Donald Trump has agreed to sit down for a victim interview with the FBI as part of the investigation into the assassination attempt against him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“We want to get his perspective on what he observed,” Kevin Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge for the Pittsburgh field office, told the Associated Press. Rojek said it would be a “standard victim interview, like we would do.”
It is unclear when the interview will take place, and the the former president’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
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On a call with reporters on Monday morning, Rojek released more details about the shooter, Thomas Crooks, but said investigators still have not determined a motive for the assassination attempt.
The bureau also said Crooks purchased a ladder before the shooting but did not bring it with him to gain access the rooftop at the Butler Farm Show Grounds, NBC News reported. The FBI did confirm he used a drone but found no recorded footage on the device.
Investigators also revealed that in the months before the shooting, Crooks searched the internet for the attempted assassination of Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia who survived an assassination attempt in May. Crooks also used aliases to purchase more than two dozen firearms and weapons, The New York Times reported.
The FBI began investigating the crime scene and interviewing witnesses at the Butler rally shortly after the assassination attempt on July 13. FBI Director Christopher Wray sparked an uproar last week after he testified to the House Judiciary Committee that there was “some question about whether or not it was a bullet or shrapnel that hit [Trump’s] ear” during the shooting.
Trump and his campaign pushed back on Wray’s statements before Congress, with the former president himself insisting in a post on Truth Social “no, it was, unfortunately, a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Trump’s former White House physician, released a statement shortly after the testimony insisting that there was no doubt the former president was hit by a bullet. “Congress should correct the record as confirmed by both the hospital and myself. Director Wray is wrong and inappropriate to suggest anything else,” he wrote.
Jackson previously said he examined Trump’s wounded ear in the days following the shooting. However, Trump has not released his official medical record from his treatment at Butler Memorial Hospital.
The FBI reversed this assertion later the same week, releasing a statement confirming “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.”
