Former U.S. president Donald Trump has agreed to be interviewed by the FBI as part of an investigation into his attempted assassination in Pennsylvania earlier this month, a special agent said on Monday in disclosing how the gunman prior to the shooting had researched mass attacks and explosive devices.
The expected interview with the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is part of the FBI’s standard protocol to speak with victims during the course of its criminal investigations. The FBI said on Friday that Trump was struck in the ear 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,” 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 circumstance.”
Trump said in a Fox News interview that aired Monday night that he expected the FBI interview to take place Thursday.
Through more than 450 interviews, the FBI has fleshed out a portrait of the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, that reveals him to be a “highly intelligent” but reclusive 20-year-old whose primary social circle was his family and who maintained few friends and acquaintances throughout his life, Rojek said. Even in online gaming platforms that Crooks visited, his interactions with peers appeared to have been minimal, the FBI said.
His parents have been “extremely cooperative,” with the investigation, Rojek said. They have said they had no advance knowledge of the shooting.
The FBI has not uncovered a motive as to why he chose to target Trump, but investigators believe the shooting was the result of extensive planning, including the purchase under an alias in recent months of chemical precursors that investigators believe were used to create the explosive devices found in his car and his home, and the deployment of a drone about 200 yards (180 meters) from the rally site in the hours before the event.
The day before the shooting, the FBI says, Crooks visited a local shooting range and practiced with the gun that would be used in the attack.
Republican presidential candidate former U.S. president Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, July 24, 2024, in Charlotte, N.C. (Alex Brandon / AP Photo)
After the shooting, authorities found two explosive devices in Crooks’ car and a third in his room at home. The devices recovered from the car, consisting of ammunition boxes filled with explosive material with wires, receivers and ignition devices, were capable of exploding but did not because the receivers were in the “off” position, Rojek said. How much damage they could have done is unclear.
The FBI has said that Crooks in the lead-up to the shooting had shown an online interest in prominent public figures, searching online for information about individuals including President Joe Biden. In addition, Rojek said, Crooks looked up information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power plants and the attempted assassination in May of Slovakia's populist 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 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 Nov. 22, 1963.
New details, meanwhile, were emerging about law enforcement security lapses and missed communications that preceded the shooting.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, released text messages from members of the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit that showed how local officers had communicated with each other about a suspicious-behaving man who turned out to be Crooks lurking around more than an hour before the shooting.
One text just before 4:30 p.m. describes a man “sitting to the direct right on a picnic table about 50 yards from the exit.”
In another text at 5:38 p.m., an officer tells other counter-snipers: "Kid learning around building we are in. AGR I believe it is. I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him.” Photographs of Crooks circulated among the group.
AGR is a reference to a complex of buildings that form AGR International Inc, a supplier of automation equipment for the glass and plastic packaging industry. Crooks scaled the roof of one of the buildings of the compound and is believed to have fired eight shots at the rally stage with an AR-style rifle that was purchased legally by his father years earlier.
The shots were fired at 6:12 p.m., according to a Beaver County after-action report.
Trump said he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear,” and he appeared in the days later with a bandage on the ear. One rallygoer, Corey Comperatore, was killed, and two others were injured. Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service counter-sniper.
In an interview with ABC News, a Beaver County officer who sounded the alarm said that after sending a text alerting others to Crooks, “I assumed that there would be somebody coming out to speak with this individual or find out what's going on.”
Another officer told ABC News that the group was supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service counter-snipers but that that never happened.
An email to the Secret Service seeking comment was not immediately returned Monday.
Three men were injured after a man armed with a knife entered a Montreal-area Islamic cultural centre Friday afternoon.
A 15-year-old boy who was the subject of an emergency alert in New Brunswick has been arrested.
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Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander and other senior figures in the Lebanese movement in an airstrike on Beirut on Friday, vowing to press on with a new military campaign until it is able to secure the area around the Lebanese border.
Three men were injured after a man armed with a knife entered a Montreal-area Islamic cultural centre Friday afternoon.
Police have arrested an 18-year-old woman who allegedly stole a Porche and then ran over its owner in an incident that was captured on video.
The parents of a teenager who died after allegedly consuming the poisonous products of a Mississauga man are now suing him, as well as several doctors involved in her care.
The search for a missing six-year-old boy in Shamattawa is continuing Friday as RCMP hope recent tips can help lead to a happy conclusion.
Relatives of a 60-year-old man who took his own life in a Nova Scotia jail after long periods of confinement in his cell have launched a lawsuit against the province.
A 15-year-old boy who was the subject of an emergency alert in New Brunswick has been arrested.
Lawyers in Britain representing dozens of alleged victims -- including three Canadians -- of Mohamed Al Fayed, the former boss of Harrods, said Friday their clients assert that he was a "monster" who raped and sexually abused young women.
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Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador blamed the United States in part on Thursday for the surge in cartel violence terrorizing the northern state of Sinaloa which has left at least 30 people dead in the past week.
A paid passenger on an expedition to the Titanic with the company that owned the Titan submersible testified before a U.S. Coast Guard investigatory panel Friday that the mission he took part in was aborted due to an apparent mechanical failure.
A UN human rights expert warned on Friday that gang violence is spreading across Haiti as a UN-backed mission targeting criminals in the troubled Caribbean country remains underfunded and understaffed.
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Sean "Diddy" Combs, who was arrested this week on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, pleaded not guilty Tuesday and was ordered to remain in custody until his federal trial in New York. CNN spoke to several legal experts to try to understand what lies ahead for Combs and for those in his orbit.
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Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem says there is a lot of uncertainty around how artificial intelligence could affect the economy moving forward, including the labour market and price growth.
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Transport Canada has issued a recall for 38,000 General Motors (GM) vehicles for safety risks related to a software glitch, the agency reported in a notice on Wednesday.
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Newfoundland and Labrador's chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
A 16-year-old biennial event aimed at fostering business in the country's eastern Arctic and northern regions has been cancelled indefinitely as a dispute unfolds between Inuit in Canada and a Labrador group claiming to share their heritage.
Jim Lester’s farm hopped on the cow-cuddling trend in early August, and his time slots have been pretty well sold out ever since.
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