00:00Why did Thomas Crooks try to kill former President Trump?
00:03The answer still isn't clear, but it doesn't look like Crooks was a hardcore partisan.
00:07Fox News reports that U.S. Senators received a briefing on Crooks on Wednesday.
00:11The briefing revealed that prior to the shooting, Crooks, who was 20 years old,
00:15wrote a post on the gaming platform Steam that read,
00:18"'July 13th will be my premiere. Watch as it unfolds.'"
00:22But the briefing also indicated that so far,
00:24there wasn't evidence that he was operating out of any particular ideology.
00:28His laptop contained searches related to Trump's July 13th rally,
00:31but also to President Biden and the Democratic National Convention.
00:34These details are just as mystifying as earlier reports that Crooks was a registered Republican,
00:39but had also donated $15 to a Democratic Political Action Committee in 2021.
00:44According to the AP, some of Crooks' high school classmates remembered him as a quiet loner,
00:48but not in a way that raised alarms at the time.
00:51So while this attack may not have been a product of political extremism,
00:54the absence of that motivation just makes the mystery of Crooks' behavior
00:58that much more unsettling.
00:59John Cohen, former head of intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security,
01:03told ABC News,
01:04"'Likely, it was a combination of mental health issues, ideological beliefs,
01:08and a sense of personal grievance,
01:10the same combination of factors present in almost every school shooting
01:13and mass casualty attack over the past several years.'"
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