WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump has agreed to an interview by the FBI as part of an investigation into his attempted murder in Pennsylvania earlier this month, a special agent said Monday in revealing that the gunman had researched mass attacks and explosives before the shooting.
The expected interview with the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is part of the FBI’s standard protocol for speaking to victims during its criminal investigations. The FBI said Friday that Trump hit by a bullet or a fragment thereof 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, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office. “It’s a standard victim interview that we would do for any other crime victim, under any other circumstances.”
Through about 450 interviews, the FBI has built a picture of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, showing him to be a “highly intelligent” but withdrawn 20-year-old whose primary social circle was his family and who had few friends and acquaintances throughout his life, Rojek said.
The FBI has not yet determined a motive for targeting Trump, but investigators believe the shooting was the result of extensive planning. For example, he purchased precursor chemicals in recent months that investigators say were used to make the explosives found in his car and home. He also deployed a drone about 600 feet from the rally site in the hours leading up to the event.
Additionally, Rojek said, Crooks searched online for information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power plants and the attempted murder in May of Slovakia’s populist Prime Minister Robert Fico.
According to the FBI, on July 6, the day he registered to attend the Trump rally, Crooks Googled the following: “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?” That’s a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman who shot and killed President John F. Kennedy from a sniper post in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Crooks’ parents have been “extremely cooperative” with investigators, Rojek said, and the extensive planning leading up to 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.
