More than 500 officers and agents have been called in to assist with the investigation, including F.B.I. profiling experts from Quantico, Va., who were trying to build a profile of a possible perpetrator, said Christopher Combs, special agent in charge of the bureau’s San Antonio office.
“We don’t know why the bomber is doing this. We don’t know his reasons,” said Mr. Combs, adding that the authorities were especially hoping to understand why whoever was behind the bombings was wielding “this level of violence.”
“We would really like the bomber to contact us so we can talk to him,” he said.
So far, the police have been alerted to more than 600 packages deemed suspicious, as residents have phoned and emailed friends and family to verify the provenance of parcels before opening them.
Chief Manley signaled that the authorities could be getting closer to labeling the attacks as domestic terrorism. “We will have to determine if we see a specific ideology behind this, or something that will lead us along with our federal partners to make that decision,” he said.
PhotoAustin police officers near the scene of an explosion Sunday night that injured two people. Credit
Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
He said the fourth bombing demonstrated a higher level of sophistication than the previous three, as well as a “significant change” in the way the victims were targeted.
In the first three bombings, cardboard boxes were discovered outside homes, seeming to target specific individuals. The packages were not delivered by the Postal Service or any other package delivery company, but instead appeared to have been left outside overnight. They detonated when they were handled by the people who discovered them.
The fourth bomb, however, which exploded on Sunday, was left on a roadside, and was believed to have been detonated with the use of a tripwire by two random passers-by, Chief Manley said. He warned residents that a future bomb could also be connected to a tripwire, which can be fashioned from hard-to-see materials such as fishing line or filament.
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“We have a high degree of confidence that the same individual built all these devices,” Fred Milanowski, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Houston, told reporters.
He declined to discuss details of the latest bomb’s construction, but described the way that tripwire explosive devices are assembled.
“In general, the tripwire is going to be attached to a switch, and it’s going to be anchored down on the other side, obviously, so that when somebody actually trips on it, they will activate that switch,” he said. “That’s why we call it a victim-activated device. It’s random. It’s not targeted. The randomness that a child could have come across that is very concerning to us.”
With so little known about who is behind the attacks and whether they will continue, the city is on edge, with many residents appearing unsure of whether to proceed with normal life or stay in hiding.
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“I think everyone in Austin is in the process of trying to figure out exactly how nervous to be,” said Stephen Harrigan, an author and essayist who has lived in Austin for more than 50 years and whose home is about eight miles from the scene of Sunday’s explosion.
“Are these bombings targeted acts of murder with a specific motive behind them — which is horrible enough — or do they represent something broader and more random?” he said.
Thad Holt, 76, who lives in the gated condominium community of 5000 Mission Oaks a few miles from Sunday’s bomb site, said an occasional car break-in is the kind of crime most typical in the neighborhood.
PhotoRichard Herrington, who lives about a half-mile from the blast site in Travis Country, said he and his family had gone hiking Sunday afternoon near the street where the tripwire was set. “We could have very easily walked down that street,” he said. Credit
Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
“It’s too close for comfort,” Mr. Holt said. “It sort of puts you on edge. It puts the whole town on edge.”
Richard Herrington, 75, a retired pharmacist who lives about a half-mile from the blast site, said he and his family had gone hiking Sunday afternoon near the street where the tripwire was set and went off later that evening.
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“My oldest granddaughter, age 7, said, ‘Grandpa, I want to walk on the street where there’s the most shade,’” Mr. Herrington said. “We could have very easily walked down that street because there is shade. We could have been on that street and maybe the tripwire was there already, I don’t know. I’m anxious for our community because we don’t know when and where it’s going to happen again. I feel like it will happen again.”
At about 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, Mr. Herrington said, he and his wife were watching an N.C.A.A. basketball game when the blast occurred. “I was in the military. Never in combat. If you’ve been in the military and you hear a mortar round go off, it has a thump. And that’s how I knew it was a bomb, because it was a distinctive thump like that.”
The four neighborhoods where the explosions have occurred are varied economic and demographic slices of Austin. The first three bomb scenes were in largely working- and middle-class sections of northeast and east Austin, with sizable black, Hispanic and Asian populations. Hammocks and baby swings hang from tree branches on front lawns near Haverford Drive, the site of the first bombing on March 2. The explosion on Sunday took place in Travis Country, an upscale planned community that is largely white. It is a hilly and wooded area near a patchwork of busy highways and parkways.
After the first three bombings, many community leaders and residents speculated that the attacks appeared to be hate crimes, because those injured were black and Hispanic.
The first package killed Anthony Stephan House, a 39-year-old black man, after he discovered it outside his home. The second targeted two more African-Americans — Draylen Mason, 17, who was killed, and his mother, who was critically injured after she brought the package inside from their front porch and opened it in the kitchen. The third left a 75-year-old Hispanic woman seriously injured.
The explosion Sunday, which injured two white men, suggested that the bomber or bombers were driven by something other than racial bias.
In Monday’s news conference, the authorities said they had received a large number of tips on who could be behind the attacks, but that so far, none had led to the identification of a suspect.
In news conferences, officials have begun to take the unusual step of appealing to the bomber or bombers directly.
“I will reach out to the suspect or suspects and ask that you contact us,” Chief Manley said. “There are innocent people getting hurt in this community and it needs to come to a stop.”
President Trump has stepped up his attacks on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation in recent days, and his lawyer even suggested that the inquiry should be shut down. And just in case the direction in which this whole thing is headed wasn’t clear, Trump has now hired a lawyer who argues the president is being framed.
Trump’s legal team on Monday announced the hiring of Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney who served as an independent counsel and a special counsel in the 1990s and was later hired by the New York Senate to investigate Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D). The hiring was first reported by the New York Times.
DiGenova clearly has experience, but what may make him most attractive to Trump is his thoughts on this particular case. He told Fox News Channel in January that the investigation is “a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime.”
“Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime,” diGenova said.
That interview was the most notable in a series of TV appearances that seem, in a way, to have been auditions for joining Trump’s legal team. We know that Trump seems to like hiring people who say things he likes on cable TV, and diGenova has supplied no shortage of that. Much of diGenova’s commentary has described a vast law-enforcement conspiracy to take down Trump.
Here’s a sampling:
Feb. 2: ’The largest law enforcement scandal in history’
“We are headed toward a very sad ending for the FBI and senior DOJ officials. … I believe that several high FBI officials will be charged criminally. And it is conceivable that some DOJ people will also be charged criminally. … I would consider this the largest law enforcement scandal in history for this reason. The activities of McCabe and others and Bruce Ohr and others were designed to subvert the Constitution and a national election, the most serious offense under our Constitution.” (“Hannity”)
March 15: Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe should be fired …
“He’s done a number of things worth punishment, including careening through obstruction of justice from the beginning of the Trump campaign, doing everything he could to exonerate Hillary Clinton in the email server case corruptly. … He should be fired. He should have been fired a long time ago. And if he loses some of his benefits, that’s good for the country. And it’s the least that can be done to him.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)
… and the people involved should be arrested
“It means that the system of equal justice has been rent asunder by the conduct of James Comey, America’s best-known dirty cop, Andrew McCabe and others, including senior Obama administration Justice Department officials. This is a moment in history that has sullied the reputation of the FBI and the Department of Justice, and deservedly so. Every one of these people should be put in a wanted poster at a post office, even though they may never be arrested.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)
“Or show up at your house in the morning while you and your wife were in bed in order to frighten you like they did with Mr. Manafort. What a disgusting, awful display of raw political power. Not law enforcement power, political power.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)
March 7: A federal grand jury should investigate the investigators
“This is why, Lou, the only way to get these answers, once the Nunes committee is done, is to have a federal grand jury force all of these State Department people, CIA, DNI people, FBI, DOJ senior people under oath in a grand jury. It’s the only way we’re ever going to get the full story. … This is the single most important scandal of the last 50 years because senior DOJ and FBI officials engaged in conduct that was designed to corrupt an American presidential election. It wasn’t the Russians who corrupted the presidential election; it was the American officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI.” (“Lou Dobbs Tonight”)
Jan. 20: Loretta E. Lynch and Sally Yates broke the law
“We’re going to discover that the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the national security division, John Carlin, Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ officials and, regrettably, line attorneys — people who were senior career civil servants — [allegedly] violated the law.” (Daily Caller)
Feb. 2: Attacks on FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein
“I have a lot of confidence in [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions ultimately doing the right thing. I have very little confidence in Rod Rosenstein, no confidence in Chris Wray.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)
“It suggests, as we have said from the beginning, that there was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton, and if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime. Everything that we’ve seen from these texts and from all the facts developing shows that the FBI and senior DOJ officials conspired to violate the law and to deny Donald Trump his civil rights.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)
Feb. 1: Wray planted stories about threatening to resign
“Chris Wray planted these stories himself. He is trying to show the employees of the FBI and the former agents that he is brave. He is stalwart. He is standing up for them. This is nonsensical. If he offers to resign, the president should accept his resignation. This type of behavior by an FBI director is childish. It’s immature.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)
Aug. 4: Leakers are committing ‘regicide’
“They are encouraging these people to continue to leak and basically to commit regicide. I mean, they want to kill the president politically, and they’ll do it any way they can.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)
Jan. 30: Rosenstein’s appointment of special counsel was illegal
“But Rod did something worse. He created a mandate for Mueller, which had no limitations of time, money, subject matter. He didn’t even name a crime that was being investigated, which was a violation of the Department of Justice regulations. I think when all was said and done, Rod Rosenstein’s memorandum and the appointment of a special counsel will go down in history as one of the worst decisions ever made by a Justice Department official.” (“Lou Dobbs Tonight”)
Dec. 1: Flynn’s transition actions didn’t break the law …
“All of Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador to Russia were perfectly legal during the transition period and even before. It’s not a crime to communicate with an ambassador of a foreign country about foreign policy when you are the foreign policy adviser to the incoming president. So, I don’t know why he lied. It’s inconceivable to me. If he had told the truth, there would be no crime.” (“Ingraham Angle”)
… and Jared Kushner may have done something wrong 10 to 15 years ago
“As far as Kushner goes, if there is anything with Kushner, it involves transactions involving real estate deals 10, 15 years ago.” (“Ingraham Angle”)
