WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump has agreed to be interviewed by the FBI as part of an investigation into the attempted assassination in Pennsylvania earlier this month, an official said on Monday.
The expected interview with the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is part of the FBI’s standard protocol to speak with victims of federal crimes during the course of their investigations. The FBI said on Friday that Trump was struck by a bullet or a fragment of one during the July 13 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“We want to get his perspective on what he observed,” Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, said Monday.
Rojek disclosed the planned conversation with Trump as he revealed new details about the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, including internet searches that reveal an interest in mass shootings, power plants, improvised explosive devices and the ttempted assassination of Slovakia’s prime minister earlier this year.
Despite hundreds of interviews, the FBI said it still has not been able to uncover a motive for the shooting, but it said that the portrait of Crooks that has emerged is of a reclusive loner whose primary social circle was his family. Crooks’ parents have been “extremely cooperative” with investigators, Rojek said, and the extensive planning that preceded the shooting was done online.
The parents have said they had no knowledge of Crooks’ plans, and investigators have no reason to doubt that, the FBI said.