Mueller initially disputed this, saying, “Your facts are not altogether well –” In a heated exchange, Gohmert shot back: “Sir, if you’re going to call me a liar, you need to point out specifically where the facts are wrong.”
Mueller responded: “We went to the mosque. Prior to Boston,” he said vehemently. “Prior to Boston happening, we were in that mosque talking to imams several months beforehand as part of our outreach efforts.”
Gohmert then asked: “Were you aware that those mosques were started by Alamoudi?”
“I’ve answered the question, sir,” Mueller replied.
Not satisfied with this, Gohmert pressed: “You didn’t answer the question, were you aware that it was started by Alamoudi.” Mueller then admitted that he had not been.
So we had the spectacle of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation being warned by at least one foreign government that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a jihadist, but not even being aware of the fact that Tsarnaev attended a Muslim Brotherhood-linked mosque that was founded by a principal al-Qaeda financier – and sending agents to that mosque not to investigate the Tsarnaevs or any other possible jihad activity there, but to engage in “outreach” to Muslims.
If anything illustrated the Obama Administration’s abject failure to take the jihad threat seriously, that was it. The only thing that would have completed the picture would have been if Robert Mueller had been holding Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s photo on the cover of Rolling Stone.
The foremost lesson of the Boston bombing was that the denial of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, which the Obama Administration (as well as the mainstream media) had pursued so assiduously, was wrongheaded and dangerous. Obama said in late April 2013 that his FBI had not acted improperly, but had investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev and found no signs that Tsarnaev was “engaging in extremist activity.” This was probably because agents had no idea how to tell whether or not Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “engaging in extremist activity,” because the “extremist activity” he was engaging in was Islamic jihad, and Obama’s FBI is forbidden to study Islamic jihad. And so the politically correct FBI ignored Tamerlan Tsarnaev despite repeated warnings from Russian authorities. And if they did investigate him, they didn’t know what to look for or how to understand what they were seeing.
Now, after all their massive failures, they’re getting tough with the surviving Tsarnaev, and calling for the death penalty? It’s too little, too late.