The young man who tried to kill Donald Trump mounted a “sustained and detailed effort” to attack a major gathering of some kind before settling on the Republican presidential nominee at a rally in Pennsylvania in July, FBI officials said Wednesday.
FBI officials said Thomas Crooks, 20, searched for information about the former president and his then-rival, Democratic President Joe Biden, more than 60 times before registering for Trump’s rally 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 Trump’s rally when it was announced in early July “and looked at it as a target of opportunity.”
He also said the FBI has not yet been able to determine what motivated Crooks to try 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.
FBI officials said they had found no evidence to suggest Crooks worked with anyone else or was directed by a foreign power.
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