Trump rally shooter sought info on attempted killing of foreign leader
FBI officials said former president Donald Trump has agreed to be interviewed by agents investigating the shooting at his campaign rally.



U.S. Secret Service agents remove former president Donald Trump from the stage after a shooting during a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein
Updated July 29, 2024 at 4:34 p.m. EDT|Published July 29, 2024 at 11:01 a.m. EDT

The gunman who tried to kill former president Donald Trump conducted internet searches related to power plants, mass shooting events and the attempted assassination this year of Slovakia’s prime minister, FBI officials said Monday, offering new details about what they described as the gunman’s “careful planning” for the attack.

The details, including Thomas Matthew Crooks’s interest in the attack on Prime Minister Robert Fico, were released as agents continue to unpack data pulled from the gunman’s cellphones, laptop and other digital devices. Fico was gravely wounded in the May shooting.

In a call with reporters on Monday, FBI officials said Trump has agreed to an interview about the assassination attempt against him at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pa. ... “We want to get his perspective as to what he observed,” said Kevin Rojek, who heads the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, which is leading the investigation. “It is a standard interview we would do for any other victim of crime.”

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Samuel Oakford contributed to this report.

By Devlin Barrett
Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department, and is the author of "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election." He was part of reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 and 2022. In 2017 he was a co-finalist for the Pulitzer for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer for International Reporting. Twitter https://twitter.com/DevlinBarrett

By Perry Stein
Perry Stein covers the Justice Department and FBI for The Washington Post. She previously covered D.C. education. Before she joined The Post in 2015, she was a staff writer for Washington City Paper and wrote for the Miami Herald. Twitter https://twitter.com/perrystein