President Donald Trump said had the FBI not spent so much time trying to prove Russian collusion they might have caught onto signals that the Florida school shooter was going to attack and could have apprehended him before he did so.
After a week during which Robert Mueller proved Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Trump used the shooting, in which 17 died, including 14 children, to attack the FBI for going after him in the Russian collusion investigation.
And in just one 280 character tweet late Saturday night, he managed to conflate the two biggest national news stories of the week – Russian election interference and the Florida tragedy.
‘Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter,’ he wrote.
‘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!’
President Donald Trump said had the FBI not spent so much time trying to prove Russian collusion they might have caught onto signals that the Florida school shooter was going to attack and could have apprehended him before he did so
After a week during which Robert Mueller proved Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Trump used the shooting, in which 17 died, including 14 children to attack the FBI for going after him in the Russian collusion investigation
The president failed to mention that the FBI, which has 35,000 employees, was alerted to the 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz at its field office in Miami. Field officers in Miami have nothing to do with looking into the Russian collusion into the 2016 election – that is being handled in Washington.
The message came just a few hours after a late-afternoon tweet-storm from the president, in which he took aim at the ‘fake news media’ for failing to report that a Facebook executive confirmed the majority of Russian spending on ads came after the 2016 election.
He also took the opportunity to attack Democrats for failing to pass gun control legislation during Obama’s eight years in the White House.
It seemed that in the series of Tweets about Russian collusion and the Florida school shooting, Trump was paving the way for his late-evening message linking the two things.
Trump is far from the only person to attack the FBI field office in Miami for overlooking warning signs that pointed to the likelihood that Nikolas Cruz would become a school shooter.
Cruz was repeatedly identified by local and federal agencies as a troubled young man with violent tendencies, and on Friday the FBI admitted it failed to investigate a tip by someone last month identifying him as a potential threat.
In that tip, someone close to Cruz identified him as a gun owner intent on killing people, and said it might happen at school.