FBI Under Pressure Again After Georgia School Shooting

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is under pressure again over revelations that the agency knew about the Georgia school shooter before Wednesday’s tragedy.
Colt Gray, 14, opened fire on Apalachee High School, in Barrow County, on Wednesday, killing two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and two teachers Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie.
Gray has been taken into police custody and is set to be charged with murder and tried as an adult, Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) Director Chris Hosey said during a press conference.
After the shooting, FBI Atlanta revealed that the National Operations Center had interviewed Gray in May 2023 after social media posts had been flagged.
In a statement posted on social media, the agency wrote that it had received “several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time.” The threats “contained photographs of guns” and ultimately led to a 13-year-old male and his father being interviewed.
“The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online,” the FBI said.
“At the time, there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state, or federal levels,” it added. Local schools were alerted to continue to monitor the boy. The FBI later confirmed that the subject it was referring to was Gray.
This has led to criticism less than two months after the FBI faced backlash following an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13.
Kyle Becker, a producer for Fox News, said the FBI should have been more focused on issues like Gray being flagged as a possible threat than on January 6 rioters.
“While the FBI was busy chasing down MAGA grandmas who may have been in D.C. on J6, the bureau ignored warnings about the Georgia mass shooter,” Becker wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “No one is even surprised anymore.”
Conservative media personality Nick Sortor said: “The FBI has ADMITTED the Georgia school sh**ter was on their radar, as he had made threats to shoot up the school already, but they failed to act on it.
“What the hell is the FBI even for at this point?” Sortor went on to call for the FBI to be “disbanded” and “scrapped,” saying: “The Public has NO reason to have any faith in them.”
Shannon Watts, a Democratic supporter who co-founded Everytown, an organization that advocates for gun laws, wrote: “Last year, the student responsible for today’s shooting threatened to kill people at school. Because there wasn’t ‘probable cause,’ the FBI made no arrests.”
Watts also blamed Georgia’s lack of red flag/extreme risk laws, which allow law enforcement, and sometimes family members, to petition for a court order to remove someone’s access to guns.
“Georgia doesn’t have a red flag law, so police also didn’t remove guns from the 13-year-old’s home,” Watts added.
When Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was asked about how the state’s policies could prevent shootings like this, he answered: “Today is not the day for politics or policy, today is the day for an investigation, to mourn these precious Georgians that we have lost, to thank the first responders that went into the line of fire, the school staff, superintendent, the principal and others that are just trying to hold this community together—that’s what we need to be focusing on right now.”
Newsweek has contacted the FBI via email for comment.
The FBI and Secret Service faced a storm of criticism after Trump was hit in the right ear by a bullet fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead at the scene.
Louisiana Republican Representative Clay Higgins, who is on the House task force investigating the shooting, accused the FBI of acting in a way that amounted to “an obstruction to any following investigative effort,” after it released Crooks’ body for cremation.
Higgins wrote in an August report: “My effort to examine Crooks’ body on Monday, August 5, caused quite a stir and revealed a disturbing fact … the FBI released the body for cremation 10 days after J13. On J23, Crooks was gone. Nobody knew this until Monday, August 5, including the County Coroner, law enforcement, Sheriff, etc.”
He said the Butler County coroner in Pennsylvania “technically had legal authority over the body, but I spoke with the Coroner, and he would have never released Crooks’ body to the family for cremation or burial without specific permission from the FBI.”
He also wrote that “similar to releasing the crime scene and scrubbing crime scene biological evidence…this action by the FBI can only be described by any reasonable man as an obstruction to any following investigative effort.”
Another controversy was over FBI Director Christopher Wray being among several law enforcement officials who raised doubts over what caused Trump’s injury.
“As I said, I think with respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray testified before Congress.
The FBI eventually confirmed Trump was hit by a bullet, saying in a July 26 statement: “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”
Trump responded on Truth Social: “I assume that’s the best apology that we’ll get from Director Wray, but it is fully accepted!”