The gunman who tried to kill former president Donald Trump conducted internet searches related to power plants, mass shooting events and the attempted assassination this year of Slovakia’s prime minister, FBI officials said Monday, offering new details about what they described as the gunman’s “careful planning” for the attack.
The details, including Thomas Matthew Crooks’s interest in the attempted killing of Prime Minister Robert Fico, were released as agents continue to unpack data pulled from the gunman’s cellphones, laptop and other digital devices. Fico was shot and gravely wounded in Slovakia in May.
In a call with reporters on Monday, FBI officials said Trump has agreed to an FBI interview about the assassination attempt against him at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
“We want to get his perspective as to what he observed,” said Kevin Rojek, who heads the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, which is leading the investigation. “It is a standard interview we would do for any other victim of crime.”
Crooks’s motive for the shooting is still unclear, FBI officials said, and they have not yet found evidence tying any other people to the attack. The officials said they plan to continue searching through the gunman’s phones and his gaming and social media accounts to identify a possible motive or any indication that he may have worked with an accomplice.
He used aliases and at least some encrypted communication accounts to purchase firearm supplies and materials to build explosive devices, the officials said.
Trump was speaking at an outdoor rally when Crooks, 20, opened fire from a rooftop just outside the security perimeter. The gunman fired at least eight shots, killing one person in the crowd, critically injuring two others and wounding Trump before being killed by a Secret Service sniper.
The FBI said last week that a bullet or bullet fragment grazed the former president’s ear.
Investigators found two explosive devices in Crooks’s car parked at the rally site. The devices were capable of explosions, but both were in the “off” position when they were found, the officials said Monday.
Agents have conducted more than 450 interviews, including with Crooks’s parents, who did not seem to have any indication of the attack before it occurred and have been cooperating with authorities, officials said.
“We believe the suspect made significant efforts to conceal his activities,” Rojek said.
While the FBI has focused primarily on the shooter and his actions before the attempted assassination, multiple additional investigations are focused on the security failures that allowed a man with a rifle to obtain a perch from which to shoot at the president from about 150 yards away.
Rojek said the gunman climbed heating and cooling equipment near one building to get onto the roof, then traversed multiple other roofs before settling on the spot from which he would launch the attack.
Investigators have tried to reconstruct the gunman’s activities leading up to the early-evening attack. They said he drove to the rally around 11 a.m. and spent about an hour there before driving back home, about 50 miles away.
Later that day, he told his parents he was going to a shooting range, but actually drove back to the rally site. He arrived at around 3:45 p.m. and flew his drone around the site for about 10 minutes, officials said. Because there was no memory card in the drone, investigators could not determine what information about the site’s security the gunman gleaned from it, officials said.
He left the rally site for about an hour before returning to get in position for his eventual attack, officials said. He carried a backpack and an AR-style weapon with a collapsible stock, an enhancement to weapons that makes them more compact.
Officials said they are still determining how he was able to conceal the weapon at the rally.
The gunman was a “highly intelligent” man who attended college and maintained steady employment, officials said. They indicated that they have struggled to identify much about him or his potential motive in part because he didn’t have many friends.
His social circle mostly consisted of his immediate family, officials said. The family owned more than a dozen firearms, and the younger Crooks became interested in firearms as a hobby years ago. That hobby transformed into more formal shooting training and lessons in September 2023, according to officials.
His father, who originally bought the gun used in the attack in 2013, legally transferred ownership of the weapon to his son last year.
“We believe he had few friends and acquaintances throughout his life,” Rojek said.
Separately, aides to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Monday shared texts among law enforcement officers who were helping with security that day, showing they had noticed and were concerned about thesuspect eventhough he was not seen with a weapon until moments before the attack.
Almost two hours before the gunman began firing, a local law enforcement official texted colleagues that he had seen a young man at a picnic table where he was able towatch counter-snipers on a roof. “He knows you guys are up there,” the law enforcement officer texted.
About an hour later, roughly a half-hour before the shooting, anotherlaw enforcement officer texted others about his concerns, saying there was someone with “a range finder looking towards stage.”
“FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him,” the officer texted, referring to the Secret Service.
The text exchanges were reported Sunday by the New York Times and ABC News.
FBI officials are not investigating to what extent there were failures in the security provided for the event, but they have noted that in the earlier sightings of Crooks that day, no one reported seeing him with a weapon.
That didn’t happen until a local police officer was hoisted up to peer at the roof where the gunman was and saw him holding a rifle. The officer dropped down because he did not have a hand free to draw his own weapon, Butler County Sheriff Michael T. Slupe told The Post earlier this month.
About 30 seconds after that encounter, the gunman opened fire, FBI officials said Monday.
Samuel Oakford contributed to this report.
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Publish date : 2024-07-29 14:14:22
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