White House spokesman Josh Earnest refused to say whether the intelligence community had enough information to prevent a radical Islamic couple from rampaging the husband’s work holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., last Wednesday, and killing 14 people.
“I think it’s still too early to make any grand pronouncements about what could’ve been done differently to prevent this terrorist attack from occurring,” Earnest said on Wednesday when asked directly if the incident represented an intelligence failure.
Earnest’s reluctance to fault law enforcement agencies came the same day that FBI Director James Comey told a congressional panel that the two shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were radicalized before they met, and before Malik came to the U.S. on a fiancee visa in 2014.
Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the couple talked about launching such mayhem before the self-proclaimed Islamic State rose to power last summer.
They were “talking to each other about jihad and martyrdom before they became engaged and married and were living in the U.S.,” Comey said on Wednesday.
Comey also said the Islamic State and similar extremist terrorist groups inspired the shooting spree, but said the FBI doesn’t yet know if the couple was ordered to do so by any specific terrorist network.
Earnest said investigators are still digging into the couple’s contacts and determining how exactly the tragedy occurred.
“The FBI has not determined that they were part of a network or cell inside the United States and were not … directed specifically by any sort of overseas extremist terrorist organization,” Earnest said.
