Name: FBI: Suspect wrote he had 'opportunity to take out' Kirk
Uploaded: 2025-09-16T11:49:20.000Z
Duration: 7 min 17 s
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Authorities are investigating the killing of the conservative political activist, Charlie Kirk.

Basic passive voice

The 22-year-old suspect in the case, Tyler Robinson, is scheduled to appear in a Utah courtroom tomorrow.

The FBI revealing that the suspect wrote a note before the shooting saying he had the opportunity to take out Kirk and planned to act.

Joining us now is CNN senior law enforcement analyst and former FBI deputy director, Andrew McCabe.

So Andrew, I want to play some of what director Kash Patel said just this morning.

The suspect wrote a note saying I have the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it.

That note was written before the shooting.

Evidence of existence, we now have learned, existed before the shooting, was in the location in the suspect and partner's home.

But we have since learned that the note, even though it has been destroyed, we have found forensic evidence of the note and we have confirmed what that note says because of our aggressive interview posture at the FBI.

So help us understand what that means exactly.

I'm not sure what aggressive interview posture means.

It's not something I'm familiar with, but what the director is basically saying is their investigation, which has spent a good deal of time apparently focusing on the shooter's residence, which he shared with the person I think he's referred to as his partner.

We're told from Utah state officials that that person has been very cooperative, seems to be the only witness that they've identified as being continually cooperative.

And that person we know has shared access to their computer and phone devices with the investigators.

And I would suspect that that access led them to be able to recover messages that were exchanged between the two of them that had been deleted, but not permanently removed from their devices.

So that's great evidence, but it is evidence of something that we already knew.

We know this person, Tyler Robinson, shot Charlie Kirk, and this just goes to his planning, his premeditation of that act.

Yeah, based on the evidence that they've provided both.

The Utah governor, as you know, Spencer Cox, says the suspect in this case was radicalized in what he's describing as a fairly short amount of time.

In your experience, what does that timeline look like and how does it happen?

So Wolf, this is not a satisfying answer, I'm sorry, but it is different for every mass shooter, every school shooter, every terrorist, any individual who is compelled to engage in these radical acts of violence.

For whatever reason, they go through their own personal radicalization period.

Sometimes it's at the encouragement and with the direction of a mentor, a religious figure, someone who is pushing them in that direction.

And other times it's entirely solitary, people who spend a lot of time on the internet consuming radical propaganda, whether that's from a terrorist organization or just really extreme violence and points of view that they find on social media.

So all these things have different impacts on people who are pretty typically isolated, alienated.

They have their own grievances that they bring to this radicalization process and all that boils together in a very toxic mixture that leads us to a situation like we had last Wednesday.

Right, and we're learning more about the allusions to memes and video games on the bullet cases left behind.

Walk us through how this sort of dark internet culture radicalizes people.

Yeah, so I mean, there's been so much talk about this in an effort to try to understand this individual's political desires, preference, what have you.

I think the messages on the bullet casings are really significant when you look at them in this context.

So initially, most of us who are not spending all of our time in video games and video messaging applications and things like that and like really trawling those areas of the very male, very violent, somewhat extreme kind of communities, we read some of the messages on the bullets and they seem to indicate one thing to us.

And then you hear, well, no, in the context of this particular video game, Helldivers, that might mean the opposite.

At the end of the day, none of that is very helpful for investigators.

Investigators depend on clear, persuasive, unassailable evidence.

And the unassailable evidence in this case is that this young man publicly murdered Charlie Kirk, who was a known, a widely known conservative political figure.

That is really all we, that's the only thing we need to know at this point.

And trying to decipher more detail about his motives from things like the bullet casing messages, I just find it not to be particularly persuasive.

We do know that the governor has said there is more information about his backgrounds and his political leanings that will be coming out tomorrow when he is charged in court.

So we'll likely learn some more that'll add to the picture.

Right, and just to follow up, authorities are alleging he did kill Charlie Kirk.

The charges are set to be filed tomorrow and then he'll appear in court.

But I wanted to get your take on the roommate here because you heard the governor of Utah, Governor Cox, say that the roommate was shocked about this.

The roommate has been cooperating with authorities and didn't have any idea this was happening.

What role do you see the roommate having in this investigation?

I was a bit surprised when, in the initial press conference, when they announced that they had this person in custody, they very quickly talked about not having a prosecutorial interest in the roommate, which I thought was a little bit odd at that early juncture in the investigation.

The fact that that person is continuing to cooperate is a good sign.

The fact that they haven't been charged yet indicates that investigators haven't found a really clear kind of smoking gun piece of evidence that ties the roommate to the planning or the execution of the shooting.

And so that person may very well stay in this status of cooperating witness.

But as the investigation gets deeper and deeper and they start, like we talked about earlier, recovering deleted messages off of devices, it's always possible that their view of this person could change.

And so I think we have to leave that possibility out there.

Right now, they seem to be on a pretty clear path helping the authorities, but you really never know where that's gonna end up.

All right, Andrew McCabe, thank you so much.