White House: No sign of wider terrorist cell

Reporting from Washington  —  Top U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials told President Obama on Saturday that the widening investigation into the San Bernardino massacre has found no evidence yet indicating the two shooters had received outside support or were part of a broader terrorist cell, according to the White House.

The officials who briefed Obama, including FBI Director James Comey and Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch, described “several pieces of information” that suggest Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were “radicalized to violence to commit these heinous attacks,” the statement said.

Pressure grew on the Obama administration to consider expanding the criteria, or lowering the threshold, used to open terrorism-related inquiries.

The couple had not drawn the attention of the FBI or other federal authorities that seek to identify and track potential terrorists, even though Farook had used the Internet to make contact with people from the Shabab, an Islamist militant group based in Somalia, and the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-linked group in Syria, a federal law enforcement official said.

Malik had pledged allegiance to Islamic State in a Facebook posting Wednesday shortly before she and her husband burst into a holiday gathering and killed 14 people.

For the last several days, supporters of Islamic State have used Twitter to praise the lethal attack at the Inland Regional Center, but no official statement from the group appeared until Saturday.

U.S. intelligence analysts have no reason to doubt the authenticity of an Islamic State online broadcast Saturday that claimed the Dec. 2 rampage was carried out by the group’s supporters, a U.S. official said.

In an English-language broadcast on the group’s Bayan radio station, the extremist group said “soldiers of the caliphate” had conducted the attack, the official said. In an Arabic announcement, the couple were called “supporters,” the official said.

The broadcast declared “we pray to God to accept them as martyrs” but did not claim that Islamic State had played any role in planning the attack.

FBI technicians settled into what could be a lengthy task trying to recover messages, digital trails and other evidence from computers and other equipment the couple tried to destroy.

The bureau’s Operational Technology Division laboratory at Quantico, Va., is beginning to pore over the hard drives, two cellphones and other digital equipment taken from the Redlands home where the couple lived, according to a federal law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The official said technicians will try to recover call records and restore videos and audio recordings the couple may have watched or listened to.

The goal is to learn “everything we can get” about the assailants, and any new clues into whether they were self-radicalized on the Internet, or had gotten outside direction or help in planning the attack.

“This won’t be done in a day,” the official said. “It takes time. But there will be enough for us to work on.”

The FBI is working with security agencies in Pakistan, where Malik was from, and Saudi Arabia, where she later lived and apparently married.

Officials said Malik was granted a K-1 visa, also known as the fiance visa, in Pakistan in July 2014 and traveled to the United States that month.

The visa required her to give fingerprints and other information, which were passed twice through background checks using State Department watch lists, as well as through immigration, counter-terrorism and criminal databases at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, officials said.

As part of the review, she would have been interviewed by a U.S. consular officer in Pakistan.

Investigators on Saturday questioned how she had passed those screening tests since some of her family allegedly had ties to radical Islamic sects in the Punjab area of Pakistan.

“It’s an uncle of hers who we are interested in,” the official said.

Malik traveled frequently between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and is believed to have maintained close ties with her relatives in Punjab. She was never entered on a no-fly list kept by Saudi authorities.

The developments came as Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in a speech Saturday in Washington, said the Obama administration and its allies would intensify efforts to defeat Islamic State.

“The urgency of defeating Daesh cannot be overstated,” Kerry said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. “Daesh is a mixture of killers and kidnappers, smugglers and thieves and apostates who have hijacked a religion and combined a medieval thinking with modern weapons to wage an especially savage brand of war.”

Kerry also promised new efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war, which he says has strengthened Islamic State and created a refugee crisis that has threatened Europe’s security.

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