FBI Cracks Phone of Man Who Shot Trump

Who Was Phone

It took a few days, but the FBI has finally cracked the phone of the now-deceased 20-year-old man who wounded Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania rally over the weekend.

In a press release, the bureau said that it had "successfully gained access" to the phone that belonged to would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, a one-time nursing aide who was shot and killed by Secret Service agents moments after his attempt on the former president's life.

While it remains unclear how the FBI got into Crooks' phone, the agency's first statement after the shooting acknowledged that "suspicious devices" found in his home and car had been sent to the FBI Laboratory for processing.

Despite ample misinformation and rumor mill churn, there's not all that much known about Crooks besides what he did for a living, that he was a registered Republican, and that he'd once donated $15 to a progressive cause on ActBlue.

Those few facts paint a disparate picture of a youthful shooter who had never been old enough to vote for president — and who now never will.

Prior Battles

While the drama surrounding Crooks himself continues to play out, it seems there is far less back-and-forth surrounding his digital privacy than we've seen with those who committed political violence in recent years.

As we learned after the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting, for example, Apple CEO Tim Cook went toe-to-toe with the FBI and refused to unlock an iPhone that belonged to one of the then-suspected shooters. That refusal resulted in a drawn-out battle that ultimately became moot when a mysterious Australian hacking firm known as Azimuth did the feds' dirty work — and ended up, in turn, getting sued by the FBI.

In the near-decade since San Bernardino, there was a single additional instance when Apple refused FBI requests to unlock a terror suspect's phone, but for the most part, we've not heard of CEOs choosing to hold their ground on encryption the way Cook did back at the end of 2015.

We don't know, of course, whether Crooks even owned an iPhone or how the FBI gained access to his handset — but at this stage, it doesn't seem like breaching encryption was any trouble.

More on the would-be assassination: Elon Musk Says People Have Tried to Kill Him, Muses About Building "Flying Metal Suit of Armor" as Defense