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Motive Remains Unclear in FBI Review of Trump Assassination Try


The FBI has not found evidence of a political motive or the involvement of others in the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump by a 20-year-old shooter who died at the scene of the July incident, the Associated Press reports. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, conducted “extensive attack planning,” the FBI said, including looking up campaign events involving both Trump and President Joe Biden, particularly in western Pennsylvania. He also had gathered information on explosives for the past five years. Once a Trump rally was announced for July 13 in Butler, Pa., “He became hyper-focused on that specific event and looked at it as a target of opportunity,” said Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office.


In the 30 days before the attack, the FBI says, Crooks did more than 60 internet searches related to Biden and Trump, including seeking the dates of both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. FBI Director Christopher Wray has previously revealed that one week before the shooting, Crooks did a Google search for “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” That’s a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. The new details add to an emerging portrait of Crooks as a highly intelligent and reclusive man who investigators say in the years before the shooting had taken an eerie interest in explosives, violence and prominent public figures 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. “We have a clear idea of mindset, but we are not ready to make any conclusive statements regarding motive at this time,” Rojek said.

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