Biden: ‘We must unite as one nation’

Julian E. Barnes, Michael Gold and Simon J. Levien / © 2024 The New York Times Company

Senior FBI officials said Sunday that agents were investigating the shooting at a rally for former President Donald Trump as a possible domestic terrorism attack and assassination attempt.

The officials said that they had found no indication that the 20-year-old gunman, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was part of any larger plot and that their top priority was determining his motive. The shooting, in Pennsylvania on Saturday, killed one man at the rally, injured Trump and critically wounded two other people. The shooter was killed by Secret Service snipers.

Trump said on social media that a bullet had pierced his right ear. He was able to walk off his plane unaided when it landed in New Jersey hours later.

The FBI officials said they had not uncovered evidence that the shooter had mental health issues, and said his phone, rifle and a possible “rudimentary” explosive device found among his possessions had been sent to the bureau’s lab in Quantico, Virginia. The family was cooperating with the investigation, the FBI said.

The assassination attempt plunged the 2024 presidential race into shock and uncertainty. Trump was set to be formally nominated at the Republican National Convention, beginning in Milwaukee on Monday. His campaign and RNC officials said in a statement that the convention would proceed as planned, and Trump said early Sunday that he looked forward to speaking to the nation from Wisconsin.

Trump, who said he planned to travel to Milwaukee on Sunday afternoon, vowed to remain “defiant in the face of wickedness.”

In brief remarks to the nation from the White House on Sunday afternoon, President Joe Biden called the assassination attempt “contrary to everything we stand for us as a nation, everything. It’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not American. And we cannot allow this to happen.”

Biden said he had demanded a national security review and promised to share the results with the American people. He also said he had directed the Secret Service to review security arrangements for the Republican convention and pledged that the Secret Service would give Trump “every resource capability and protective measure necessary to ensure his continued safety.”

“We must unite as one nation,” Biden said. “We must unite as one nation to demonstrate who we are.”

Here’s what we know:

Oval Office address: Biden is scheduled to speak to the nation in an Oval Office address at 8 p.m. Sunday. He also still plans to sit for a previously scheduled interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday, and to travel to Las Vegas on Tuesday for an official — not campaign — speech at an NAACP convention.

The victims: The spectator killed at the Trump rally was Corey Comperatore, said Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. He was 50, according to a post on Facebook by Comperatore’s sister. The two other victims, who remained hospitalized Sunday, were David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, Pennsylvania.

Rally security: There were four counter-sniper teams covering the rally, two from the Secret Service and two from local police agencies, the Secret Service’s spokesperson, Anthony Gugliemi, said. The building where the gunman fired from was outside of the rally’s designated perimeter, he said, so it was secured by local law enforcement officers. The Secret Service believes those officers responded to an alert of a threat but lost sight of the man they were chasing, who then jumped on the roof and quickly started shooting.

The gun: FBI officials confirmed that the gunman’s father had purchased the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle found by his body — a type of weapon common to many mass shootings — but said that it was not clear if the father gave the weapon to his son or if it was taken without permission. A New York Times analysis of videos from the event suggests that he fired eight shots from a small building a few hundred feet from the stage where Trump was speaking.

The response: The shooting recalled assassinations that roiled U.S. presidential campaigns in the 1960s and early 1970s. It prompted condemnations from Biden, other world leaders and politicians from both major U.S. political parties — along with a flood of unsubstantiated claims on social media. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability said it would investigate and asked Kimberly A. Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, to testify July 22. Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, issued a statement calling the shooter a “monster” and urging Americans to remember their commonalities, saying, “Beyond the red and the blue, we all come from families with the passion to fight for a better life together.”

Firsthand accounts: Times journalists were at the rally. A reporter and a photographer each described their experience. One image by the photographer, Doug Mills, appeared to capture a bullet streaking past Donald Trump’s head.

Campaign security: Trump’s campaign managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, sent a memo to staff members telling them to avoid their offices while they were being assessed for security. In the memo, which was viewed by the Times, they urged staff not to comment publicly on the shooting and said they “will not tolerate dangerous rhetoric on social media.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.