FBI says it’s trying to rebuild trust after botched tip

WASHINGTON » A top FBI official acknowledged Thursday that the nation’s top law enforcement agency has lost public trust after the revelation that it failed to investigate a potentially life-saving tip before the Florida school shooting, a mistake he suggested was the result of bad judgment.

David Bowdich, the FBI’s acting deputy director, said he personally visited the FBI’s West Virginia call center this week as part of a review of why a warning that the suspect, Nikolas Cruz, had access to guns and a “desire to kill” was not referred to agents in Florida for further investigation.

“People make judgments out on the street every day. Every now and then those judgments may not have been the best judgments based on the information they had at the time,” Bowdich said, adding that the bureau is still trying to determine exactly what went wrong.

The comments, the FBI’s most extensive so far regarding the missed tip, came as the bureau faced a fresh wave of politically charged criticism, this time from the National Rifle Association, whose leaders seized on the failure as a chance to discredit the FBI’s broader work. The FBI is facing unprecedented criticism from President Donald Trump and other Republicans, who have accused it of partisan bias in its investigations of both Hillary Clinton and Trump ties to Russia.

Trump himself raged at the FBI for what he perceived to be a fixation on the Russia investigation at the cost of failing to deter the attack. And Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a Trump ally, called for FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign.