At the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump told the harrowing story of the attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pa. He prefaced his deeply personal account with the statement that he wouldn’t tell it again.
However, Trump will have to relate that story one more time because he has agreed to allow the FBI to interview him about the assassination attempt as part of its investigation. It’s a routine feature of criminal investigations for the FBI, reports the Associated Press.
“We want to get his perspective on what he observed,” Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, told the AP. “It is a standard victim interview like we would do for any other victim of crime, under any other circumstances.”
The bureau has already conducted some 450 interviews in its investigation, most of which sought to obtain a profile of Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. FBI agents have said that Crooks’ parents have been “extremely cooperative” in speaking to them, and the FBI believes that the parents had no knowledge of the research and planning that their son undertook.
“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 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 use of a drone about 200 yards (180 meters) from the rally site in the hours before the event,” the AP reports.
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Agents have confirmed that Crooks researched mass shootings, homemade explosive devices, and the attempted assassination of Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia. He also searched how far away Lee Harvey Oswald was from John F. Kennedy when he assassinated the president in 1963.
On Friday, the FBI announced its conclusion that a bullet indeed struck the Trump in the ear. The agency’s short statement read, “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.” The statement came after FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress on Wednesday that he was unsure whether a bullet or a piece of shrapnel struck Trump.
The FBI isn’t the only government entity trying to get to the bottom of the Trump assassination attempt. The House Oversight Committee held a contentious hearing last week to determine Secret Service failures at the Butler rally. That hearing led both parties to condemn Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who subsequently resigned.
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