The FBI's "track record is good" when it comes to investigating and arresting potential terrorists, Sen. Richard Burr said Sunday, even though the agency questioned Pulse Nightclub terror suspect Omar Mateen twice in recent years and determined the evidence was "inconclusive" that he may have been a danger.
"We are in a war against terrorism," the North Carolina Republican, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Fox News Sunday afternoon. "The threshold for trying to identify an individual that might be a member or an arm of a terrorist organization is tough."
The FBI, he noted, has interviewed several people in recent years, and has arrested and prosecuted more than 101 individuals in the United States since January 2015 who were committed to carry out an act of terrorism.
FBI agent Ron Hopper said Sunday that the agency first became aware of Mateen when co-workers at a Florida security company where he was employed complained that he had made inflammatory comments to them about having potential ties with terrorists and then again in 2014 because of possible ties to an American suicide bomber.
And from an intelligence standpoint, Burr said, "I can assure every American that we've got law enforcement and agencies every day combing social media trying to look for comments, the concerns about the individual, a group, or a location."
He added, however, "this is what many of us in the intelligence community have been saying for the last year, if not longer. We have to take this more seriously, eliminate the desire that terrorists have to commit acts in this country. We've got to make sure that we go where they plan and where they start the communications. Because if you look at our track record, we have taken tools away from law enforcement in the last 12 months, not given them more to prevent these acts."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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