Trump agrees to FBI questioning as part of assassination investigation

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump has agreed to be interviewed by the FBI as part of a an investigation into his attempted assassination A special investigator announced Monday that the gunman had researched mass attacks and explosive devices before the shooting in Pennsylvania.

The expected interview with the 2024 Republican presidential candidate is part of the FBI’s standard protocol for speaking to victims as part of its criminal investigations. The FBI said Friday that Trump hit by a bullet or bullet fragments 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 victim interview, like we would with any other crime victim under any other circumstance.”

Through around 450 interviews, the FBI has created a portrait of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crookswhich identifies him as a “highly intelligent” but withdrawn 20-year-old whose most important social circle was his family and who had few friends and acquaintances throughout his life, said Rojek.

His parents have been “extremely cooperative” with the investigation, Rojek said. They said they had no prior knowledge of the shooting, a statement the FBI believes is credible because Crooks had done nothing in public in the weeks before the attack that would have aroused their suspicions.

The FBI has not yet been able to find a motive for why he targeted Trump. However, investigators believe the shooting was the result of extensive planning. This included the purchase of chemical precursors in recent months that investigators believe were used to build the explosive devices found in Trump’s car and house. In addition, a drone was used about 180 meters from the rally site in the hours before the event.

In addition, Rojek said, the crooks searched the Internet for information about mass shootings, explosive devices, power plants and the attempted assassination in May. The populist Slovak 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 googled: “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?” This is an allusion to Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman who killed President John F. Kennedy from a sniper post in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Meanwhile, new details emerged about law enforcement security lapses prior to the shooting: Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, released text messages from members of the Beaver County Emergency Unit showing that local police had spotted a suspicious-looking man – who turned out to be – hanging around nearby in the hour before the shooting.

“Child studying near the building we are in. I believe it is AGR,” one officer wrote to other snipers, attaching a photo of Crooks. “I saw him with a rangefinder looking at the stage. FYI, if you want to notify SS snipers, tell them to watch out. I lost sight of him.”

AGR is a reference to a complex of buildings that make up AGR International Inc. Crooks scaled the roof of one of the buildings in the complex and fired eight shots at the rally stage with an AR-style rifle. Trump said he was “hit by a bullet that pierced the top of my right ear,” and he appeared in the days afterward with a bandage on his ear. One rally attendee, Corey Comperatore, was killed and two others were wounded. Crooks was shot by a Secret Service sniper.

In an interview with ABC News, a Beaver County police officer who raised the alarm said that after sending the text message, he “assumed that someone was going to come out to talk to this person or find out what was going on.”

Another official told ABC News the group was supposed to have a face-to-face meeting with Secret Service snipers, but that never happened. An email to the Secret Service was not immediately returned Monday.