Former US President Donald Trump has agreed to meet with the FBI for a “victim interview” about this month’s assassination attempt, bureau officials said on Monday.
Providing an update on the status of the investigation into the July 13 shooting, Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said they had still not determined the motive for the attack by 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks.
They said Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service sniper after firing eight shots during a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, appeared to be a “loner” and that they had not identified any co-conspirators.
FBI Special Agent Kevin Rojek said the interview with Trump “will be a standard victim interview, just as we do with any other victim of a crime in any other circumstance.”
“We want to get their perspective on what they observed,” Rojek said.
FBI officials said they have interviewed dozens of people who knew or interacted with Crooks, including family members, co-workers, former teachers, classmates and others.
“We have learned that the individual was highly intelligent, had attended college, and was steadily employed,” Rojek said. “It appears that his primary social circle was limited to his immediate family as we believe he had very few friends and acquaintances.”
FBI officials said Crooks’ parents have said they had no prior knowledge of their son’s plot. “We find that credible at this stage,” Rojek said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, testifying before a congressional committee last week, said Crooks had searched online for details about the November 1963 shooting of US President John F Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.
“On July 6, he Googled, ‘How far was Oswald from Kennedy?'” Ray said.
Rojek said the investigation revealed that Crooks had also conducted searches “related to information on power plants, mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, and an attempted assassination of the Slovakian prime minister earlier this year.”
– ‘suspect’ –
Crooks was sitting on the roof of a nearby building and opened fire on Trump with an AR-style assault rifle just after 6 p.m. while the Republican White House candidate was addressing a rally in Butler.
Trump was hit in his ear, two rally attendees were seriously injured, and a 50-year-old Pennsylvania firefighter was shot and killed.
Rojek said police had identified Crooks as a “suspicious person” about an hour before the shooting.
“A local officer took a photo of the man and sent it to other SWAT operators on scene and local command personnel,” he said.
He said SWAT operators spotted Crooks about 30 minutes later, just after 5:30 p.m., using a rangefinder and browsing news websites on his phone.
At about 6:08 p.m., police dashcam video showed Crooks climbing to the building’s roof, from where he eventually opened fire, Rojek said.
“At approximately 6:11 p.m. a local police officer was taken to the rooftop by another officer where he encountered this individual,” he said.
Crooks pointed his rifle at the officer, who “immediately fell to the ground,” he said. “Over approximately 25 to 30 seconds into this encounter, the individual fired eight rounds before being successfully neutralized.”
US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned last week after she acknowledged the agency had failed in its mission to prevent the assassination attempt.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
