Boston bombingFBI defends handling of Boston bombing, admits FBI-CBP miscommunication

FBI director Robert Mueller yesterday defended the way his agency handled the Russian request that the FBI pay attention to Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the months before the 15 April attack on the Boston Marathon.

At the request of the Russian security service, Mueller told a Senate subcommittee, the FBI initiated an investigation of Tamerlan in March 2011. The investigation found no evidence that Tamerlan was a terrorism threat. Just to make sure, the FBI twice asked the Russian security agency for more information, to see what they knew about Tamerlan’s possible connection to a terrorist network in the Caucuses. The Russians ignored both requests for information, and the FBI closed the file.

“As a result of this, I would say, thorough investigation, based on the leads we got from the Russians, we found no ties to terrorism,” Mueller told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on commerce, justice and science.

The Washington Post reports that Mueller did acknowledge that electronic notifications that Tsarnaev had left the United States in January 2012 to spent six months in Russia were not shared fully within the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston.

“To the extent that we go back and look and scrub and see what we could have done better, this is an area where we’re looking at and scrubbing it and doing better,” the FBI director said.

FBI agents interviewed Dzhokhar before he was charged. He told them that he and his brother were angry about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The FBI also revealed that Dzhokhar wrote a note while he was holed up in the boat. The note was found after Dzhorkhar was taken to a hospital. In it, the 19-year old says the two brothers were driven by anger at the United States, and describes those killed and injured near the Marathon finish line as “collateral damage.”

CBS News reports that Dzhorkhar says in the note that he did not mourn his older brother because he was a martyr and that he will soon join him in paradise.

Mueller did not offer new information about the way the FBI handled the case before and after the attack, but said the agency is still investigating whether other people were involved in the attack.

Mueller told the lawmakers that the Russian security agency contacted the FBI in March 2011, reporting their concern that Tamerlan was planning to return to Russia to join Islamic militants.

FBI agents in Boston then looked into Tsarnaev’s background. They visited the community college he attended and interviewed his parents and Tsarnaev himself. Mueller said his agent did not find any ties between Tsarnaev and any terrorist network. In September and October 2011 the FBI contacted the Russians again, asking whether they had any more information about Tsarnaev that the FBI could follow, but the FBI received no response, and the case was closed.

The Post quotes Mueller to say that although the file was closed, the agency went ahead and added Tsarnaev’s name to a low-level watch list that notified U.S. law enforcement when he traveled. This is the reason why, in January 2012, an automatic notification was sent to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent with the Boston terrorism task force that Tsarnaev had left the country for Russia. A second notice was sent when he returned six months later.

Mueller said the CBP agent took no action in response to the FBI electronic notices about Tsarnaev, probably because the office receives hundreds of similar notifications each year.

Mueller said changes in the system will ensure that more attention is paid to such notices in the future.