Gunman in Trump assassination attempt saw rally as ‘target of opportunity,’ says FBI official

FBI reveals detailed attack planning in assassination attempt on Trump, motive still unknown, extensive online searches conducted.

The gunman in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump searched online for events of both Mr. Trump and President Joe Biden, 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,” a senior FBI official said on Wednesday (August 28, 2024)

Investigators who have conducted nearly 1,000 interviews do not yet have a motive for why 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at Mr. Trump during a July campaign rally but they believe that he conducted "extensive attack planning," including looking up campaign events involving both the current President and former President, particularly in western Pennsylvania.

The FBI analysis of his online search history reveals a “sustained, detailed effort to plan an attack on some event, meaning he looked at any number of events or targets,” Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Pittsburgh field office, told reporters on Wednesday (August 28, 2024) in the latest in a series of briefings on the investigation.

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. Crooks' internet searches in the days leading up to the rally included queries about the grounds where the rally was held, “Where will Trump speak from at Butler Farm Show?” “Butler Farm Show podium" and ”Butler Farm Show photos."

In the 30 days before the attack, the FBI says, Crooks did more than 60 internet searches related to Mr. Biden and Mr. 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 an apparent 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.