Why Was Crooks' Cellphone At/Near FBI Office In DC In 2023?

A cell phone associated with the home and work addresses of the assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, visited the Gallery Place building in Washington, DC, that houses offices of the FBI, the Heritage Oversight Project reported last week. This FBI office is about 240 miles from Crooks’ home.

The Oversight Project, part of the Heritage Foundation, began a geo-location investigation hours after the July 13 attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump at a fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania which killed one man and seriously wounded two men.

“We began this investigation on the night of the shooting,” an Oversight Project spokesman told Blaze News. “We’ve been working 24/7 since then.”

BEGS THE QUESTION: WAS CROOKS WORKING WITH FBI TO KILL TRUMP?

According to Oversight investigators, a phone associated with Crooks’ work address at a nursing home in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, traveled to the Gallery Place complex in downtown Washington, DC, on June 26, 2023. The phone “pinged” seven or eight times from that location the same day.

Gallery Place, an 11-story mixed-use building constructed over the Chinatown Metro station, is filled with retail stores and restaurants but also houses offices of the FBI on the upper floors, former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin told Blaze News. "It is the closest [location] off-site that I'm aware of to the Washington Field Office," Seraphin said. "Agents are assigned to Washington Field, but they work out of Gallery Place."

Investigators said they found at least nine devices associated with Crooks’ home and work addresses in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Geo-location investigation shows a phone associated with Thomas Crooks visited Butler, Pennsylvania, 55 miles from his home and work addresses, twice just days before the shooting. Those trips took place on July 4 and July 8, 2024, the Oversight Project reported. That phone ceased all activity on July 12.

The Oversight Project believes at least two of the nine phones belonged to Crooks himself. A cell phone was found under Crooks’ body after he was killed by a counter-sniper July 13. The device also stopped at a Home Depot in Butler, they said. A report from US Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Crooks purchased a 5.5-foot double ladder at a Home Depot just after 9:30 a.m. on the day of the shooting. Investigators do not believe Crooks used the ladder to access the roof just north of the fairground.

COINCIDENCE? WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

Oversight Project leaders said they hope other experts in the fields of geo-location searches and criminal investigations will step forward to assist with their probe. The investigation was begun out of concern that the work of the FBI, Secret Service, and other federal law enforcement won’t be transparent or thorough.

Geo-location technology uses a unique ID assigned to each cell phone and searches for common places where the phone and its user travel. Investigators used Crooks’ home and work addresses to find cell phones that were common to both addresses, then triangulated each phone’s paths of travel. They used commercially available phone-identification numbers that are normally used to tailor advertising to the phone’s user.

“Every device has an ad ID. It’s kind of like a Social Security number for your cell phone,” said a spokesman for the Oversight Project. “It's unique and it identifies the phone. You can't erase it. You can refresh and get a new one, but you only have one ID per phone.”

WHY DID CROOKS TRAVEL TO BOSTON?

Another device associated with Crooks took a flight from Pittsburgh to Logan International Airport in Boston on March 1, then went to a hotel in Plymouth Harbor, Mass. The device returned to Pittsburgh on March 4. A phone device linked to Crooks also visited the Allegheny Arms & Gun Works in Bethel Park on August 30, 2023, the report said.

The devices linked to Crooks’ home and work addresses also visited various spots in Bethel Park, including the YMCA, a building that houses a karate school and a laundromat, a garden center, a golf course, and a Planet Fitness, the report said.

“We are willing to cooperate with legitimate investigations and share further information,” Oversight Project Director Mike Howell wrote on X.

“For the protection of whistleblowers and our investigation, we will not be sharing further information with the congressional task force due to the connective tissue between that entity and FBI, USSS and other entities,” Howell wrote.