Former US President Donald Trump has agreed to be heard by the FBI in an investigation into the attack on him in Pennsylvania, according to a special agent of the US agency.
The expected hearing with the Republican presidential candidate is part of the FBI's standard protocol for talking to victims in the course of its criminal investigations.
On Friday, the FBI had revealed that Trump was hit by a bullet or a fragment of a bullet during the assassination attempt on 13 July at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
‘We want to know his perspective on what he observed,’ said Kevin Rojek, FBI special agent in Pittsburgh.
‘This is a standard hearing with the victim, as we would with any other victim of crime in any other circumstances,’ he explained.
Through some 450 interviews, the FBI has developed a portrait of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, which reveals that he was a ‘highly intelligent’ but reclusive 20-year-old whose main social circle was his family and who maintained few friends and acquaintances throughout his life.
The FBI has been unable to discover why the perpetrator chose to attack Trump, but investigators believe that the shooting was the result of extensive planning, including the purchase in recent months of chemical precursors that investigators believe were used to create the explosive devices found on his body.
According to the US agency, Crooks also searched online for information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power stations and the attempted assassination of Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico in May.
The FBI also said that on 6 July - the day Crooks registered to attend Trump's rally - he Googled: ‘How far was Oswald from Kennedy?’, in reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman who killed President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963.
The parents of the perpetrator have been ‘extremely co-operative’ with investigators, said Rojek, explaining that they had no knowledge of the preparation of the attack, in a version that the FBI considers credible.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
