FBI faces Congress’ scrutiny over handling of Florida tips

Florida Gov. calls for Wray to resign

The FBI — already facing congressional investigations over its handling of the Russia probe and other political matters — was hit this week with a new batch of inquiries from lawmakers about its failure to act on tips that might have prevented the massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

On Friday, the chairs of three powerful congressional committees that oversee the bureau sent letters demanding briefings on the FBI’s misstep, and others lambasted the bureau for its apparent failure.

The bureau acknowledged that it received a warning on Jan. 5 that Nikolas Cruz had a desire to kill and might attack a school, but the information — from an adult close to Cruz — was not passed to agents in the field for investigation. Separately, in September, the bureau received a tip that a YouTube user with the screen name “nikolas cruz” had written “Im going to be a professional school shooter” in response to an online video, but investigators could not link the account to a person.

Cruz, 19, is accused of walking into Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday with a rifle and killing 17 people.

“The fact that the FBI is investigating this failure is not enough,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said in a statement. “Both the House and Senate need to immediately initiate their own investigations into the FBI’s protocols for ensuring tips from the public about potential killers are followed through. Lawmakers and law enforcement personnel constantly remind the public that ‘if you see something, say something.’ In this tragic case, people close to the shooter said something, and our system utterly failed the families of seventeen innocent souls.”

The FBI declined to comment on the various congressional requests.

Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott seized on the FBI’s failure to investigate Cruz and called Friday for FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign.

“Seventeen innocent people are dead and acknowledging a mistake isn’t going to cut it,” Scott said in a statement.

However, Florida’s Republican Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Fox News, “The people who had that information and did not do anything with it, they are the ones that need to go.”