A bombshell new report released by the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz on Wednesday revealed that during former President Barack Hussein Obama’s tenure in office from 2009 to 2017, the agency repeatedly missed clear-cut opportunities to stop terror attacks such as the 2009 Fort Hood shooting.
“Following the 2009 attack at a military facility in Fort Hood, Texas, the FBI requested an independent review of its actions associated with its assessment of Nidal Hasan, the individual who conducted the attack,” the report reads.
“This review determined that shortcomings in the FBI’s policies and procedures related to counterterrorism assessments contributed to delays and potential missed opportunities to mitigate Hasan’s actions.”
DEVELOPING: New IG report “…we found at least six attacks committed in the United States by individuals who the FBI had previously assessed or investigated…” including 2009 Fort Hood, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2016 Pulse Nightclub READ: https://t.co/0zNzEHTZSm @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/msBeTbZxEp
— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) March 4, 2020
Similar conclusions were found for:
- … the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings
- … the 2015 Curtis Culwell Center attacks
- … the 2016 Pulse nightclub shootings
- … the 2016 New York and New Jersey bombings
- … the early 2017 Fort Lauderdale airport shootings
“Since September 11, 2001, [Homegrown Violent Extremists] have carried out over 20 attacks in the United States, some of which occurred after the FBI closed a counterterrorism investigation or assessment on the individual,” the report continues.
“Following these attacks, the FBI conducted reviews and determined there were weaknesses in its HVE assessment processes. However, we found that the FBI has not taken sufficient action to address these weaknesses.”
An additional review conducted in 2017 found that of the potential terrorist threats identified from 2014 to 2016, the FBI failed to “take adequate action on nearly 40 percent of” the cases.
As noted by Sen. Rand Paul in a tweet posted following the publication of the IG’s report, many of these missed opportunities occurred under then-disgraced FBI Director James Comey’s leadership:
When I asked James comey after the Pulse mass shooting if in retrospect the FBI concluded too soon that Mateen was not a threat. The arrogant Comey refused to admit any mistake & maintained the opinion that Mateen was not a threat. Comey: tell that to the 49 people who died. pic.twitter.com/JSyduiUTjm
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 6, 2020
The tweet was accurate.
Following a congressional hearing in September of 2016 about the Pulse nightclub shooting, the Associated Press confirmed that during the televised hearing, Comey “did not concede that anything should have been done differently or that any red flags were missed.”
Moreover, he reportedly caught an attitude when questioned by Paul about what has since been confirmed by Horowitz as the FBI’s history of shoddy work.
“The questions arose because the FBI has said it investigated Orlando gunman Omar Mateen a few years before the June shooting and interviewed him multiple times. The FBI in 2014 also looked into Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Afghan-born U.S. citizen accused in the explosion, but found nothing that tied him to terrorism,” the AP reported.
“Two senators, in particular, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Kelly Ayotte, said they were alarmed that both individuals had at one point been on the FBI’s radar but were not intercepted.”
Yet when questioned about these facts, Comey reportedly replied, “Your facts are wrong.”
Fact-check: FALSE.
.@FBI Dir. Comey gets saucy w/ @RandPaul on supposed examples of when FBI didn’t admit it made a mistake. “Your facts are wrong, senator.”
— Paul D. Shinkman (@PDShinkman) September 27, 2016
Four years later, the FBI has finally been forced to bend the knee and admit the truth.
“The FBI has acknowledged that various weaknesses related to its assessment process may have impacted its ability to fully investigate certain counterterrorism assessment subjects, who later committed terrorist acts in the United States,” Horowitz’s report continues.
According to Lewis Schiliro, a former head of the FBI’s New York field office, the blame for these “weaknesses” lie with the fat cats up top, not field agents.
“Agents get hundreds of cases a day, and you are limited where you can apply your resources,” he said in a statement to The Washington Times.
He added that the latest IG report is yet another black eye for the agency.
“Anytime there is criticism, of course, it undermines the public faith in the bureau, and that can never be good because the FBI depends on the public trust,” he said.
It doesn’t help that Comey, the bureau’s former director, and his top dogs spent years undermining the public’s faith via their incessant lies and falsehoods.
Read the full report below:
What’s unclear from Horowitz’s report is whether Obama’s attempts to block his administration from investigating Islamic radicalism played any role in the FBI’s repeated blunders.
The late Philip Haney, a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower, began revealing in late 2015 and early 2016 that during his time at the agency, Obama had curtailed some investigations because of concerns about racism.
“After leaving my 15-year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness – and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack,” he wrote in February of 2016.
The problem, he explained, was that Obama had been more concerned with not offending the Muslim community than with protecting the American people.
For instance, Haney cited what happened in 2009, when an Islamic terrorist almost succeeded in blowing up a Northwest Airlines Flight headed from the Netherlands to Detroit.
Afterward, Obama publicly lashed out out DHS for having failed to “connect the dots.” But as noted by Haney, it was Obama’s own actions that had made it near impossible for federal officials to connect any dots anymore.
“Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS),” he explained. “These types of records are the basis for any ability to ‘connect dots.’”
But according to Obama, the records were essentially racist, as they’d been accrued through what he believed to have been racial profiling.
While these facts weren’t addressed in Horowitz’s report, they remain relevant given that all of the six attacks cited by him were committed by Islamists.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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