Douglas update brings anger
Lawmakers express frustration at FBI’s lack of explanation for failures
The FBI updated members of Congress on Tuesday on the agency’s investigation into how it mishandled two warning calls about the Parkland school shooter, but did not satisfy the lawmakers’ need to fully understand what went wrong.
The meeting “raised more questions than it answered,” U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Ponte Vedra Beach, said in a Twitter post after the closeddoor briefing in Washington. “We should have more answers 20 days after the shooting. This was clearly a major failure and Americans deserve swift accountability and reform.”
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, said little new information was released or any new strategies to avoid the errors that preceded the Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which killed 17.
“A very specific lead was given to the FBI, and they just botched it,” Krishnamoorthi said upon leaving the meeting. “Right now we have to find out why that happened. Most important for me is: How do we prevent this from happening again, and how do we actively figure out who is on the verge of committing a similar school shooting or any other act of terror like this?”
Two calls came to the FBI before the shooting, warning that a Nikolas Cruz could cause serious violence.
In September a Mississippi man called the FBI saying a YouTube user named “nikolas cruz” had posted, “Im going to be a professional school shooter.” The FBI said it did not have enough information to identify Cruz or even what state he lived in.
But the second call in early January to the FBI’s Public Access Line — or “PAL” tipline — was so detailed it lasted more than 13 minutes, provided the teen’s name, described his guns, and guided the call taker to Cruz’s social media account where he wrote: “I want to kill people.”
The caller, described as someone close to Cruz, warned that: “he’s going to explode,” and worried about him “getting into a school and just shooting the place up.”
The tip should have been considered a “potential threat to life,” but the information was not forwarded to the FBI’s Miami office for investigation, the agency revealed soon after the shooting.
Two days after the massacre, FBI Director Christopher Wray issued a public apology, saying the agency deeply regretted mishandling the call and was reviewing its processes for responding to information from the public.
“We need to figure out what needs to be changed at the FBI, especially at the lowest levels where leads are coming in, to make sure that when there’s a lead that’s as specific, as substantive, as the ones that they received, that action is taken right away,” Krishnamoorthi said.
He and other members of Congress urged the FBI to act swiftly.
“We can’t wait,” he said. “We can’t stall in any way. Let the chips fall where they may.”
South Florida Rep. Ted Deutch, whose district includes Stoneman Douglas High, said the FBI on Tuesday acknowledged some confusion in the protocols it uses to screen tips and is working to clarify them.
He said he stressed to the FBI that the families of the dead children and staff members need to hear directly from the FBI as quickly as possible on what the ongoing investigation has found and when it will be concluded.
“The families deserve the opportunity to hear from the FBI directly, exactly where things stand,” Deutch said.
In August last year, the FBI boasted on its website that the Public Access Line had received more than 2 million calls since it started in 2012, resulting in “thousands of actionable tips and leads for special agents and intelligence analysts.”
In those first eight months of 2017 alone, the line took more than 617,000 calls, fielded by “intake specialists.”
Tuesday’s Congressional briefing was provided to members of two House committees: Judiciary, and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
In a letter, the chairmen of the panels had asked that the FBI brief the committees on “the tip, protocols and the FBI’s actions before and after the incident.”