Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday that authorities will release redacted transcripts on Monday of the phone calls between Orlando shooter Omar Mateen and police during the attack.
“It’s been our goal to get as much information about this investigation into the public domain as possible,” Lynch told CNN’s Dana Bash in an interview on “State of the Union.” “So people can understand, as we do, possibly what motivated this killer, what led him to this place and also provide us with more information.”
Lynch also appeared Sunday on the four other major network talk shows and made similar statements.
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She told Bash that the transcripts will show when Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State militant group, how he explained his reasoning for the attack and what he mentioned more broadly about U.S. foreign policy while holed up in a gay nightclub for at least three hours with the 49 people he killed and 50 or so he injured. FBI Director James Comey said Mateen had three phone calls with Orlando police during the attack.
Lynch said on CNN that the transcripts will be redacted so as ” to avoid re-victimizing those people that went through through this horror. But it will contain the substance of his conversations.”
Lynch will travel to Orlando on Tuesday to meet with law enforcement, first responders and the victims and their families, as well as other key community members. She said that the investigation is ongoing and that her agency is piecing together who in Mateen’s life knew what about his plans and when, including his wife.
“We are trying to figure to out motivations, everything that led him to his path,” she told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
She told Wallace and ABC’s Jonathan Karl that the Justice Department is also looking into what could have been done differently that could have prevented the Orlando massacre. The FBI said Mateen was on its watch lists in years prior to the massacre but was later removed.
In her Sunday show talk-a-thon, Lynch largely avoided discussing the political fault lines on terrorism, guns and even LGBT rights that have divided the nation after Orlando.
She did say that she supports Democrats’ version of a bill to ban people on various terrorist watch lists from buying guns. The Senate is expected to vote Monday evening on two versions of the legislation, with the Democrats’ proposal being more strict than the Republican version. It’s not clear whether either bill has enough support to get through the Senate, let alone the House of Representatives.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Amber Phillips
