Former US President Donald Trump has agreed to be interviewed by the FBI in connection with the assassination attempt on him on July 13 at a rally in Pennsylvania, a special agent said on Monday (July 29). The expected interview with Trump, who is now an official Republican presidential nominee for November 2024 polls, is part of the federal agency’s standard protocol to speak with victims during the course of their criminal investigations.
The FBI said on Friday that Trump was hit by a bullet or a fragment of it during the attack which left him injured in his right ear.
"We want to get his perspective on what he observed," said Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Pittsburgh field office. "It is a standard victim interview like we would do for any other victim of crime, under any other circumstances."
The FBI has conducted around 450 interviews and fleshed out a portrait of the attacker, Thomas Matthew Crooks, which revealed him to be a "highly intelligent" but reclusive 20-year-old whose primary circle was his family and who maintained few friends and acquaintances in his life, Rojek said.
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Motive of attack yet not known
The FBI has not been able to unearth the motive behind the attack on Trump, however, according to the investigators, the July 13 shooting was the result of extensive planning, including the purchase of chemical precursors in the recent months, which they believe were used to make explosive devices found in his car and his home during the investigation. He had also used a drone about 180 metres from the site of the rally before the event started. The shooter also search information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power plants and the attempted assassination in May of Slovakia's populist Prime Minister Robert Fico, Rojek said.
The FBI has said that on July 6, the day Crooks registered to attend the Trump rally, he googled: "How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?" That's a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed President John F. Kennedy from a sniper's perch in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
(With AP inputs)
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