Transcription
We are following breaking news out of Rhode Island where a manhunt is underway for the person suspected of fatally shooting two people on the campus of Brown University.
Earlier tonight, the FBI released these new images of a person of interest while announcing a $50,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest. It's the latest cleanup effort coming from the very top of the FBI.
Sunday morning, FBI Director Cash Patel raced to social media to announce an arrest had been made in connection to the case. Local authorities confirmed they acted on a tip that came directly from the FBI. The only problem, the wrong man was apprehended.
Here's how one Brown student, who herself is the survivor of a prior school shooting, described the terrifying negligence. "The second that we found out that the shooter or the supposed shooter was in custody, this this weight was lifted off everyone's shoulders. And I remember last night I was with friends when we started getting all the alerts that they released him that they got the wrong guy. And you you felt the tension grow in the room and you felt that weight kind of go back on onto people and people became scared again."
Real mistakes with real consequences. Here with more, Michael Fineberg, MS now national security and intelligence analyst. He's a former assistant special agent in charge with the FBI and a fellow at Lawfair. Michael, let's start where Alicia ended, and she's right. Real um mistakes have real consequences. If the FBI is now releasing new video and photos about 48 hours later, what does that tell you about where this invest in investigation is? And we welcome your comments about just the posting from the FBI director that then prompted the authorities to give out information that they had not given out.
"Yeah. So, there's a few things to unpack in those questions. Um, and I'd be remiss if I didn't begin by noting that this is not the first time this has happened with Kashm. During the investigation into Charlie Kirk's assassination, he tweeted out information that often directly contradicted past tweets specifically dealing with the supposed apprehension of the subject. Um during the raid on John Bolton's house, he was tweeting about the search as it was going on, which directly puts the involved agents lives in danger if people flock to the scene and decide to take issue. With respect to the plot that was unmasked in Michigan, uh I think around Halloween, it was reported recently in the Wall Street Journal that his tweeting about that arrest before other nationwide efforts were complete caused other suspects in other regions of the country involved with the case to speed up their plans to leave the United States. So at the most basic level, he is throwing a wrench in the works of the investigative process with every tweet or pronouncement he makes without actually knowing the facts. Now, this has other consequences, too. It is incredibly cruel, as we just saw, to the community of Providence and particularly the students at Brown who thought for a moment that they were safe, that the problem was contained and that they did not need to worry anymore. And we've got to note there are students there for whom this is their second mass shooting. That's probably another topic. But lastly, I'd point out that if he's telling people that they have the subject, then other law enforcement agencies which are not directly involved in this particular manhunt, but are in the surrounding areas who would probably have their feelers attuned to what was going on and be on the lookout for anything suspicious in neighboring areas, might have let their guard down, thinking that there was no longer a problem. And that might have caused us to lose a tip, to not check certain surveillance footage, to not review license plate readers. It could have caused any number of things that should have happened not to."
Michael, help me understand and contextualize um because I I was really struck by the Brown students response. And it said a lot about uh how these when these events happen, the importance of getting it right >> before you go public with any comment, let alone information specific to the case. help me understand and contextualize this yippy cayle sling it and wing it attitude and approach of Cash Patel. Uh you have uh laid out accurately uh other examples of this rush to get information out. It can't be just trying to impress the boss Donald Trump and and to uh be in the game to show just how much of an FBI director I am. Um, it's there's got to be more to this because the impact it is having is consequential >> and and and results in bad police work, bad FBI work, bad process and for any investigation process is paramount, right? But more importantly for the victims, it is also paramount that they feel safe at some point in that process that the authorities are getting it right. Cash Patel gets it wrong every time.
"Yeah. Look, I think the director of the FBI in any administration at any point in the nation's history really has three entities to which he or someday she needs to be loyal and true to. The first is the White House. You know, I get that, but that is easily the least important element of the FBI director's responsibilities. The second is to the FBI workforce, but again, that's relatively unimportant. You want somebody who's going to be a good leader, who's going to be a good boss, who's going to set a moral example for the workforce. But the most important person, the most important group that the FBI director has a duty to is the public. And Cash Patel is utterly failing in that. The with these tweets, he is burning down whatever trust has been built over the past 117 years between the FBI and the American people. He is repeatingly feeding them information that is not true and then having to walk it back."