A month ago, former President Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man, fired eight shots from a building near the rally, killing a Trump supporter. One of the bullets grazed the Republican candidate’s right ear, narrowly missing his head.
Despite the seriousness of the case, a month later the motives for the attack remain unclear and the American press has been talking less and less about the subject. Most of the news on the subject is from three or four weeks ago. In the few recent reports, there are more uncertainties than answers about the motive for the attack.
“A month since the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, many questions remain unanswered — perhaps the biggest of which is how a gunman was able to access a rooftop with a direct line of sight to the former president,” stated the portal US News on the day that the attack was one month old.
The day before, the newspaper New York Times heard from Republican Rep. Mike Kellyof Pennsylvania, who was in the audience with his family on the day of the attack and who has been named chairman of a bipartisan congressional task force to find answers about what happened on July 13. “We don’t know a lot about Crooks. I want to know more about ‘Who is this person?’ Because we don’t have solid facts, conspiracy theories continue to thrive,” he said.
Last week, the ABC News brought a report showing that the shooter had visited a gun club dozens of times in the year before the attack, concluding with the information that “FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, said to a Senate panel last month that the investigation remains focused on motive, identifying possible co-conspirators and building the timeline of the shooter’s actions.”
FBI no details
The lack of in-depth details about the 20-year-old criminal is another critical point in this story. The FBI has yet to reveal concretely what the shooter’s real motivation was or information about the alleged involvement of other people in the case, stating only that Crooks may have chosen Trump “at random” since he was researching several Republican and Democratic politicians.
In a meeting with Trump earlier this month, FBI investigators offered only the coldest of information, such as that Crooks was an extremely intelligent person, a high achiever in school, and that he might suffer from some “mental disorder” that has not yet been diagnosed.
Investigators also told Trump they had reviewed three foreign email accounts associated with Crooks but found only information about gun and ammunition purchases, nothing related to a specific motivation or involvement of others.
Iranian conspiracy
Days after the attack, the American newspaper Political, released information that US intelligence had received increasing information about a possible Iranian plot to assassinate Trumpin retaliation for the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020. Despite this news, US officials in charge of the case have not made any connection between Crooks’ attack and Iran.
Recently, Trump’s campaign was the target of a hacker attack, which raised suspicions among Republicans of an attack by the Iranians, who were already trying to interfere in the American elections.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung went as far as to say that “the Iranians know that President Trump [caso volte à presidência] will end his reign of terror, just as he did in his first four years in the White House.”
Security flaws
In addition to the problems surrounding the course of the investigation, the attempted assassination of Trump revealed significant flaws that currently exist in US security.
According to information that emerged after the Butler attack, The Secret Service had already identified Crooks as a threat approximately an hour before the shooting, however, the agents lost sight of the criminal. Additional information also indicated that a sniper, who was assisting the Secret Service, recorded Crooks’ presence on the roof of the building from which he carried out the shooting 20 minutes before the attack, but no concrete action was taken to prevent the act.
In late July, Trump’s team reported that the attack may also be the target of a boycott campaign promoted by Google. According to the allegations, Google, for a time, did not suggest phrases related to the assassination attempt against Trump in its search engine. Members of the Republican Party and allies of Trump, including his son, Donald Trump Jr., accused the American company of trying to interfere in the election by suppressing information about the attack. Trump Jr. said that “Google’s intentional interference is truly reprehensible.”
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