FBI was warned twice about teen gunman
Jan. 5 tip from person who knew him wasn’t passed to Florida agents
Parkland, Fla. — The FBI received two alarming tips about Nikolas Cruz in the past six months: Someone who knew him well believed he was capable of murdering teachers and students. And an online commenter using the handle “nikolas cruz” professed his desire to become a “professional school shooter.”
But somehow no one at the FBI connected the dots or shared information about Cruz with the agents who might have stopped him before Wednesday, when he killed 17 people at a high school in Broward County.
The day following the massacre, the FBI said it had no way to trace the chilling online comment, flagged in September by a tipster in Mississippi, to South Florida.
Then, in a shocking admission Friday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the tip from the person close to Cruz — delivered in a Jan. 5 phone call to a bureau hotline — was never passed along to the FBI’s field office in Miami, as official protocol required.
The inability of federal law enforcement to identify Cruz exposes a disturbing lack of communication within the FBI, as well as a cursory initial inquiry that should have been pursued more aggressively, according to law enforcement sources and grieving survivors.
If the leads had been passed along to federal agents in South Florida, “they would have run them to ground and possibly prevented the school shootings,” said a law enforcement official who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation.
A former federal agent agreed:
The latest indictment does not focus on the hacking but instead centers on a social media propaganda effort that began in 2014 and continued past the election, with the goal of producing distrust in the American political process. Trump himself has been reluctant to acknowledge the interference and any role that it might have played in propelling him to the White House.
The indictment does not allege that any American knowingly participated in Russian meddling, or suggest that Trump campaign associates had more than “unwitting” contact with some of the defendants who posed as Americans during election season.
But it does lay out a vast and wide-ranging Russian effort to sway political opinion in the United States through a strategy that involved creating Internet postings in the names of Americans whose identities had been stolen; staging political rallies while posing as American political activists and paying people in the U.S. to promote or disparage candidates.
While foreign meddling in U.S. campaigns is not new, the indictment for an effort of this scope and digital sophistication is unprecedented.
“This indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the internet,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Friday. “The indictment alleges that the Russian conspirators want to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy. We must not allow them to succeed.”
The 13 Russians are not in custody and not likely to ever face trial. The Justice Department has for years supported indicting foreign defendants in absentia as a way of publicly shaming them and effectively barring them from foreign travel.
The surreptitious campaign was organized by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm that the indictment says sought to conduct “information warfare against the United States of America.”
The company, among three Russian entities named in the indictment, had a multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of workers divided by specialties and assigned to day and night shifts. According to prosecutors, the company was funded by companies controlled by Prigozhin, the wealthy Russian who has been dubbed “Putin’s chef” because his restaurants and catering businesses have hosted the Kremlin leader’s dinners with foreign dignitaries.
Prigozhin said Friday he was not upset by the indictment.
“Americans are very impressionable people,” he was quoted as saying by Russia’s state news agency. They “see what they want to see.”
Also Friday, Mueller announced a guilty plea from a California man who unwittingly sold bank accounts to Russians involved in the interference effort.
The election-meddling organization, looking to conceal its Russian roots, purchased space on computer servers within the U.S., used email accounts from U.S. internet service providers and created and controlled social media pages with huge numbers of followers on divisive issues such as immigration, religion and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Starting in April 2016, the indictment says, the Russian agency bought political ads on social media supporting Trump and opposing Clinton without reporting expenditures to the Federal Election Commission or registering as foreign agents. Among the ads: “JOIN our #HillaryClintonForPrison2016” and “Donald wants to defeat terrorism ... Hillary wants to sponsor it.”
“They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump,” the indictment states.
“The indictment alleges that the Russian conspirators want to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy. We must not allow them to succeed.” ROD ROSENSTEIN, DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL