WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump agreed to be interviewed by the FBI as part of an investigation into his attempted murder in Pennsylvania earlier this month, a special agent said Monday as he revealed how the gunman before the shooting had researched mass attacks and explosive devices.
The expected interview with the 2024 Republican presidential candidate is part of the FBI’s standard protocol for speaking with victims during the course of its criminal investigations. The FBI said on Friday that Trump was hit in the ear by a bullet or fragment of a bullet during the July 13 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“We want to get his perspective on what he observed,” said Kevin Rojek, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office. “It’s a standard interview with the victim, like we would do with any other crime victim, under any other circumstances.”
Through more than 450 interviews, the FBI created a portrait of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, which reveals him to be a “highly intelligent” but reclusive 20-year-old, whose main social circle was his family and who kept few friends. and acquaintances throughout his life, Rojek said. Even on online gaming platforms Crooks visited, his interactions with peers appeared to have been minimal, the FBI said.
His parents were “extremely cooperative” with the investigation, Rojek said. They said they had no prior knowledge of the shooting, a statement the FBI considers credible.
The FBI has not discovered why he chose to attack Trump, but investigators believe the shooting was the result of extensive planning, including the purchase, under an alias, in recent months of precursor chemicals that investigators believe were used to create explosive devices. found in his car and home, and the deployment of a drone about 200 yards (180 meters) from the rally site hours before the event in an apparent act of surveillance.
The day before the shooting, the FBI says, Crooks visited a local shooting range and practiced with the gun that would be used in the attack.
After the shooting, authorities found two explosive devices in Crooks’ car and a third in his bedroom at home. The devices recovered from the car — consisting of ammunition boxes filled with explosive material with wires, receivers and igniters — were capable of exploding, but did not explode because the receivers were in the “off” position, Rojek said. How much damage they could have caused is unclear.
The FBI said Crooks demonstrated online interest in prominent public figures by searching online for information about individuals, including President Joe Biden. Additionally, Rojek said, Crooks researched information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power plants and the attempted assassination in May Slovakia’s populist Prime Minister Robert Fico.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last week that on July 6, the day Crooks registered to attend the Trump rally, he searched on Google: “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?” This is a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman who killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Meanwhile, new details were emerging about law enforcement security lapses that preceded the shooting, with Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, releasing text messages from members of the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit that they showed how local police officers had communicated. with each other about a suspicious-looking man who turned out to be a bandit who had been lying in wait for more than an hour before the shooting.
“Child learning about the construction we are in. AGR, I believe so,” one officer wrote to other countersnipers, including a photograph of Crooks. “I saw him with a rangefinder looking at the stage. FOR YOUR INFORMATION. If you want to warn the SS snipers to be careful. I lost sight of him.”
AGR is a reference for a complex of buildings that form AGR International Inc, a supplier of automation equipment for the glass and plastic packaging industry. Crooks climbed onto the roof of one of the complex’s buildings and fired eight shots at the rally stage with an AR-style rifle legally purchased by his father years earlier.
Trump said he was “shot by a bullet that pierced the top of my right ear” and appeared days later with a bandage on his ear. A rally participant, Corey Operator, was killed and two others were injured. Crooks was shot to death by a Secret Service counter-sniper.
In an interview with ABC News, a Beaver County official who raised the alarm said that after sending the message, “I assumed someone was going to come talk to this individual or find out what was going on.”
Another official told ABC News that the group was supposed to receive face-to-face briefings from Secret Service countersnipers whenever they arrived, but that never happened.
An email sent to the Secret Service seeking comment was not immediately returned Monday.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
