Rep. Schiff Discusses Latest in Boston Marathon Bombing Case on CNN's State of the Union
Washington, DC –Today, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a senior Member of the House Intelligence Committee, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley to discuss the latest in the Boston Marathon bombing case and the timing for reading the Miranda rights with Senator Dan Coats (R-IN). Some excerpts are below:
“I think [law enforcement] properly invoked the public safety exception. But the other question is, when does he have to be presented before a magistrate? In this case, it seems that the magistrate made clear the magistrate was going to arraign this person on Monday, and that put a very limit on how long the questioning could go on. Already, I think the statements that the suspect made are going to be challenged by the defense team. And while the priority has to be on making use of any information that could protect the public, it's also valuable to admit those into evidence.
If for example the attorney general decides to seek the death penalty, those may be – his statements may be the best evidence of what his intent was, what his role was, how culpable he was. So we shouldn't discount the need to produce that evidence.
“I think it looks like the FBI got what they needed in terms of making sure the public was safe, and that's really the basis of the public safety exception. The FBI is always going to want to interview as long as they possibly can to get into what happened overseas and the full nature of the plot. But the public safety exception only goes really to protecting the public. And once they have gotten the information they need to do that, that's really the full length and dimension of that exception.
“We really don't know yet what happened during this six-month trip to Dagestan. There are a lot of unanswered questions there. There may have been radicalizing influences in the United States. There may have been radicalizing influences overseas. It does look like a lot of the radicalization was self-radicalization online, but we don't know the full answers yet, and that's why this investigation is going to be thorough, it's going to chase down every lead, and it will take as long as it takes… We shouldn't leap to the conclusion that we know the full story yet.
“I don't think that we've seen any of stove piping issues that pre-dated 9/11. I think we have fixed a lot of those problems. What we may see here maybe in a way a more striking conclusion, that is that in a free and open society, even when you do everything right, you still may not be able to prevent a group of people willing to kill themselves using relatively low tech means…But, I think we might do a disservice to the American people if we suggest that there's always got to be a problem when anything bad happens. The reality is we would need to take such intrusive steps, make this country into a police state that no one would want to accept in order to completely prevent these low tech attacks.
Watch the segment below, or click here:
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