Former US 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, officials have said.
The expected interview with the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is part of the FBI’s standard protocol to speak with victims of federal crimes during the course of their investigations.
The FBI said on Friday that Mr Trump was struck 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,” Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, said on Monday.
Through roughly 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.
The FBI has not uncovered a motive as to why he chose to target Mr Trump, but investigators believe the shooting was the result of extensive planning, including the purchase in recent months of chemical precursors that investigators believe were used to create explosive devices found in his car and his home and the use of a drone about 200 yards from the rally site in the hours before the event.
In addition, Mr Rojek said, Crooks looked online for information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power plants and the attempted assassination in May of Slovakia’s populist Prime Minister Robert Fico.
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?” in 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.
Crooks’ parents have been “extremely cooperative” with investigators, Mr Rojek said, and the extensive planning that preceded 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 added.
Republican Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania witnessed the assassination attempt against Mr Trump first-hand and will lead the House task force charged with investigating what went wrong and recommending solutions to help ensure such an attack does not happen again.
Mr Kelly represents the city of Butler, where the July 13 attack occurred.
He attended Mr Trump’s campaign rally and sponsored the legislation to create the task force, saying his community was grieving and that “the people of Butler and the people of the United States deserve answers”.
Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York jointly announced on Monday that 13 legislators, seven Republicans and six Democrats with backgrounds in law enforcement, legal affairs and the military, had been appointed to the task force.
It will issue a final report before December 13.
“We have the utmost confidence in this bipartisan group of steady, highly qualified, and capable members of Congress to move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability, and help make certain such failures never happen again,” Mr Johnson and Mr Jeffries said in their statement.
