The FBI has still not determined what motivated a gunman to try to assassinate former president Donald Trump at a July campaign rally in Pennsylvania, officials with the federal law enforcement agency said on a call with reporters Wednesday.
Federal officials sifted through five years’ worth of online activity by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks and said they found no credible evidence that a foreign entity directed him to carry out the attack. Nor did they find credible material indicating that he worked with a co-conspirator.
Investigators also found no consistent political focus for the shooter, saying they determined that Crooks made more than 60 online searches about Trump and President Joe Biden in the month before the attack.
Crooks’s online activity indicates “a mixture of ideologies,” said Kevin P. Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office. “We see no definitive ideology associated with our subject, either left-leaning or right-leaning.”
The gunman’s online history shows he sought information about both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention and researched logistics about Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, officials said. They stressed that the investigation is ongoing and that they continue to pursue leads regarding the gunman and any possible associates.
Crooks attempted to shoot Trump while the Republican presidential candidate was speaking at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13.
He opened fire from a rooftop just outside the security perimeter of the campaign rally. The gunman fired at least eight shots, killing one person in the crowd, critically injuring two others and wounding Trump’s ear, before being killed by a Secret Service sniper.
Officials said Crooks died of a single shot to his head. An autopsy determined that he had no alcohol or illegal drugs in his system at the time of the shooting, officials said.
The FBI officials said they conducted a “productive interview” with Trump as part of the investigation. They characterized the former president as cooperative. They also said Crooks’s parents have been cooperative throughout the investigation, handing over all the information they could to law enforcement.
Law enforcement officials previously said they were focused on Crooks’s online activity as they searched for his motive. They revealed in an earlier briefing that Crooks had searched online “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy,” referring to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
While many expect political motives behind attacks on politicians, a 1997 Secret Service study of American assassins and would-be assassins of public figures found that “attackers and near-lethal approachers of public officials rarely had ‘political’ motives.”
There are multiple investigations into the apparent security lapses that allowed the gunman to shoot at Trump from relatively close range, including how he managed to use an HVAC system to clamber atop an unsecured roof, traverse multiple rooftops and then fire shots during the campaign rally.
