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FBI Claims it Couldn’t Have Prevented Boston Marathon Bombing, Needed Even MORE Surveillance Tools

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe F.B.I. has concluded that there was little its agents could have done to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, according to law enforcement officials, rejecting criticism that it could have better monitored one of the suspects before the attack.

That conclusion is based on several internal reviews that examined how the bureau handled a request from a Russian intelligence agency in 2011 to investigate whether one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been radicalized during his time in the United States.

Mr. Tsarnaev, who along with his brother, Dzhokhar, came to the United States about a decade ago from the Russian republic of Dagestan, was killed during a shootout with the police four days after he and his brother detonated two bombs at the finish line of the marathon, killing 3 people and injuring more than 200, the authorities say.

Members of Congress have contended that the F.B.I. should have done a more extensive investigation of Mr. Tsarnaev in response to the Russian request. And they have said the bureau should have followed up with Mr. Tsarnaev after he returned from a trip to Russia in 2012.

But F.B.I. officials have concluded that the agents who conducted the investigation and ultimately told the Russians that there was no evidence that Mr. Tsarnaev had become radicalized were constrained from conducting a more extensive investigation because of federal laws and Justice Department protocols. Agents cannot use surveillance tools like wiretapping for the type of investigation they were conducting.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fake Boston Marathon Victim Who Allegedly Received $500K from Victims’ Fund Captured

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Photo Credit: APNew York woman has been caught after using fake hospital records to pose as a Boston Marathon bombing victim with a brain injury and fraudulently collected nearly half a million dollars from the fund for victims.

Audrea Gause, 26, was arrested in her hometown of Troy, New York on Friday on a Massachusetts fugitive warrant charging her with larceny.

Gause submitted a claim to the fund last month, including several pages of false medical records indicating she was treated at hospitals in Boston and in New York for a traumatic brain injury suffered in the bombings, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said.

She received a $480,000 check from the fund, created to help victims of the April 15 attacks that killed three people and wounded more than 260.

Coakley said the claim alleged that Gause sustained a brain injury from the bombing and experienced long-term memory loss, impaired speech, and loss of some motor function that would require future surgery.

Read more from this story HERE.

Massachusetts Governor Got Drunk, Left Bar Without Paying Tab After Boston Bombing

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Photo Credit: Jared Wickerham

It was a very drunk governor Deval Patrick who sat in a restaurant in the Berkshires for some alone time in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and ended up drinking heavily, the Boston Herald reported on June 6 after the governor gave a candid talk to employees and revealed that he had become drunk.

At the time, the drunk governor didn’t even have the money to pay for his food or drinks at the West Stockbridge bistro called Rouge. Still drunk, Gov. Patrick left Rouge without paying his bill that night, but he did return at some point later and pay up, said Rouge co-owner Maggie Merelle, who served him.

Merelle, in fact, said that the drunk governor was so well-behaved that she didn’t even realize that he’d had a few too many. The drunk governor wasn’t even tipsy, she said.

But Gov. Patrick has owned up to his heavy drinking that night. “By the end of the meal, I was actually quite drunk, by myself,” he conceded to his employees.

Read more from this story HERE.

Congressman: Marathon Bombing Preventable with Russian Intel; FBI Fails to Answer Questions About That and Todashev Killing

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Photo Credit: AP

Congressman says Russians believe Boston bombings were preventable

BY Fox News. Russian intelligence officials believe that if U.S. authorities had acted on warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombings could have been prevented, U.S. Rep. William Keating said Saturday after returning from a congressional delegation trip to Russia.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who met with Russian intelligence officials Thursday, said he was provided with details on how U.S. intelligence agents were warned in 2010 that Tsarnaev was preparing to join a terrorist cell in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, the Boston Globe reported.

Keating told reporters at Boston’s Logan International Airport that a top Russian counterintelligence official told the delegation that “if we had the level of information sharing that we do now, then the bombings might have been avoided,” according to the report.

He said he learned that information was sent from Russian officials to the U.S. government about Ibragim Todashev, a friend of Tsarnaev who was killed by an FBI agent in Florida on May 22 while being questioned in the bombing probe, the Boston Globe reported. Read more from this story HERE.

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Keating says Russian officials were forthcoming on bombing suspect

By Wesley Lowery. FBI agents in Boston have yet to provide information about why Tamerlan Tsarnaev was able to move freely in and out of the country after US officials were warned about him, or about the May 22 fatal shooting of one of his friends in Orlando, Representative William R. ­Keating said on Saturday after returning from a trip to Russia to meet with that country’s top intelligence officials.

Keating said officials with the Russian ­Federal Security Service provided details about how they warned US intelligence agents in 2010 that they believed Tsarnaev was preparing to join a terrorist cell in Dagestan, in southern Russia.

After investigating him, FBI officials closed the file on Tsarnaev, who then spent six months in Russia, during which he is believed to have met with known terrorists.

Addressing reporters at Logan International Airport, Keating said he was impressed with what he saw as the forthcoming nature of the Russian intelligence officials. Meanwhile, he said, FBI officials were absent from Capitol Hill hearings about the bombings.

“We had a hearing on homeland security and [the Boston FBI office] were invited,” Keating said. When asked whether agents from the office had shown up, he responded: “No.” Read more from this story HERE.

Man Linked to Boston Bombing Shot Dead During Interview With Two FBI Agents

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Photo Credit: APBy Fox News. Ibragim Todashev, who was shot and killed early Wednesday during a shooting at an apartment complex near Universal Studios in Orlando, knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers behind the April 15 bombing attack. Todashev was shot while being questioned about an unsolved 2011 triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., in which one victim was a onetime associate of Tsarnaev, two law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation and the FBI told the Boston Globe.

“The agent, along with other law enforcement personnel, were interviewing an individual in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation when a violent confrontation was initiated by the subject,” FBI Agent Dave Couvertier said in a statement obtained by FoxNews.com. “During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries. As this incident is under review, we have no further details at this time.”

Three law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that Todashev lunged at the FBI agent with a knife before he was shot. However, two of those officials said later Wednesday it was no longer clear whether Todashev lunged at the agent with a knife. Read more from this story HERE.

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Florida man killed by FBI agent reportedly had link to Boston Marathon bomber, triple murder

By Susan Candiotti, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Feyerick, and Carol Cratty. [A friend named Taramov] said Todashev was not a radical. “He was just a Muslim. That was his mistake, I guess.”

Taramov said his friend had told him he had a bad feeling about the direction the investigation was heading.

“He felt like there’s going to be a setup … bad setup against him. Because he told me, ‘They are making up such crazy stuff, I don’t know … why they doing it. OK, I’m answering the questions, but they are still making up some, like, connections, some crazy stuff. I don’t know why they are doing it.’ ”

Before meeting with the FBI for a 7:30 p.m. interview Tuesday, Taramov said, his friend asked him to take his parents’ telephone numbers. “He just told me, ‘Take the numbers, in case something happens, if I get locked up, or whatever, call them.’ You know what I mean?

“We were expecting to get him locked up, but not getting him killed. I can’t believe it.” Read more from this story HERE.

Holder and Gohmert Go Full Contact in House Fight Over Boston Bombings

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Attorney General Eric Holder and Rep. Louie Gohmert clashed Wednesday on how the FBI conducted its investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing.

Early in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Holder said he felt the FBI’s investigation into the terrorist bombings had been “thorough.” Texas Republican Gohmert took issue with that idea, pursuing a line of questioning about what the FBI had and had not asked Tamerlan Tsarnaev after they received information from Russian intelligence indicating he had become radicalized.

Gohmert explained he was “trying to determine how the FBI blew the opportunity to save people’s lives by accepting the Russian information and following up on it.”

The Republican congressman claimed that the investigation had been derailed due to concerns about profiling of Muslims. Gohmert asked whether the FBI’s questions for Tsarnaev had focused on his Muslim beliefs and his involvement with the Islamic Society of Boston, an organization that holds radical views and has connections to terrorist front groups.

“A lot of people are concerned about profiling, but there are a lot more people concerned about getting blown up by a terrorist,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Boston: FBI Failed to Warn, Could Have Prevented Bombings

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Photo Credit: APBoston authorities could have prevented last month’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings if federal law enforcement agencies had adequately shared information and followed through on warnings about accused bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, witnesses told Congress Thursday.

“I believe that though it would not have been easy, it was possible to have prevented the terrorist attacks in Boston,” former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., told the House Homeland Security Committee. “In a literal sense, the homeland security system we must acknowledge that we built after 9-11 to protect the American people from terrorist attacks failed to stop the Tsarnaev brothers.”

In the first congressional hearing into the April 15 bombing that killed three and injured more than 200, Lieberman and other witnesses testified about a lack of information sharing between federal agencies and between federal authorities and local police. Republicans and Democrats alike joined in the criticisms.

“We cannot ignore that once again it has taken a tragedy to reveal problems in our vast, varied and numerous federal databases,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi, the committee’s top Democrat.

Witnesses told the committee that Boston authorities were never told prior to the bombing that Russia had warned the FBI about the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the bombings’ alleged mastermind who also had posted radical jihadist videos on the internet.

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Senators Now Attempt to Regulate Gun Powder as an Explosive, Limiting Quantity, Requiring Background Checks

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Photo Credit: APAfter reports that the Boston Marathon terrorists had used black powder for the explosive component of their pressure cooker bombs, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) proposed major changes to federal laws regulating loose gun powder and explosives.

On April 23, Lautenberg introduced S. 792, the Explosive Materials Background Check Act. Originally, the Senator submitted the bill as a shell bill–meaning it was not fully written–but this month he has finally submitted the full text of his bill.

An analysis of the text reveals profound changes to current law. Lautenberg’s changes in the explosives law would seriously hamper history reenactor hobbyists, black powder hunters, sportsmen, target shooters, and anyone that loads their own ammo with modern smokeless gun powder or the older style black powder.

One change would require those that want to buy and store either smokeless powder or black powder to get a new license–at a rate of $50 every three years–to allow them to do so. The bill also says that they will only be allowed to have “limited” supplies but does not seem to say what amount would exceed those limits.

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Female DNA Found on Bomb Components in Boston Marathon Probe, Source Says

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Photo Credit: APFemale DNA was found on bomb components used in the attack this month on the Boston Marathon, a source familiar with the investigation confirmed to Fox News, though the source cautioned that it is too early to draw hard conclusions from that evidence.

“No one should expect that the investigation is over,” the source told Fox News in confirming the development first reported by the Wall Street Journal, adding that it is just one piece of evidence that investigators are looking at.

The revelation about female DNA came on the same day that the FBI went inside the Rhode Island home of bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow’s parents, and the nearby family of a man identified as his mysterious mentor hired a family spokesman to keep the media at bay.

“We are there as part of our ongoing investigation, but we aren’t permitted to discuss specific aspects of our case,” an FBI official said outside the suburban Providence home where Katherine Russell and her 3-year-old daughter are staying.

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Ron Paul: Police Manhunt for Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Scarier Than Attack

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Photo Credit: APFormer Rep. Ron Paul said the law enforcement that swarmed around Boston in the days following the marathon bombings was scarier than the actual terrorist attack.

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” he said on the Lew Rockwell website, Politico reported. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”

The terror attacks on April 15 in Boston killed three and injured 264.

Mr. Paul, a former libertarian political candidate who served in Congress as a member of the Republican Party, said the door-to-door searches police conducted in Watertown for the bombing suspects were particularly alarming.

Read more from this story HERE.