President Trump criticizes FBI over failed probe on Florida shooter; says ‘too much time' spent on Russia
President Donald Trump late Saturday night criticized the FBI for failing to act on a tip that might have prevented the recent massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, and said the bureau was devoting too much time to its investigation of his presidential campaign.
“Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter,” Trump said in a Tweet. “This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”
The president’s comment marks the first time he has weighed in on the bureau’s failure to investigate a Jan. 5 tip about 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who this week was charged with shooting and killing 17 people at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The FBI acknowledged the tip on Friday, saying a person close to Cruz had warned a call taker on the bureau’s general tipline that the young man had a desire to kill and might attack a school. The bureau said that information was not passed to agents in the field for investigation - an apparent breach of protocol.
The resources devoted to the Russia case should not have had any direct effect on the FBI’s response in Florida because the tip about Cruz, although reported to a call-center supervisor, never reached agents who would do an investigation, officials have said.
Still, the incident comes at a precarious time for the FBI. Conservative lawmakers already had been reviewing the bureau’s handling of two hotly charged political matters: the probe of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election; and the now-closed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
On Friday, the chairs of three powerful congressional committees that oversee the bureau sent letters demanding briefings on the FBI’s Florida misstep, while others lambasted the bureau for its apparent failure.
“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.
While lawmakers and federal law enforcement officials assessed their response, state authorities were left to prepare for one of the state’s highest-profile prosecutions in recent memory. Michael Satz, the state attorney for Broward County, said Saturday that the incident was “the type of case the death penalty was designed for,” though his office would not formally announce whether it will seek such a sentence so families had time to mourn.
The incident comes at a precarious time for the FBI. Conservative lawmakers already had been reviewing the bureau’s handling of two hotly charged political matters: the probe of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election and the now-closed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Trump has been highly critical of investigators’ actions in both of those cases, and some in the bureau have worried his persistent attacks might do lasting damage to the premier federal law enforcement agency’s reputation.
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.
Scott’s call, though, did not immediately seem to gain wide traction. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi a Republican who, like Scott, is an ally of Trump, 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.”
Republican leaders who oversee the FBI, while highly critical of the bureau, also did not immediately call for the director to step down.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chair of the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Wray demanding that the bureau brief the committees by no later than March 2 on why the agency did not act on a January tip about the suspected shooter and his propensity for violence. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also asked that the bureau brief his committee staffers by the end of next week.
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