In the 6 days since the attempted Trump assassination, investigators are digging deep

Transcript

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

In the six days since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, federal investigators have tried to piece together what led the 20-year-old gunman to try and kill the former President. At the same time, there's a push to get to the bottom of a massive security failure. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas is covering this. Ryan, information has been trickling out about what investigators have found. What do we know so far?

RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Well, the latest comes from a briefing that members of Congress received on a call with senior FBI and Secret Service officials, and a source who was on that call tells me that the FBI has been combing through the shooter's electronic devices - that includes a laptop, as well as two cellphones, one primary phone and then a second cell that was found at his home - and that work has yielded some new information. I'm told that the shooter, Thomas Crooks, had saved images of President Biden, former President Trump, but also photos of the attorney general, of the FBI director, as well as the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton. He also had searched for dates of Trump's speaking events and dates of the Democratic National Convention, which is in Chicago in August. One other search term that he looked up is noteworthy here, and that is major depressive disorder, and that's noteworthy because it raises the question of possible mental health issues that he may have been going through.

MARTÍNEZ: Wow, OK. Now, is there anything new that might answer the question of motive, like why he tried to assassinate Trump?

LUCAS: You know, that is the big question here, and unfortunately, no, there is nothing that would answer the question of why he did this. The FBI and Secret Service officials say that when investigators searched Crooks' home, they didn't find anything there that pointed to a political ideology, and that's unusual in this case - or unusual in a case like this, that is. They said normally, they would expect to find some sort of marker of political thinking in a domestic terrorism case. People who knew Crooks have told investigators that he didn't really talk about politics all that much.

Now, we know that the gun Crooks used in the shooting was legally purchased. It was purchased by his father. The FBI has said as much publicly. Now, his father told investigators that it was his understanding on Saturday that Crooks was taking the gun and going to the shooting range with it, and we know that he belonged to a shooting range. Now, we knew investigators also had found explosive devices in Crooks' car. I'm now told that the two devices in that car that were found had radio controls to detonate them remotely, and that investigators found a transmitter on Crooks' body on the roof where he was killed.

MARTÍNEZ: OK. Now, that one piece of this investigation is obviously what we've talked about - the shooter. The other big piece is how a shooter was able to get in a position with an actual sight-line on Trump.

LUCAS: That is a huge question going forward. It's one that lawmakers certainly have questions about. It was a failure on the Secret Service's part. There's also questions about local law enforcement. One thing that came out of that congressional briefing is that the Secret Service knew about a threat to Trump before he took the stage at that rally in Butler, Pa. Now, that is according to Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, who posted that on X after the briefing. So there are still a lot of questions about what the Secret Service's plan was to secure that rally in Butler, and then what, of course, went wrong - how the shooter was able, as you said, to get onto a roof with a clear line of sight on the former president.

Now, there are a number of investigations that have been announced to look into what went wrong. President Biden, of course, has ordered an independent review. The Department of Homeland Security inspector general has said that they're going to take a look at it. House Speaker Mike Johnson, as well, has said that he's setting up a task force, but all of those investigations could take a lot of time. We're talking weeks, months. The public, though, could get at least some details on Monday, and that's because the director of the Secret Service has been subpoenaed to appear in public for a hearing before the House Oversight Committee.

MARTÍNEZ: All right. That's NPR's Ryan Lucas. Ryan, thank you very much for bringing us up to date on this.

LUCAS: Thank you.

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