The FBI offered the press on Monday a few more pieces of the Thomas Crooks puzzle, the 20-year-old who nearly assassinated former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago. It is, however, a puzzle that is still far from complete.
In preparing for his attempted assassination, Crooks searched the Internet for information about power plants, mass shootings and the attempted assassination of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico last May, in which the politician was seriously wounded. These new details, shared in a call with reporters by Kevin Rojek, head of the FBI office in Pittsburgh, the nearest major city to the site of the attack, lead investigators to believe that he prepared the attack thoroughly and well in advance, yet managed to avoid raising suspicions among his family members. There are still no convincing conclusions about the motive of the perpetrator of the attack, although it is almost certain that Crooks acted alone, without the help of anyone.
Rojek also said on Monday that the agency had summoned Trump for an interview to clarify what happened on July 13, just 10 minutes into one of his mass rallies. The Republican candidate was slightly injured in the right ear, one of his supporters, a former volunteer firefighter named Corey Comperatore, died, and two others were seriously injured.[La de Trump] “It will be a standard interview, the same one we would do with any other victim of a crime,” Rojek promised.
On Monday, it was also revealed that officers on the ground had been aware of Crooks’ existence earlier than previously reported, which raised suspicions of a local security forces sniper. The man had just finished his shift, but before leaving, he shared his suspicions with his colleagues, in a message at 4:26 p.m., 100 minutes before the attack, according to the report. The New York Times.After that, the suspect vanished.
The FBI on Friday settled the debate over what caused Trump’s injuries. It was not a shrapnel, but one of the eight bullets Crooks had time to fire before he was killed by Secret Service snipers. The bullet grazed the former president’s ear, and was therefore 0.6 centimeters from hitting the candidate’s head.
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In preparing for the attack, Crooks used aliases on different websites and encrypted means of communication. Hidden behind these digital veils, he purchased firearms supplies and materials to build explosives. Agents found two of these explosives, with their detonators disconnected, in the trunk of the car in which the young man covered the 80 kilometers that Saturday between his home in Bethel Park, also in Pennsylvania, and the farm where Trump held his outdoor rally.
Crooks climbed onto the roof of an industrial warehouse and was able to comfortably take aim at his target, some 150 yards away. An embarrassing series of security lapses allowed him to act as he pleased. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her post on Tuesday, a day after appearing before a Capitol Hill committee where she was scathingly criticized by lawmakers from both parties who called for her resignation. On that day, Cheatle called what happened “the agency’s most serious operational failure in decades.”
An “extremely intelligent” young man
On Wednesday, it was the FBI director’s turn on Capitol Hill, who offered more new information than Cheatle to congressmen and fueled suspicions about what caused the wound to Trump’s ear. Among other things, he said that Crooks searched the Internet for information about the distance from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed John Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Rojek, who said his conclusions came from 450 interviews, returned to that detail on Monday, describing the attacker as “extremely intelligent” and solitary. “It gives the impression that his social circle was limited to his immediate family. He was very aware that he had made very few friends and relationships throughout his life,” he said. That tendency to seclusion is making it difficult, he added, to decipher his motives.
Once at the rally site, Crooks, according to the FBI, climbed up using air conditioning equipment to climb onto the roof of one of the buildings that were outside the security space, a space that was clearly stingy and irresponsibly designed. From there, he went from roof to roof until he settled on the watchtower from which he fired.
The man had arrived at the scene at 11 a.m. (local time), seven hours before Trump began speaking. He spent some time there, preparing the ground, and returned to the house where he lived with his parents, to whom he lied, saying that he was going out again because he planned to spend Saturday afternoon at a shooting range. The weapon he used was a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, bought by the parents a decade earlier, to feel more protected after hearing the news of the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown (Connecticut), in which a shooter killed 28 people in an elementary school. Last year, the father transferred ownership of the weapon to his son.
At about 3:45 p.m., Crooks was back at Butler’s farm, where supporters were already lining up to greet Trump. For about 10 minutes, he flew a drone over the area to scout it out. It was then that a local police officer noticed him. He took a photo, which he shared with the Secret Service, before the shooter left the scene again. Why the authorities decided to go ahead with plans to hold the rally knowing that there was a suspect, identified and then lost in the crowd, is another piece that is still missing to complete the puzzle of what happened that day. A day in which a solitary boy resurrected the worst ghosts in the history of political violence in the United States.
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