The gunman who tried to kill former president Donald Trump conducted internet searches related to power plants, mass shooting events and the attempted assassination this year of Slovakia’s prime minister, FBI officials said Monday, offering new details about what they described as the gunman’s “careful planning” for the attack.

The details, including about Thomas Matthew Crooks’s interest in the attempted killing of Prime Minister Robert Fico, were released as agents continue to unpack data pulled from the gunman’s cellphones, laptop and other digital devices. Fico was shot and gravely wounded in Slovakia in May.

In a call with reporters on Monday, FBI officials said Trump has agreed to an FBI interview about the assassination attempt against him at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

“We want to get his perspective as to what he observed,” said Kevin Rojek, who heads the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, which is leading the investigation. “It is a standard interview we would do for any other victim of crime.”

Crooks’s motive for the shooting is still unclear, FBI officials said, and they have not yet found evidence tying any other people to the attack. The officials said they plan to continue searching through the gunman’s phones and his gaming and social media accounts to identify a possible motive or any indication that he may have worked with an accomplice.

He used aliases and at least some encrypted communication accounts to purchase firearm supplies and materials to construct explosive devices, the officials said.

Trump was speaking at an outdoor rally when Crooks, 20, opened fire from a rooftop just outside the security perimeter. The gunman fired at least eight shots, killing one person in the crowd, critically injuring two others and wounding Trump before being killed by a Secret Service sniper.

The FBI said last week that a bullet or bullet fragment grazed the former president’s ear.

Investigators discovered two explosive devices in Crooks’s car parked at the rally site. The devices were capable of explosions, but both receivers were in the “off position” when they were found, the officials said Monday.

Agents have conducted more than 450 interviews, including with Crooks’s parents, who did not seem to have any indication of the attack before it occurred and have been cooperating with authorities, officials said.

“We believe the suspect made significant efforts to conceal his activities,” Rojek said.

While the FBI has focused primarily on the shooter and his actions before the attempted assassination, multiple additional investigations are focused on the security failures that allowed a man with a rifle to obtain a perch from which to shoot at the president from about 150 yards away.

Rojek said the gunman used heating and cooling equipment near one building to climb onto the roof, then traversed across multiple other roofs before settling on the spot from which he would launch the attack.

Investigators have attempted to reconstruct the gunman’s activities leading up to the early evening attack. They said he drove to the rally around 11 a.m. and spent about an hour there before driving back home, about 50 miles away.

Later that day, he told his parents he was going to a shooting range, but actually drove back to the rally site. He arrived at around 3:45 p.m. and flew his drone around the site for about 10 minutes, officials said. Because there was no memory card in the drone, investigators could not determine what information about the site’s security the gunman gleaned from it, officials said.

He left the rally site for about an hour before returning to get in position for his eventual attack, officials said. He carried with him a backpack and AR-15 style weapon with a collapsible stock, which is an enhancement to weapons that makes them more compact.

Officials said they are still determining how he was able to conceal the weapon at the rally.

The guman was a “highly intelligent” man who attended college and maintained steady employment, officials said. They indicated that they have struggled to identify much about him or his potential motive, in part because he didn’t have many friends.

His social circle mostly consisted of his immediate family, officials said. The family owned more than a dozen firearms and the younger Crooks became interested in firearms as a hobby years ago. That hobby transformed into more formal shooting training and lessons in September 2023, according to officials.

His father, who originally purchased the gun used in the attack in 2013, legally transferred ownership of the weapon to his son last year.

“We believe he had few friends and acquittances throughout his life,” Rojek said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The early signs last week were that Vice President Harris’s replacement of President Biden as the Democrats’ 2024 standard-bearer appeared to modestly increase Democrats’ hopes of winning.

The evidence since then has only affirmed that. The signs continue to improve for the Democratic ticket — particularly when it comes to Harris’s image.

A long-unpopular vice president has gotten a second look from voters now that the spotlight is trained on her. And at least for now, the polls suggest that Americans are both warming to her and liking her significantly more than they like Biden.

Multiple polls in recent days tell that tale.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll on Sunday showed Harris’s favorable rating at 43 percent. That’s eight points higher than her rating last month, and 11 points higher than Biden’s last month.

A Wall Street Journal poll Friday showed 46 percent of registered voters liked Harris — 11 points higher than her showing almost a month ago, and 12 points higher than Biden’s at that time.

And Fox News polls on Friday in four key Midwestern and Rust Belt states — Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — showed Harris’s favorable rating averaging 49 percent, which is eight points higher than Biden’s current number.

Combine that with earlier CNN and New York Times/Siena College polling, and it all suggests that Harris has increased favorable views of the top of the Democratic ticket by at least the high single digits.

Some of the more interesting findings from those polls:

• The ABC/Ipsos poll is the first quality poll in years to show more Americans viewing her positively (43 percent) than negatively (42 percent), though the difference is well within the margin of error.
• That same poll showed Harris improving by 16 points with independents — from 28 percent favorable in mid-July to 44 percent favorable today.
• The Wall Street Journal poll showed that the percentage who viewed her “very favorably” more than doubled from 15 percent last month to 35 percent now.
• The Fox polls showed Harris’s favorable rating improving on Biden’s by an average 11 points with independents, 11 points with women, 17 points among voters under 35 and 15 points among people of color (though that last number includes only Michigan and Pennsylvania).
• The Times/Siena poll showed her improving on Biden’s early July numbers by six points with non-college Whites, nine points with Black voters, 11 percent with independents, 12 percent with women and 30 points with voters under 30.
• The earlier CNN poll showed somewhat smaller increases vs. Biden in late June — but increases nonetheless. She gained five points with independents, eight points with women, and 12 points among people of color and voters under 35.

Perhaps most striking in the Times/Siena poll is how much Harris appears to have made the Democratic ticket more palatable to less-reliable voters who could defect from the Democrats or sit out the 2024 election.

While just 74 percent of Biden 2020 voters liked him, 88 percent of Biden 2020 voters liked Harris. And the poll showed her being viewed favorably by about twice as many people who didn’t vote in 2020 (46 percent vs. 24 percent) and who currently support a candidate besides her, Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (33 percent vs. 17 percent).

All of which suggests Harris could not only stem the bleeding of Biden’s support, but she could appeal to less-likely voters and claw back some voters who went for left-leaning third-party candidates.

As with all early polling conducted in the days after the Democrats’ switcheroo, it’s worth emphasizing that it’s early. Harris is surely in a honeymoon period that might not last, particularly as attention turns to some of the positions she took during her 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign.

It’s also important to note that, even with the improved image of the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris’s favorable numbers are mostly similar to Trump’s in these polls. Trump appears to have gotten a bit of his own bump after the assassination attempt against him and the Republican National Convention, and he was already generally more popular than he was during his presidency. And the race both nationally and in swing states is very close.

But there’s little question that, at least for now, Harris has put the Democratic ticket back on the map for lots of the most problematic voting groups for Democrats. Democrats looked like they were going to have to win lots of voters who didn’t like Biden and who didn’t seem to have much reason to vote blue, beyond dislike of Trump. Many of those voters today see a more viable option in Harris.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have tapped seven Republican and six Democratic lawmakers to serve on a bipartisan task force investigating the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

All 13 lawmakers have backgrounds and experience relevant to the committee’s role: seeking accountability and answers after a gunman wounded the former president, killed one person and critically injured two others during a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), who represents Butler County and has ties to law enforcement in the area, was appointed to chair the panel. He is joined by Republican Reps. Mark Green (Tenn.), David Joyce (Ohio), Laurel Lee (Fla.), Michael Waltz (Fla.), Clay Higgins (La.) and Pat Fallon (Tex.).

From the other side of the aisle, Rep. Jason Crow (Colo.), a former Army ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was appointed the panel’s ranking Democrat. Democratic Reps. Lou Correa (Calif.), Madeleine Dean (Pa.), Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.), Glenn Ivey (Md.) and Jared Moskowitz (Fla.) are the other members.

“We have the utmost confidence in this bipartisan group of steady, highly qualified, and capable Members of Congress to move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability, and help make certain such failures never happen again,” Johnson and Jeffries said in a joint statement.

They said the task force will have subpoena authority and will assume control over all House committee investigations into the assassination attempt.

In a deeply polarized Congress, similar commissions have seen mixed results in recent years. But so far, lawmakers have demonstrated an unusually serious and cooperative approach toward investigating the attempted assassination of Trump, the former president and 2024 Republican nominee. Republicans protested the last high-profile select committee formed by a Democratic-led House to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Only two Republicans ultimately served on it.

The three primary goals of this panel include understanding the security and communications breakdowns that allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, to open fire from a rooftop that was just outside the security perimeter of the outdoor rally; ensuring accountability; and preventing Secret Service failure going forward. The last shooting at a U.S. leader under Secret Service protection was in 1981, when a gunman fired at President Ronald Reagan as he left a speaking engagement at the Washington Hilton.

Senate lawmakers are set to hold a hearing with acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe and Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate on Tuesday.

In the days since the shooting, lawmakers have been frustrated by the lack of detailed information offered by the Secret Service.

A day after a contentious appearance before the House Oversight Committee last week, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her post. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray offered a more detailed account of the assassination attempt in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, though he also angered some lawmakers by saying Trump was wounded by either a bullet or shrapnel. The bureau later clarified that investigators believe Trump was wounded by either a bullet or a bullet fragment.

Ivey, a former assistant U.S. attorney who serves on two of the House committees that have already launched investigations into the shooting, said the task force will have to quickly collect information from multiple sources to put together a comprehensive account of what happened that day. During a visit to the Butler, Pa., site after the shooting, Ivey said, he found local law enforcement officials and people on the ground who were “more than willing to share their insight.”

A former U.S. government official who has experience with past investigations into major security incidents said that lawmakers should focus on putting together an independent timeline to compare it against the official protection plan crafted by Secret Service ahead of the rally.

That will assist members in determining “whether it was the plan itself that was wrong, whether they gave short shrift to what the envelope of protection looked like or if somebody didn’t do their job — and why,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about sensitive security issues.

Since the assassination attempt, Secret Service officials have encouraged the Trump campaign to avoid large outdoor rallies, The Washington Post reported last week. But Trump over the weekend wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would continue to stage such rallies.

The Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), privately told donors that running against Vice President Harris instead of President Biden made the race more challenging — an admission at odds with the Donald Trump campaign’s public projections of confidence.

“All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” Vance said about Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, according to a recording of his remarks at a Saturday fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minn. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”

Publicly, the Trump campaign has insisted that Harris replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket has not changed the race, arguing that she shares responsibility for public dissatisfaction with Biden’s leadership. Vance told reporters on July 22, a day after Biden dropped out of the race, that there was no difference in running against Harris vs. Biden.

“I don’t think the political calculus changes at all,” Vance said. “We were running against Joe Biden’s open border, Kamala Harris’s open border. Kamala Harris supported the green new scam. Kamala Harris, frankly, covered Joe Biden even though it was obvious he was mentally incompetent for a very long time.”

Trump adviser Jason Miller said in a July 22 Fox News interview: “Democrats are a bit of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. And they may have gotten rid of one problem with Joe Biden, but they’ve inherited a whole new problem with Kamala Harris.”

Trump himself has expressed nostalgia for running against Biden (“He will always be my first choice”) and at the same time dismissed Harris as “worse than Joe.”

Vance, though, gave a different assessment for donors on Saturday ahead of joining Trump at a rally in St. Cloud, Minn. He said Harris was less well-known than Trump or Biden, so Republicans would have to work to shape people’s opinions of her.

“We have a very unique opportunity, but also a very unique challenge, because, let’s be honest, 10 days ago, the two candidates who were running for president, everybody had an opinion about ’em. Love ’em or hate ’em, everybody has an opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden after the past eight years,” Vance said. “But Kamala Harris, people don’t really know.”

Vance said the campaign would try to define Harris based on past positions, which he said included opposing fracking, praising the “defund the police” movement and supporting decriminalization of unauthorized border crossings. The Harris campaign says she won’t ban fracking. She denounced “defund the police” after becoming Biden’s running mate, and the current administration opposes decriminalizing border crossings.

At the fundraiser Vance recounted asking Trump senior adviser Susie Wiles how the race had changed, and he said she answered that she was more confident Trump would win because people like Trump’s polices better than Biden’s.

Two national polls taken since Biden dropped out showed Trump and Harris within the margin of error, erasing Trump’s earlier leads over Biden in the same surveys.

Vance spokesman Will Martin said Monday in a statement: “Poll after poll shows President Trump leading Kamala Harris as voters become aware of her weak, failed and dangerously liberal agenda. Her far-left ideas are even more radioactive than Joe Biden, particularly in the key swing states that will decide this election like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”

Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) has withdrawn from consideration to serve as Vice President Harris’s running mate, he announced Monday on social media.

Cooper had been one of roughly a dozen individuals that Harris’s campaign was considering after President Biden withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed her. Harris is slated to pick her running mate before Aug. 7, when the Democratic Party will nominate its presidential ticket using a virtual process. The full party convention is Aug. 19-22 in Chicago.

“I was honored to be considered for this role,” Cooper wrote in a statement posted on social media. “This just wasn’t the right time for North Carolina and for me to potentially be on a national ticket. As I’ve said from the beginning, she has an outstanding list of people from which to choose, and we’ll all work to make sure she wins.”

Cooper, 67, was initially seen as a top contender because of his long-standing relationship with Harris and his success in winning statewide in North Carolina, where he has never lost an election. Democrats are hoping to win the state’s 16 electoral votes in November, and some believed elevating Cooper could put them over the top in a state where Biden narrowly lost in 2020.

The relationship between Harris and Cooper dates to a period when both served as attorneys general of their respective states.

It was not immediately clear why Cooper took himself out of contention. The Harris campaign declined to comment. Cooper’s withdrawal was first reported by the New York Times.

Other top contenders for the job, all of whom have been participating in events that serve as vice-presidential auditions of sorts, include Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).

Harris is also said to be considering Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has repeatedly said she is not interested in the role, though some Democrats are still encouraging Harris to select her.

In an interview last week with The Washington Post, Cooper declined to comment on his potential interest in the job.

“She has a lot of great people to choose from,” he said. “She has to win. I want her to win. I want her to pick the person that can help her win. I respect her process, and I don’t want to comment on that process.”

Harris has become a regular presence in North Carolina, visiting the state seven times this year. She last traveled there three days before Biden ended his reelection bid, making a campaign stop in Fayetteville, where Cooper introduced her. Harris later called him a “dear friend,” noting their overlap as their states’ top lawyers.

“I’ve known him for almost two decades,” she said, “and he is an extraordinary leader.”

Cooper was among the earliest names mentioned as a possible running mate for Harris after Biden’s exit on July 21. Harris called Cooper in the hours after Biden’s withdrawal, along with other vice-presidential contenders such as Beshear and Shapiro.

“If you want a nominee who could put Donald Trump’s destruction of Roe v. Wade at center stage, if you want a nominee who actually prosecuted criminals like Donald Trump, and if you want a nominee who could put Trump’s age and fitness in the forefront, Kamala Harris is the person,” Cooper said the next morning on MSNBC.

Harris has tasked Eric Holder, the former attorney general, to lead the vetting process with a team of lawyers at Covington & Burling.

The attorneys began their work last week, and Harris has told aides she wants to pick “a governing partner” who is qualified to serve as president. She also wants a running mate who can help deliver her message of fighting for the middle class and protecting democracy and freedoms, according to the person familiar with the deliberations.

AMBLER, Pa. — Seeking to capitalize on an outpouring of enthusiasm and an influx of cash, Democratic Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania sought Monday to draw a contrast between Vice President Harris and Donald Trump, warning a packed gymnasium here that he would strip more freedoms from a vast swath of Americans.

The rally in this small suburb outside of Philadelphia was one of the first for the nascent Harris presidential campaign in a hotly contested state both parties hope to take in November. For many Democrats, the enthusiastic crowd exemplified the surge in support for their ticket after President Biden opted to step aside following his disastrous debate with Trump in late June.

The governors spent the afternoon blasting Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, as self-interested, out-of-touch and destructive.

“Donald Trump bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade,” Whitmer said. “He appointed Supreme Court justices who are taking away our rights. He cut taxes for himself and for his buddies, and he tried to overturn an election.”

She then went after Vance, saying he “does not see women as equals. He does not want everyone to have a seat at the table. He’s scared of us. … As Democrats, we want everyone to have a seat at the table. I mean even cat lovers and dog lovers alike.”

The event offered an early look at the themes and messages the party’s likely nominee and her surrogates will roll out over the next three months, including pitting Harris, a former prosecutor, against Trump, a felon. The campaign is casting the election as a choice between freedom and the further erosion of rights. But Monday also served as an informal audition by a pair of Democratic stars rumored to be among those Harris is considering to be her running mate.

Shapiro, taking on a vice-presidential “attack dog” role, described Trump as “a guy who doesn’t love this country” and asked the crowd to remember what it was like living in America during the Trump presidency.

“It was more chaos, less jobs and far less freedom,” Shapiro said. “He had no earthly idea how to be president back then. I’m serious. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

He described Trump as a “dangerous” man who leans into imagery and iconography associated with American values while working to strip Americans of cherished rights.

“While he’s hugging the flag, he’s taking away our freedoms,” Shapiro said. “It’s not freedom to tell our kids what books they can read. That’s not freedom. … It’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies. That’s not freedom. It’s not freedom to tell people they can go vote — but he’s going to pick the winner.”

Harris’s campaign began a week ago after Biden, facing dismal poll numbers and plummeting party morale, upended the race for the White House by announcing that he would no longer seek a second term.

Biden endorsed Harris, who has long been viewed as his heir apparent. And in less than two days, she announced that she had secured enough delegates to be the presumptive Democratic nominee. Since then, her campaign has touted a huge swell of enthusiasm and donations.

Harris’s campaign announced this weekend that it had raked in more than $200 million since Biden ended his own reelection bid, with two-thirds of that haul coming from first-time donors. And the campaign said it had recruited 170,000 new volunteers in little over a week and is holding 2,300 events to mobilize grass-roots supporters at the beginning of August.

That fervor seemed apparent in Ambler on Monday, where the line to see Shapiro and Whitmer at Wissahickon High School was queued up more than two hours before the speeches were slated to start. Officials estimated the audience at 1,100, the crowd filling the school’s gymnasium and ringing an indoor track overhead.

Gloria Richardson, 72, of neighboring Upper Dublin, said she and her husband had been giving $100 to the Biden-Harris campaign as loyal Democrats. Now that Harris was at the top of the ticket, they plan to give more.

“It’s like Barack Obama again. People feel connected. They feel like they have a stake in this,” said Richardson, who was wearing a shirt emblazoned with a Shapiro slogan. “We’re a visual country. We know that [Biden] had good stuff in his brain, but the visuals were taking over the conversation. That was painful. Now it’s very futuristic. I feel like my grandkids have a stake in this. We’re getting the young people involved again.”

Amid the changes at the top of the ticket, Harris is on an accelerated timetable to pick a running mate. She plans to decide by Aug. 7, in line with the Democratic National Committee’s plans for its official nomination. In addition to Shapiro and Whitmer, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is considered to be on the shortlist, The Washington Post has previously reported. Both Whitmer and Shapiro hail from battleground states that Democrats need to win in November. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), who was under consideration to serve as Harris’s running mate, announced Monday on social media that he was withdrawing his name from contention.

Still, it is unclear what enduring impact Harris’s surge of support will have on the race or whether a week’s worth of momentum will last for another three months.

New Fox News polls in battleground states found Trump and Harris statistically tied in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin while Harris led by six points in Minnesota. The campaign announced she will travel to Georgia, another battleground state, on Tuesday.

The Trump campaign bought more than $1.7 million in television ads Monday morning across the major swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada, according to the tracking firm AdImpact. The spots, set to start running Tuesday and continue through Aug. 12, are the first major general-election purchase by the Republican nominee’s campaign.

The Harris campaign is planning its own series of ads later this week, its first major purchase, according to a person familiar with the details, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

At Monday’s rally, Beth Staab, a 56-year-old Democratic organizer from Montgomery Township, said that things had grown grim amid her group of Democratic-leaning friends — until everything changed eight days earlier.

“We were in a holding pattern. We all had our tasks to do. We all knew what we needed to do, and yet we were like, ‘I don’t think we can do it,’” she said. They all had qualms over Biden becoming the nominee. “Because we felt as though there were a lot of unanswered questions, and we were afraid to be advocating for something that we were not sure of.”

Though Staab said she feels a deep sense of gratitude and loyalty to Biden, the moment that he withdrew from the race “was like the sun was rising. Everyone was happy. Everyone is motivated.”

Michael Scherer in Washington contributed to this report.