Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) slammed the U.S. government's anti-terrorist organizations Tuesday on "The Lead" for failing to cooperate better in the matter of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
CNN host Jake Tapper asked Grassley about the exchange he had with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano earlier Tuesday that led her to testify the government knew of Tsarnaev's travels to Russia, but his return last July did not raise any flags because the FBI alert on him had expired. Despite Tsarnaev's established connections to radical Islam that led to a federal investigation in 2011, nothing was done when he returned from a six-month trip to Chechnya and Dagestan, heavily Muslim republics in the North Caucasus region of Russia.
"When you have a ping like that or an alert like that, immediately the FBI should have been notified about it, and Senator Graham brought out today that the FBI didn't know anything about it," he said. "So you get back to a major problem that we have, does the left hand of government know what the right hand is doing? And if we're going to win this war on terrorism, we've got to have complete cooperation among all the departments that are involved in the war against terrorism."
The FBI did not do nearly enough to check into Tsarnaev's background, Grassley said, and the Department of Homeland Security failed in communicating its concerns about him to the Bureau.
"I think there's a lot of unanswered questions and we've got to get to the bottom of it," he said. "I hope that we do, but you get back to the very same thing. You've got to have these two departments cooperating, and when Department of Homeland Security knew something and they didn't tell the FBI, then that probably is one reason why the FBI didn't go as far as they normally would have gone."
A Republican-led House Committee is asking the Obama administration to disclose all information it had on the deceased Tsarnaev, remarking the bombing raises "serious questions about the efficacy of the federal counter-terrorism efforts."
Full interview: