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A Monday morning announcement from the FBI revealed that President Trump will sit for a “victim interview” with the agency as part of the investigation into his attempted assassination.
Although the date of the sit-down is unknown, Kevin Rojek, the FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Pittsburgh field office, said it will be “a standard victim interview we do for any other victim of crime,” per ABC.
The agency provided an update to reporters regarding the investigation, including Thomas Matthew Crooks’ apparent premeditation. ABC reported that Rojek told reporters, “We believe his actions also show a careful planning ahead of the rally,” especially online.
However, according to the agency, Crooks did not behave in a manner that would have led anyone around him to believe he was planning on assassinating President Trump. Recent media reporting revealed that Crooks requested off work that day but told his coworkers that he would return to work the following day, according to The Independent.
His online search history revealed that he researched the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other types of mass casualty events, as well as basic searches of President Trump and Biden.
Rojek said his search history was “related to power plants mass shooting events, information on improvised explosive devices, and the attempted assassination of the Slovakian prime minister earlier this year,” according to ABC.
The FBI ran through the timeline of Crooks’s activities leading up to the assassination attempt. The ABC report stated that Crooks scoped out the rally site for about an hour beginning at 11:00 a.m. on the day of the event. He went home at 1:30 p.m., retrieved the rifle, and told his family he was going to the shooting range. At around 3:45 p.m., Crooks showed back up at the rally site and began flying a drone nearby for about 10 minutes. He was identified as a suspicious person just after 5:00 p.m. when a local SWAT officer snapped a photo of him, according to the FBI.
Crooks was seen using a range finder at around 5:30 p.m. while reading the news on his cell phone. He was spotted walking near the building he would eventually climb upon around 5:56 p.m., per ABC. A dash camera video from a local police vehicle recorded Crooks on the roof of the AGR building at 6:08 p.m., just three minutes before he began shooting.
Explosive devices found in his vehicle were “capable of exploding,” according to Rojek, but the receivers found on Crooks’s body were not activated, ABC reported.
Politico reported that Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, said on Sunday that Crooks’s plan “was to assassinate the president, create a diversion by blowing up his vehicle on the other side of the property, and then he could escape.”