After sifting through five years’ worth of online activity by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks -- who tried to assassinate Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump at a July campaign rally in Pennsylvania -- the American investigators found that the gunman did not display a consistent political focus and had researched campaign events of both the former President as well as President Joe Biden. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said investigators conducted nearly 1,000 interviews but were not able to find yet what motivated Crooks to try to assassinate Trump.
Officials also released photos of the gunman’s rifle and backpack, and homemade bombs found in his car trunk, according to a report by Associated Press. Trump was struck in the ear by a "bullet or a bullet fragment" in the assassination attempt on July 13. A rallygoer was killed and several others injured after Crooks fired eight shots from an AR-style rifle.
As per the report, the federal investigators said that during the probe it was found that the would-be assassin looked up information about explosives over the last five years and eyed the Pennsylvania campaign rally, where he opened fire last month, as a “target of opportunity".
Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, told reporters Wednesday that Investigators believe Crooks conducted “extensive attack planning,” including looking up campaign events involving both the current president and former president, particularly in western Pennsylvania.
Once a Trump rally was announced for July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, “he became hyper-focused on that specific event and looked at it as a target of opportunity,” Rojek said, as per the AP report.
As per the FBI, In the 30 days before the attack, the gunman did more than 60 internet searches related to Biden and Trump, leading up to queries about the grounds where the rally was held.
According to Bobby Wells, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, investigators have a “clearer idea of mindset” but that “at this time, the FBI has not identified a motive, nor any co-conspirators or associates of Crooks with advanced knowledge of the attack.”
Investigators also stressed that “we have not seen any indication that Crooks was directed by a foreign entity.”
Earlier, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that one week before the shooting, the gunman searched “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” That’s an apparent reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
This adds up to the emerging portrait of Crooks as a "highly intelligent" and "reclusive man" who had taken an eerie interest in explosives, violence and prominent public figures in the years before the shooting, the FBI said.
but whose internet searches of Democrats and Republicans alike have frustrated efforts to assign a simple political motive or to establish why Trump himself would have been targeted.
Crooks, who was positioned on the roof of a building less than 150 yards away, was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper after he opened fire at Trump's Pennsylvania rally.