WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert Mueller rejected suggestions Wednesday that poor coordination between the FBI and New York Police Department damaged the investigation of an Afghan immigrant charged with plotting a bomb attack in New York City.
Mueller also repeated previous assurances that there is currently no known imminent threat to the U.S. from this case or any other.
Mueller testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee in the Obama administration’s first public appearance before lawmakers since news broke about Najibullah Zazi’s alleged plot.
A criminal complaint from the case suggests that police detectives, acting without the FBI’s knowledge, might have inadvertently helped reveal the surveillance of Zazi and compromised the investigation at a sensitive stage by questioning an imam about him. The imam subsequently told Zazi that authorities were asking about him.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that interviews with people briefed on the case — and an examination of court papers — show that a great deal of the evidence presented against Zazi was not the result of a long investigation.
Instead, much of it was nabbed on the fly in the past two weeks. The fast-moving nature of the investigation does not necessarily weaken the evidence, but it opens a window on what has become clearer since Zazi was indicted: that authorities were forced to react hastily and were operating in some measure in the dark on how advanced his alleged efforts at bombmaking had become.
