Florida school shooting: FBI under pressure over failure to act

Pressure is mounting on the FBI over the agency’s failure to act on a tip that Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz might carry out an attack.

Florida Governor Rick Scott said the agency’s director must resign, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review, lamenting FBI “failures”.

Some of those close to the 17 victims of Wednesday’s shooting also voiced dismay at the FBI’s actions.

President Donald Trump on Friday met survivors of the attack in Parkland.

Mr Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visited a hospital and later the local sheriff’s office, thanking them for their response to the tragedy.

“What a great job you’ve done,” Mr Trump told law enforcement officials, adding: “I hope you get credit for it because believe me, you deserve it.”

Nikolas Cruz, 19, has confessed to carrying out Wednesday’s attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland and has been charged with 17 counts of murder.

It was the deadliest US school shooting since 2012 and has re-ignited debates about gun control, with many students from the school weighing in.

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What triggered strong criticism of the FBI?

It comes after the Federal Bureau of Investigation admitted it did not properly follow up on a warning about Mr Cruz.

On 5 January a person close to the suspect contacted the FBI tipline to provide “information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behaviour, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting”, an FBI statement said.

The FBI said that information should have been assessed as a potential threat to life and passed on to the Miami field office but that “we have determined these protocols were not followed”.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau was “still investigating the facts”.

“I am committed to getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular matter, as well as reviewing our processes for responding to information that we receive from the public,” he said.

“We have spoken with victims and families, and deeply regret the additional pain this causes all those affected by this horrific tragedy,” he added.

The 5 January tip was not the only information the FBI received about Nikolas Cruz.

In September, a Mississippi man reported to the law enforcement agency a disturbing comment left on a YouTube video by a user called “nikolas cruz” which said: “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”

Ben Bennight said he spoke to FBI representatives for about 20 minutes and that they contacted him again following the Parkland shooting.

The FBI on Thursday said they had conducted “checks” at the time, but were unable to identify the person behind the comment.

What’s being said about the FBI?

Governor Scott said in a statement that “the FBI’s failure to take action against this killer is unacceptable”.

He said that an apology would never give families “the answers they desperately need” and said that Mr Wray had to resign.

“We constantly promote ‘see something, say something,’ and a courageous person did just that to the FBI. And the FBI failed to act,” he said.

At a funeral for 18-year-old victim Meadow Pollack, Jeff Richman, a family friend, questioned the value of the FBI’s apology.

“The FBI apologised? Tell that to families,” he told Reuters news agency.

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Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that the FBI’s “failures” had led to “tragic consequences”, and announced a review at the justice department and FBI into how “indications of potential violence” are responded to.

The FBI has been criticised before for having been aware of a possible threat and then failing to thwart an attack:

• The gunman of the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas was known to the FBI
• The bureau had information about one of the two brothers behind the deadly Boston Marathon bombing in 2013
• The gunman who killed 49 people in a gay club in Orlando, Florida, in 2016 was on the FBI’s radar

In 2016, the FBI received about 1,300 tips a day through its website, which is staffed around the clock by two dozen people.

In addition to online tips, FBI field offices receive dozens of calls. About 100 of the tips are considered “actionable”.

What do we know about the suspect?

Mr Cruz had been expelled from the school he has confessed to attacking and some students said they had previously joked he would one day “shoot up the school”.

One former schoolmate, Chad Williams, said Mr Cruz was an “outcast” who was “crazy about guns”.

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His interest in weapons was apparent on his social media profiles, which the Broward County sheriff said were “very, very disturbing”.

Mr Cruz had reportedly been treated for mental health issues at a clinic.

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13 Russians Indicted as Mueller Reveals Effort to Aid Trump Campaign

The Justice Department said Mr. Mueller’s work was not complete. The indictment does not address the hacking of Democratic email systems or whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct the F.B.I. investigation into Russian interference. Mr. Mueller is negotiating with the president’s lawyers over the terms of a possible interview.

The Russian operation began four years ago, well before Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, a fact that he quickly seized on in his defense. “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President,” he wrote on Twitter. “The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong – no collusion!”

But Mr. Trump’s statement ignored the government’s conclusion that, by 2016, the Russians were “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump” and disparaging Hillary Clinton, his opponent. Working out of the office in St. Petersburg, the Russians described waging “information warfare against the United States of America,” according to court documents.

Mr. Mueller has gathered extensive evidence of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign: Mr. Trump’s eldest son met with a Russian lawyer in hopes of receiving political dirt on Mrs. Clinton; one adviser has admitted being tipped off in advance to Russian hacking of Democratic emails; another was in contact with a Twitter account used by Russian hackers; a federal judge found probable cause that a third adviser was an unlawful Russian agent. And the Trump campaign repeatedly and falsely denied any contacts with Russia.

Whether any of that violated federal law is the weightiest question facing Mr. Mueller, and Friday’s indictment did not answer it. But it painted a picture of a Russian operation that was multipronged, well financed and relentless.

Russian operatives traveled across the United States to gather intelligence and foment political discord. They worked with an unidentified American who advised them to focus their efforts on what they viewed as “purple” election battleground states, including Colorado, Virginia and Florida, the indictment said.

In August 2016, prosecutors said, Russians posed as Americans and coordinated with Trump campaign staff to organize rallies in Florida.

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Such anecdotes are rare examples of how intelligence agencies work covertly to influence political outcomes abroad. The C.I.A. has conducted such operations for decades, but both Mr. Mueller’s indictment and an intelligence assessment last year present a startling example — unprecedented in its scope and audacity — of a foreign government working to help elect an American president.

The indictment does not explicitly say the Russian government sponsored the effort, but American intelligence officials have publicly said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed and oversaw it. The indictment notes that two of the Russian firms involved hold Russian government contracts.

“This is clearly a message document,” Robert S. Litt, the former general counsel to the director of national intelligence, said of the indictment. “Mueller wants to end the debate over whether there was Russian interference in the election.”

The Russian nationals were accused of working with the Internet Research Agency, which had a budget of millions of dollars and was designed to reach millions of Americans. The defendants were charged with carrying out a massive fraud against the American government and conspiring to obstruct enforcement of federal laws.

None of the defendants were arrested — Russia does not generally extradite its citizens to the United States. But prosecutors use such indictments to name and shame operatives, making it harder for them to work undetected in the future. If they travel abroad, they risk capture and extradition.

Russian computer specialists, divided into day teams and night teams, created hundreds of social media accounts that eventually attracted hundreds of thousands of online followers. They posed as Christian activists, anti-immigration groups and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. One account posed as the Tennessee Republican Party and generated hundreds of thousands of followers, prosecutors said.

Separate divisions of the Internet Research Agency were in charge of graphics, data analysis and information technology, according to the indictment.

“I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people,” one of the Russians, Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, wrote as the operation was being unmasked.

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Their tasks included undermining Mrs. Clinton by supporting her Democratic primary campaign rival, Bernie Sanders, prosecutors said. Those instructions were detailed in internal documents: “Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them).” Mr. Mueller identified 13 digital advertisements paid for by the Russian operation. All of them attacked Mrs. Clinton or promoted Mr. Trump.

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“Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is,” one advertisement stated.

In summer 2016, as Mrs. Clinton appeared headed for a decisive general election victory, Russian operatives promoted allegations of Democratic voter fraud. That echoed Mr. Trump’s own message that he was the victim of a rigged political system.

After the election, the Russians kept up their efforts to foment dissent. In November, they staged two rallies in New York on the same day. One had the theme, “Show your support for President-Elect Trump.” The other was called, “Trump is NOT my President.”

The indictment does not say that Russia changed the outcome of the election, a fact that Mr. Rosenstein noted repeatedly. American intelligence officials have said they have no way of calculating the effect of the Russian influence.

The Federal Election Commission started its own inquiry into the Internet Research Agency last year, according to documents obtained by The New York Times, after Facebook revealed that the firm had paid more than $100,000 for politically themed ads, including ones promoting “Down With Hillary” rallies.

The commission’s inquiry was prompted by a complaint filed by the government watchdog group Common Cause that claimed that the Facebook ads violated the prohibition on foreign spending, as well as requirements mandating the disclosure of campaign spending.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told the RBC news website that Russian officials have not familiarized themselves with the document yet.

Mr. Mueller also revealed Friday that Richard Pinedo, of Santa Paula, Calif., had pleaded guilty to identity fraud in a case involving the sale of bank accounts over the internet. According to court papers, some of Mr. Pinedo’s customers are foreigners who are targets of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry. Mr. Pinedo has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with Mr. Mueller, court documents show.

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