How did the FBI miss warning signs from the Pulse shooter?
What impact will it have in Noor Salman's case? Former FBI special agent Chad Jenkins shares his perspective on 'Fox & Friends First.'
How do you know something very much disturbs the left and their narrative? When it is big news, but if you relied on the Google news lineup, or The New York Times front page, you would have no idea it happened.
Case in point: The extraordinary revelation by prosecutors in the trial of the Pulse nightclub shooter’s widow, Noor Salman, that the father of her now-dead terrorist husband was an FBI informant for 11 years.
Almost immediately after the terror attack that left 48 dead and 58 wounded, much like the Parkland shooting, Americans learned that every element of the system worked, except the FBI.
Omar Mateen’s mosque had contacted the FBI issuing concerns about him, and co-workers contacted law enforcement expressing alarm at his comments and behavior.
Mateen was vocal about his support for terrorism, threatened co-workers with death and made sure everyone knew that his family had ties to terrorism.
Yet, the FBI turned a blind eye, and never acted. We wondered, why would the FBI let this maniac go time and time again?
On my radio program, this columnist mused that it appeared obvious that the FBI had other interest in this avowed supporter of terrorism. Was he being set up by the bureau so we could arrest him? Was he an informant? Nothing else explained why the FBI would have chosen not to act against an obviously dangerous man.
Reporting about a lawsuit brought by Pulse victims, the Orlando Sentinel noted in March 2017, “According to the suit, Mateen told a deputy sheriff that he would have the terror group al Qaeda kill the coworker’s family; bragged to a co-worker about being associated with the Boston Marathon bombers; told colleagues that he had family connections to terror group al Qaeda and that he hoped law enforcement would raid his home so he could martyr himself. The suit says Mateen also praised Nidal Hasan, the Army major who shot forty-five people at Fort Hood. … Mateen was interviewed twice by the FBI, but they released him both times.”
Now the inexplicable begins to make sense.
FBI Special Agent Juvenal Martin, Seddique Mateen’s FBI handler, was also assigned to investigate his charge’s son, Omar Mateen, in the midst of the complaints that began to pour in about him. Why the FBI would assign someone with an obvious conflict of interest is stunning.
Imagine, you are running an informant (on which issues we have not been told) and you have his son essentially confessing he’s a wannabe terrorist, the family is tied to terrorists and that he wants to kill people. What happens to your informant if this becomes an issue unto itself?
Instead, as the Orlando Sentinel reported, “FBI Special Agent Juvenal Martin also testified that he considered developing Omar Mateen as an informant after closing an investigation into comments Mateen made at work in 2013 about belonging to terrorist organizations.”
Well, that’ll solve your problem, won’t it?
On the day of the massacre, the FBI admits during its investigation that they found wire transfer receipts to Afghanistan and Turkey in the home of Seddique Mateen. In the lawsuit filed by victims, we also learned that Omar Mateen had searched for cheap tickets to Istanbul.
According to The Hill, in their motion for a mistrial, Ms. Salman’s defense attorneys argue there are two reasons why the prosecution kept this information about their informant secret, “1) Omar Mateen and his father, rather than Ms. Salman, conspired to support [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria]; or 2) the FBI’s focus on Ms. Salman was based on its own motive to avoid responsibility for its failures with its own informant, Seddique Mateen, as well as his son. …”
Omar Mateen’s co-workers at security firm G4S reported that he had made comments about being connected to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, yet Mr. Martin found that the younger Mateen had no ties to terrorism. It would, of course, be extremely inconvenient to find otherwise.
G4S came under some scrutiny after the massacre. Two days after the attack, The Atlantic reported, “The company, which is the largest private security firm in the world, boasts over 600,000 employees, one of whom was Omar Mateen, the man who murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday morning. Mateen had been an employee of the company for nearly nine years, serving most recently as an armed security guard at a gated retirement community in Port St. Lucie, Florida. In the aftermath of the attack, authorities are trying to ascertain how it’s possible that Mateen cleared four background checks, two with the company and two with the FBI, without raising sufficient alarm.”
Nick Short of Security Studies Group reminded us on Twitter that G4S also had/has lucrative contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.
The judge in the Noor Salman case rebuffed her defense motion for a mistrial due to the government withholding the information about their relationship with Omar Mateen’s father, but the American people deserve answers to more questions. A few might include: On what subject was Seddique Mateen an informant? Why was an informant’s handler assigned to investigate the son of that informant? Was Omar Mateen ever actually secured as an informant himself?
This revelation, the Parkland debacle and the series of other shocking events wherein the FBI was aware of the eventual perpetrator yet did nothing, demands an investigation into the FBI as a whole.
What has happened inside the FBI is frightening, and must be dealt with immediately and transparently.
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