Phone associated with would-be assassin pinged near FBI DC offices in 2023, report says

A cell phone associated with the home and work addresses of would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks visited the Gallery Place building in Washington, D.C., that houses a mall and offices of the FBI, the Heritage Oversight Project reported July 22.

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.

Crooks, 20, was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper after opening fire on Trump and the crowd just after 6:11 p.m. ET. Only a perfectly timed turn of his head kept Trump from being killed instantly by a rifle round fired from about 130 yards away, experts said.

The shooting took the life of retired fire chief Corey Comperatore of Sarver, Pennsylvania, and seriously wounded David Dutch of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver of Moon Township, Pennsylvania.

“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.”

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.

Washington, D.C., 'is the only town in America that you can be so bad at your job that you actually get a promotion or don't get fired.'

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.

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, D.C., 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 at the Oversight Project said the phone associated with that ID number most likely belonged to someone who visited Crooks at his place of work. They said they don’t believe it was Crooks’ phone.

Geo-location technology uses a unique ID assigned to each cell phone and searches for common places where the phone and its user travel.

“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.”

Investigators said they found at least nine devices associated with Crooks’ home and work addresses in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. They believe at least two of those phones belonged to Crooks himself. A cell phone was found under Crooks’ body after he was killed by a counter-sniper July 13.

Based on geo-location data, investigators found a device associated with Crooks that traveled twice from Bethel Park just south of Pittsburgh to Butler, about 55 miles north of Crooks’ home. Those trips took place on July 4 and July 8, 2024, the Oversight Project reported. That phone ceased all activity on July 12.

The device also stopped at a Home Depot in Butler, they said. A report from U.S. 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.

'Maybe when the president wakes up from his nap, he can fire you.'

Investigators theorized that Crooks made trips to surveil the Butler site in advance of the July 13 Trump rally at the Butler Farm Show Inc. fairgrounds.

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 visited the Allegheny Arms & Gun Works in Bethel Park on Aug. 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.

The Oversight Project report will undoubtedly add fuel to an already raging public debate about how a 20-year-old man with little known firearms experience could access the AGR manufacturing complex north of the fairground, climb onto a roof with a perfect line of sight to the podium, and squeeze off a half-dozen or more rifle rounds at a former president before being killed.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) grew so frustrated questioning Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle at a July 22 hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability that she snapped, "You're full of s**t."Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

The frustration at the lack of details coming from the FBI and the Secret Service led to a collective venting of spleens by members of the U.S. House of Representatives at Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle during a July 22 hearing on Capitol Hill.

Cheatle, appointed in September 2022 by President Joe Biden, spent most of the more than four-hour hearing deflecting, deferring to the FBI, or saying she simply didn’t have answers. Both Democrats and Republicans fired barbed questions at her. Many of the committee members demanded that Cheatle resign.

Tempers boiled over at several points in the hearing. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), after not getting answers she wanted from Cheatle, told the Secret Service director, “You’re full of s**t.”

Under questioning by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Cheatle acknowledged that she knew how many shell casings were found near Crooks on the roof of Building 6 but would not share the figure with Congress. Cheatle on numerous occasions told committee members they needed to ask the FBI for those answers.

"I find this rather maddening," Boebert said, "especially knowing that you do have answers from the FBI, who you have been passing the buck to this entire hearing, not answering a congressional hearing, members of Congress, while you are under oath and under a subpoena."

Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.) said Washington, D.C., is "the only town in America that you can be so bad at your job that you actually get a promotion or don't get fired."

After listing a litany of questions Cheatle did not answer, Fry said: "I echo the bipartisan calls of this committee and all across this country that you should resign, or maybe when the president wakes up from his nap, he can fire you."

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