Former US President Donald Trump has agreed to be questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of the investigation into the assassination attempt against him in the state of Pennsylvania earlier this month, the Associated Press reported. press and Reuters, referring to today's statement by an FBI representative, quoted by BTA.
The pending questioning is part of the FBI's standard protocol for speaking with victims of federal crimes in the course of their investigations. The FBI said on Friday that 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," Special Agent Kevin Rojack, who heads the FBI's Pittsburgh branch of operations, told reporters today at a briefing on the attempted murder.
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Rojek mentioned Trump's planned questioning as he revealed new details about the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, including his Internet searches showing an interest in mass shootings, power plants, improvised explosive devices and the attempted assassination of the Slovak prime minister Robert Fizzo earlier this year.
Despite hundreds of interviews surrounding the investigation, the FBI said it still has not been able to find a motive for the shooting, but pointed out that the portrait produced of Crooks defines him as a loner who mostly interacted with people in his family.
Crooks' parents are "extremely supportive" to investigators, Rojack said, and the planning leading up to the shooting was done online.
The parents say they were unaware of Crooks' plans, and investigators have no reason to doubt their claims, the FBI said.
Rojek also revealed that police spotted Crooks more than an hour before the shooting, with one of the local officers snapping a photo that he sent to other law enforcement officers at the scene. "The shooter has been identified by law enforcement as a suspicious person," said Rojack.
About 30 minutes later, SWAT teams saw Crooks using a rangefinder and browsing news sites. Crooks was seen carrying a backpack around 5:56 p.m. local time, less than 20 minutes before the shooting, and at 6:08 p.m. he was caught on camera walking on the roof from where he eventually fired the shots, Rojack said.
Although the FBI is not the agency in charge of investigating possible Trump security lapses, FBI officials are putting together a timeline of events, he added.
Rojek confirmed that Trump was hit by a bullet, whether it was "whole or fragmented into smaller pieces".
Using encrypted applications, Crooks was able to make 25 purchases related to firearms and six chemical precursors used to make explosive devices, FBI officials told reporters. His long-standing interest in science and doing scientific experiments did not raise suspicions among his parents, notes Reuters.