help this country reduce the political violence
05:24tendencies? I think this is a moment where, in the most stark way possible, all of us as Americans
05:39can see how out of control political violence is in this country, and it's an opportunity for
05:47everybody to come together and to try to show that this is not the kind of thing we're going
05:52to tolerate in this country. The FBI's role is to focus on violence and threats of violence,
06:00but there is a role for others in the public square to address how people communicate in
06:06this country. And every day in our jobs, we see in social media in terms of threats that people
06:15are—we get, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of tips
06:20reported to us, and the language that's out there is just mind-bogglingly hateful and violent-sounding.
06:33People sometimes, as figures of speech, use expressions that are very violent expressions,
06:42and so that is a part of it. We can all do better in kind of being a little more thoughtful and
06:48measured in our language, but again, the FBI's—we've got to stay in our lane. Our lane is the
06:53violence and the threats of violence. There's a role for everybody as Americans to try to see if
06:57we can take the temperature down.
06:59Great. Thank you, and thank you for the extra time.