Senators press FBI director on response to terror threat

WASHINGTON—Republican senators pressed FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday about whether anything more could have been done to prevent recent acts of extremist violence, including the Orlando nightclub massacre and the Manhattan bombing this month.

Comey said the Federal Bureau of Investigation admits mistakes when it makes them, but he did not agree that anything should have been done differently or that any red flags were missed.

The questions arose because the FBI has said it investigated Orlando gunman Omar Mateen a few years before the June shooting and interviewed him as part of that probe.

The FBI in 2014 also looked into Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Afghan-born US citizen accused in the explosion, but found nothing that tied him to terrorism.

Two senators, in particular, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said

Spy chief says the Federal Bureau of Investigation admits mistakes when it makes them, but he did not agree that anything should have been done differently or that any red flags were missed

they were alarmed that both individuals had at one point been on the FBI’s radar but were not intercepted.

Questions

“What more do we need to do? What are the lessons learned, and if you need additional support, we need to know about it very quickly,” Ayotte said at a hearing of the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee.

Paul, one of the Senate’s leading civil liberties champions, said he was troubled that the FBI appeared to often seek new tools but didn’t seem to adequately use the ones they had.

Ayotte said she thought it was “obvious” that FBI agents in their earlier investigation of Mateen should have checked to see if he was saying anything online about terrorism, which Comey said he didn’t believe had been done — though he did note that the FBI had used other investigative methods to keep tabs on him.

Comey pushed back against the criticism, telling Paul that he had his facts wrong in characterizing the FBI’s investigations into both Mateen and Rahami. He said he had commissioned a review of the FBI’s past interactions with Mateen, who killed 49 people inside a gay nightclub, and would be doing the same with Rahami.

“We’re going to go back and look very carefully at the way we encountered him, and we will find the appropriate (forum) to give you that transparency about what we did well, what we could’ve done better, what we’ve learned from it,” Comey said.