The man suspected of being behind Tesla Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas was a “big” supporter of Donald Trump and voted for him in November, a senior law enforcement official tells the Daily Beast.
That revelation came from an interview between Matthew Livelsberger’s loved ones and investigators, the source said. His family added that they believed the 37-year-old Green Beret, who died in Wednesday’s blast outside Trump International Hotel, had Republican leanings.
“He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” Dean said. “It’s one of the reasons he was in Special Forces for so many years.”
Records in El Paso County, Colo., indicate that he registered in 2020 with the No Labels party, which supports centrist “commonsense” candidates, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. The same email Livelsberger used to sign up for LinkedIn was listed in a data breach last year that revealed he had an account on the far-right news website The Post Millennial.
Much remains unknown about what allegedly drove Livelsberger to rent a Cybertruck in his hometown of Colorado Springs and drive it to Trump’s Las Vegas property.
The truck was filled with explosives and, perhaps miraculously, only injured seven when it burst into flames just steps from the hotel’s front lobby. Livelsberger was the only fatality in the blast.
Livelsberger was a highly trained Special Operations soldier, multiple reports revealed Thursday. He was stationed in Germany, but was back stateside on approved leave.
He enlisted in the U.S. Army when he was still a teenager and was just one year away from receiving his full military benefits, having served 19 years.
CNN’s John Miller, the network’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst, gave telling insight into the blast suspect on Thursday. He told viewers the suspect was “highly trained in communications and electronic measures for bomb detections and intelligence operations.”
Miller noted that there remains no “clear motive” for the explosion, which some have speculated was meant to be a political statement against Trump.
That theory emerged largely because of the explosion’s symbolics. The vehicle used, a Cybertruck, is Tesla owner Elon Musk’s crown jewel of a vehicle. Musk has been a top Trump ally since the summer, making the explosion’s location—at the Trump property nearest to Livelsberger’s hometown—all the more suspicious.
Miller theorized that the Cybertruck’s driver wanted to make sure that his charred vehicle would appear in close proximity to the massive “TRUMP” signage at the front of the hotel.
“Is he saying it’s 7 something in the morning and there’s not a lot of people here, I’m going to come back in an hour and see if there’s a bigger crowd,” Miller said. “Or is he doing his reconnaissance as a military operator would, which is, who stops you where, where am I going to place this, so the Elon Musk vehicle is going to be right under the Trump sign.
“We don’t know the symbolism that they were going for in this attack was, but they are looking at all of that.”
A LinkedIn profile for Livelsberger included a profile photo of him posing in winter gear and holding an assault rifle. That page listed his most recent role as a Remote and Autonomous Systems Manager, which meant was responsible for the “operations, maintenance and integration” of drones in the Army. He began that role in November.
His uncle told The Independent that Livelsberger was a “super soldier.” If he were to create an exploding Cybertruck, Dean said he believed his nephew had the skills to create one that was “more sophisticated” than what was used on Wednesday.
The LinkedIn page listed Norwich University in Vermont as his alma mater. He graduated from there in 2019 with a degree in Strategic Studies and Defense Analysis.
Livelsberger occasionally commented on LinkedIn, mostly on posts related to the military and service members.
His oldest comment, from five years ago, was to assert that he’d prefer to be gifted a rifle instead of a cash bonus for referring people to an “armed counterintelligence role.” More recently, he commented three months ago that he knew somebody who would be a good fit as a “Tactical Combat Casualty Care Instructor” in Ukraine.
In other comments, Livelsberger appeared to show conservative leanings when disparaging a White House memoir penned by John Bolton.
“Bet Bolton got a hefty chunk from the DNC and other slimy donors to put the book out,” he commented on a news station’s article posted to Facebook.
“Oh boy another conspiracy theorist,” someone commented back. “Lol. What a joke.”
Livelsberger responded: “It’s not conspiracy when it’s pretty obvious guy made money from the dems.”
Livelsberger appears to have at one point been married to Sara Livelsberger, a 38-year-old who lives in Delray Beach, Florida. Dean told The Independent that they’ve since divorced and each have new partners. She did not respond to requests for comment from the Daily Beast on Thursday.
A Facebook page for Sara has been dormant since 2016, but makes multiple references to Livelsberger as her husband. That included one post from 2015, which lines up with Livelsberger’s age, that read: “It is my old a-- husbands’s 28th birthday!”
She does not appear to have the same politics that Livelsberger supposedly has. She posted during the 2016 election cycle that she was a registered Democrat and shared images that were critical of Donald Trump. She once commented that she follows Trump’s Twitter page “just to get my morning motivation to to (sic) kill someone.”
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