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SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) —
Days before killing 14 people at a holiday party, Syed Farook practiced with a rifle during one of several recent visits to a Southern California shooting range, authorities said. Sometimes he was joined by his wife, his partner in the attack.
Farook visited Riverside Magnum Range on Nov. 29 and 30, according to an instructor at the range about 20 miles from the Inland Regional Center, where the couple opened fire on Farook's co-workers Dec. 2.
John Galletta said Monday that nothing was out of the ordinary about Farook's behavior but that Farook asked a range employee why his rifle might be smoking. He was told it was most likely because it was new.
Asked whether in hindsight he or others at the range should have been suspicious of Farook, Galletta said: "How are you able to determine what somebody's intents are?"
The FBI said Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, had long since embraced radical ideology.
"We have learned and believe that both subjects were radicalized and have been for quite some time," said David Bowdich, chief of the FBI's Los Angeles office, said at a news conference Monday.
"The question we're trying to get at is how did that happen and by whom and where did that happen?" he said. "And I will tell you right now we don't know those answers."
Authorities also disclosed that a year before the rampage, Farook's co-workers at the San Bernardino County health department underwent training on how to react to a workplace shooter in the same conference room where the couple opened fire last week.
It was not immediately clear whether Farook attended the session in late 2014, county spokeswoman Felisa Cardona said.
Two employees who survived the attack said colleagues reacted by trying to do as they had been trained — dropping under tables and staying quiet.
"Unfortunately, the room just didn't provide a whole lot of protection," said Corwin Porter, assistant county health director.
Hundreds gathered at a vigil honoring the victims Monday night at California State University, San Bernardino, just miles from the social service center where the attack took place. A bell pealed 14 times — once for each victim — and mourners lit white candles. The school was hit hard by the tragedy — five of the victims and Farook were alumni.
Farook, a 28-year-old restaurant inspector born in the U.S. to a Pakistani family, and Malik, a 29-year-old immigrant from Pakistan, attacked the holiday luncheon around the same time Malik pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group on Facebook, authorities said. The Muslim couple were killed hours later in a gunbattle with police.
Authorities discovered 19 pipes in the couple's home in the neighboring city of Redlands that could be turned into bombs, Bowdich said. The FBI previously said it had found 12 pipe bombs.
Newly released emergency radio transmissions from the fast-moving tragedy show that police identified Farook as a suspect almost immediately, even though witnesses reported that the attackers wore black ski masks.
An unidentified police officer put out Farook's name because he had left the luncheon "out of the blue" 20 minutes before the shooting, "seemed nervous," and matched the description of one of the attackers, according to audio recordings posted by The Press-Enterprise newspaper of Riverside.
The two assault rifles used in the attack had been legally purchased by an old friend of Farook's, Enrique Marquez, authorities said, but they are still trying to determine how the couple got the weapons. Marquez has not been charged with a crime.
Porter, of the health department, said neither shooter spoke before firing.
"We weren't quite sure if it was an exercise the staff were throwing that they forgot to tell us about," he said, "but we all reacted instinctively and went under our tables."
WASHINGTON (AP) —
A 5-year, $305-billion bill to address the nation's aging and congested transportation systems was signed into law Friday by President Barack Obama, who said it will put Americans to work and provide states with the federal help they need to commit to long-term projects.
The bill, which was overwhelmingly approved by Congress a day earlier, provides a modest increase to highway and transit spending but falls short of the $400 billion over six years administration officials said is necessary to keep traffic congestion from worsening. Nor does it resolve how to pay for transportation programs in the long term.
Obama said he'll continue to push for greater transportation spending to meet the nation's infrastructure needs and create jobs.
"This bill is not perfect, but it is a common-sense compromise, and an important first step in the right direction," Obama said in a statement Friday.
Despite that, the 1,300-page bill was hailed by lawmakers and the industry as a major accomplishment that will halt the cycle of last-minute, short-term fixes that have kept the federal Highway Trust Fund teetering on the edge of insolvency for much of the past eight years.
Republicans leaders pointed to the bill's passage as evidence of their ability to govern, and Obama can claim progress on addressing the nation's deficient bridges and crowded highways, a major goal since the early days of his administration.
Lawmakers in both parties praised the bill as a model of bipartisan cooperation. Support for the measure was increased by a generous helping of business favors, parochial provisions, safety improvements and union demands.
"In the end, there wasn't really a philosophical problem here," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "The question was, how could we pull together these disparate pieces into one mosaic that actually had a chance to get somewhere?"
But Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., a prominent supporter of increasing transportation spending, said the deals cut to win the bill's passage caused him to reluctantly vote against it.
"While this bill includes some good transportation policies, the way we pay for these policies is unsustainable and irresponsible, offering little more than a grab bag of budget gimmicks that will actually increase our deficit in the long run," he said.
One hallmark of the bill is the creation of new programs to focus federal aid on eliminating bottlenecks and increasing the capacity of highways designated as major freight corridors. The Transportation Department estimates the volume of freight traffic will increase 45 percent over the next 30 years.
A big shortcoming in the bill, though, is how it's all financed. The main source of revenue for transportation is the trust fund, which comes mostly from the 18.4-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax. That tax hasn't been raised since 1993 even though transportation spending has increased. But raising the gas tax is viewed by many lawmakers as too politically risky.
To make up the shortfall, the bill uses about $70 billion in mostly budget ploys, including one that would move $53 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank's capital account to the general treasury. It's counted as new money on paper, but is actually just a transfer of funds from one government account to another, federal budget experts said.
Other items in the bill also don't include the means to pay for them, including more than $10 billion over five years for Amtrak and other rail programs, $12 billion for mass transit and $1 billion for vehicle safety programs. The money for those programs remains subject to annual spending decisions by Congress.
Among the bill's losers are large banks, which would receive lower dividends from the Federal Reserve, with the savings used for transportation programs. Banking officials complained that banks shouldn't be asked to foot the bill for highways and bridges.
The airline and cruise ship industries complained that their passengers are also being asked to pay for improvements unrelated to their travel. The bill ties customs fees to inflation and uses the increased revenue to offset the bill's cost. It also directs the sale of 66 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to raise $6.5 billion. The catch is the sales don't start until 2023 — three years after the transportation bill it helps pay for has expired.
The trucking industry was able to persuade lawmakers to order the government to remove trucking company safety scores from a public website despite opposition from safety advocates. Industry officials say the government's methodology is unfair. But safety advocates won inclusion of a long-sought provision requiring rental car agencies to repair recalled cars and trucks before renting them.
The Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents city bus drivers, won a provision requiring the government to direct transit agencies to take steps to protect bus drivers from assault, a growing problem. The Federal Transit Administration is required to consider whether local transit agencies provide bathroom breaks and access to bathrooms for bus drivers when evaluating the safety of the agencies.
A provision sponsored by Rep. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat whose district includes Las Vegas, authorizes the creation of a national advisory committee made up of travel and tourism industry officials to develop a national strategy for ensuring that transportation policies address the needs of travelers. Another provision sought by the dairy industry and sponsored by upstate New York, Connecticut and Wisconsin lawmakers allows trucks hauling milk to exceed federal weight limits for interstate highways in some cases.
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Donald Trump tapped a man to be a senior business adviser to his real-estate empire even after the man's past involvement in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme had become publicly known, according to Associated Press interviews and a review of court records.
Portions of Trump's relationship with Felix Sater, a convicted felon and government informant, have been previously known. Trump worked with the company where Sater was an executive, Bayrock Group LLC, after it rented office space from the Trump Organization as early as 2003. Sater's criminal history was effectively unknown to the public at the time, because a judge kept the relevant court records secret and Sater altered his name. When Sater's criminal past and Mafia links came to light in 2007, Trump distanced himself from Sater.
But less than three years later, Trump renewed his ties with Sater. Sater presented business cards describing himself as a senior adviser to Donald Trump, and he had an office on the same floor as Trump's own office in New York's Trump Tower, The Associated Press learned through interviews and court records.
Trump said during an AP interview on Wednesday that he recalled only bare details of Sater.
"Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it," Trump said, referring questions about Sater to his staff. "I'm not that familiar with him."
According to Trump lawyer Alan Garten, Sater's role was to prospect for high-end real estate deals for the Trump Organization. The arrangement lasted six months, Garten said.
The revelation about Sater's role is significant because of its timing and directness, and marks the first time the Trump Organization has acknowledged publicly that Sater worked for Trump after the disclosures of Sater's criminal background. Trump has said that among his secrets of success is that he surrounds himself with the "best and most serious people" and with "people you can trust."
Sater never had an employment agreement or formal contract with the Trump Organization and did not close any deals for Trump, Garten said.
"He was trying to restart his life," Garten said. "I believe he was regretful of things that happened in the past."
Trump did not know the details of Sater's cooperation with the government when Sater came in-house in 2010, Garten said. But Garten noted that U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch praised Sater's cooperation with the federal government, when senators asked about him during her confirmation hearings early this year. She said Sater cooperated against his Mafia stock fraud co-defendants and assisted the government on unspecified national security matters.
"If Mr. Sater was good enough for the government to work with, I see no reason why he wasn't good enough for Mr. Trump," Garten said.
He pleaded guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the prominent Genovese and Bonanno crime families, according to court records. Prosecutors called the operation a pump-and-dump scheme, in which insiders manipulate the price of obscure stocks and then sell them to hapless investors at inflated prices. Five years earlier, a New York State court had sentenced Sater to more than a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass.
Sater declined to discuss his work with Trump.
"Obviously a Donald-and-the-bad-guy piece is not interesting for me to participate in," Sater wrote in an email to AP. His lawyer, Robert Wolf, said information about Sater in public records and lawsuits obtained by the AP was defamatory. He credited Sater's stint as a government cooperator with potentially saving American military lives, although he did not provide details. Wolf told the AP to write about Sater's past "at your own risk" but did not cite specific concerns.
After his 1998 racketeering conviction, Sater spent more than a decade as an informant on the Mafia and on national security-related matters. Federal prosecutors kept even the existence of Sater's racketeering case out of publicly available court records for 14 years.
During that time, Sater launched a luxury real estate development career. Sealed court records prevented potential customers or partners from learning about his past association with organized crime. Sater altered his name, to Satter, and became a top executive in Bayrock, a development firm that partnered with Trump on the Trump Soho high-rise hotel in Manhattan and other branded luxury real estate deals.
Civil lawsuits — including a sealed case filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York that was obtained by the AP — have alleged that Bayrock engaged in a pattern of misconduct during Sater's tenure, sometimes involving potential Trump projects. The AP obtained a copy of the sealed lawsuit, which was refiled last month, when the original complaint was included as part of a lawsuit Sater filed in an Israeli court. Bayrock's attorney told AP that the firm did not mislead anyone about Sater's past and denied any misconduct. The firm has not yet responded to a version of the complaint refiled in U.S. court last month.
Trump's lawyer, Garten, said Trump had no knowledge of alleged improprieties at Bayrock or reason to believe that Sater was a major stakeholder in Bayrock's projects. Trump only learned of Sater's troubled past when The New York Times reported details in December 2007. In the article, Trump distanced himself from Sater, saying: "I didn't really know him very well."
Garten said Trump had no further interactions with Sater at Bayrock following the revelations of his criminal history. But a new relationship was formed in 2010 when Trump offered Sater office space and a chance to round up new business possibilities for the Trump Organization.
"The guy's been in business a long time, he's got a lot of contacts," Garten said of Sater.