Q&A: NY bomb case shows FBI’s reach is limited

WASHINGTON — The man accused in the Manhattan bombing was flagged for an interview with Customs officials in the course of an overseas trip, was accused two years ago of stabbing his brother and had once been angrily described by his father as a terrorist.

None of that was enough to keep Ahmad Khan Rahami on the FBI’s radar for long — and it’s not clear it should have been.

The case illustrates the difficulties investigators face in identifying and stopping individuals who might be violent extremists.

Constitutional protections permit people to hold abhorrent views — and even view jihadist videos — without automatically coming under investigation. Finite resources mean more intrusive investigative tactics, such as round-the-clock surveillance, are generally reserved for those thought to be imminent threats or those conceiving an attack. Preliminary FBI inquiries like the one conducted in Rahami’s case are, by design, not meant to be open-ended.

Some questions and answers about the investigation into Rahami and how the FBI conducts terrorism investigations.

Q. HOW DID RAHAMI BECOME KNOWN TO THE FBI?

A: The FBI says it opened an assessment on Rahami in 2014 following a domestic disturbance in which he was accused of stabbing a brother, when the agency was alerted to his father’s concerns that he might be a terrorist.

The elder Rahami told The Associated Press he told agents about his son’s apparent radicalization, but the FBI says he never shared those concerns, and law enforcement officials say he backed off his earlier characterization of his son.

The FBI says it checked its databases and reviewed Rahami’s travel records and found nothing tying him to terrorism. The review was closed with no further action.

Rahami, an Afghan-born naturalized U.S. citizen, traveled in recent years to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The length of one trip to the region automatically triggered a secondary interview with Customs and Border Protection following his return in 2014. Details of his trip and his interview were forwarded to the agency intelligence center charged with identifying potentially high-risk travelers. The advisory was not sent as an urgent alert but a more routine notification that was then distributed to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

It’s not yet clear that any obvious red flags were missed, through the FBI is certainly looking at its past interactions.

Q: WHAT STEPS ARE THE FBI PERMITTED TO TAKE IN TERRORISM INVESTIGATIONS?

A: That depends entirely on how much information investigators have to indicate terrorist activities.

An assessment, the type of inquiry used in Rahami’s case two years ago, is the most basic and least-intrusive of FBI reviews and is meant to last only a matter of weeks.

Agents checking out a tip may peruse publicly available records, check government documents and request information from the public. Though agents may seek extensions, assessments are meant to resolve in a matter of weeks with agents either closing out the inquiry or finding sufficient grounds to continue the review.

If the FBI opened a full investigation each time it conducted an assessment, Gomez said, there would be long-term inquiries on many individuals for whom there’s minimal basis for suspicion — a prospect Gomez said would be “repugnant to people.”

More formal investigative steps — surveillance and recording of phone calls — require a higher level of approval and a firmer basis for suspecting wrongdoing.

Q: HOW IS IT THAT INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE KNOWN TO THE FBI LATER GO ON TO COMMIT VIOLENCE?

A: This is not the first instance in which someone who had been on the FBI’s radar went on to be accused of an attack.

The FBI investigated Omar Mateen, the Orlando nightclub shooter, for 10 months in 2013 after boasting of mutual acquaintances with the Boston Marathon bombers and making statements to co-workers that suggested he had radical, violent intentions.

Agents conducted surveillance, contacted confidential informants and even undertook multiple interviews but ultimately found nothing to justify continued scrutiny. The FBI looked into him again the next year as part of a separate investigation into a suicide bomber who attended the same Florida mosque.

FBI Director James Comey said in May that the FBI had “north of 1,000” cases in which agents were trying to evaluate a person’s level of radicalization and potential for violence.

“We are looking for needles in a nationwide hay stack, but we are also called upon to figure out which pieces of hay might some day become needles,” Comey said in June when discussing the FBI’s past interactions with Mateen.

“That,” he said, “is hard work.”