The young man who tried to kill Donald Trump mounted a “sustained and detailed effort” to attack a major meeting of some kind before settling on the presidential candidate Republican at a rally in Pennsylvania in July, FBI officials said Wednesday.
FBI officials said that Thomas Crooks, 20, searched for information about the former president more than 60 times and his then rival, the Democratic president Joe Bidenbefore registering for the rally Trump in early July.
“We saw … a sustained and detailed effort to plan an attack across a number of events, meaning he looked at multiple events or targets,” Kevin Rojek, the FBI’s top official in western Pennsylvania, said in a telephone briefing with reporters.
Rojek said Crooks was “hyperfocused” on the Trump rally when it was announced in early July “and looked at it as a target of opportunity.”
He also said that The FBI has not yet been able to determine what motivated Crooks to attempt to assassinate Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.
Crooks’s computer activity indicated he was interested in a mix of ideologies, but did not definitively show he was motivated by a particular left- or right-wing viewpoint, he added.
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Officials of the FBI They said they had found no evidence to suggest Crooks worked with others or was directed by a foreign power.
There were no traces of illicit drugs or alcohol in his system.
He attempted murder raised questions about how Crooks was able to scale a nearby building and shoot the former president eight times before being shot dead by a Secret Service sniper. Several congressional and government investigations are looking into the security measures at the event.
The FBI, for its part, is investigating Crooks himself. Officials said they had gained some insight into his mindset, though they did not yet know what motivated him.
Crooks sought out Trump campaign events as early as September 2023, FBI officials said, and began searching in April for campaign events for both candidates near where he lived in western Pennsylvania.
He also looked up the dates of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions, they said.
In the days leading up to the July 13 rally, he sought information about the venue, including where Trump would speak and details of the company that owned a nearby building where he would later hold the speech. eight shotsone of which grazed Trump’s ear. Video evidence shows that Crooks was only on the roof of the building for about six minutes.
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Crooks, who left several explosive devices in his car, had been seeking information on bomb components as early as 2019.