John Kennedy Taking FBI Info On New Orleans Massacre With Grain Of Salt

Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said on Wednesday that he would continue to press the FBI for answers about the suspected New Orleans terrorist attack in light of past government security failures.

Authorities say 42-year-old Shamsud Din Jabbar drove a Ford pickup truck into revelers in New Orleans early Wednesday morning before being killed in a shootout with police, killing at least ten people and wounding dozens of others. Kennedy told “Special Report” guest host Aishah Hasnie he was “straddling” the line “between anger and grief.”

“There’s a fine line between anger and grief and I’m pretty much straddling that line right now. If you don’t believe in objective evil, all you need to do is go walk about 30 or 40 yards that way, we’ve still got bodies on the ground. That’s one of the reasons we postponed the game,” Kennedy said. “I’m here for two reasons: One, these are my people, these are my people’s guests. Number two, I don’t want to hear from anybody in the federal government that they don’t have the resources.”

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“Now, the White House, the FBI, Justice, Homeland Security are in charge now. We’re cooperating with them. I want to give them a reasonable period of time,” Kennedy continued. “There is a lot of information out there, some of it is actually true. I want to give them a reasonable period of time. But they need to saddle up and ride. We need to find out what happened here.”

Kennedy, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, later expressed concern that the FBI wasn’t telling him everything.

“You just never know what they’re not telling us,” Kennedy said. “But I know how to probe very hard to get the information. I’m not interested in placing blame or saying who was right or wrong. I just want to catch these sons of bitches who did this.”

Hasnie asked Kennedy if other cities could be targets.

“I can’t answer that,” Kennedy told her. “I can, but I won’t.”

Kennedy also noted the failure of the Secret Service to prevent an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during a July 13 campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, in the interview.

“I sat there and watched a 21-year-old kid outsmart the entire Secret Service of the United States and almost kill a former president, who is soon-to-be current president, and we still don’t have information, and that’s not going to happen this time,” Kennedy told Hasnie.

President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that authorities in Las Vegas are also investigating the explosion of an electric vehicle in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X that the company confirmed the cause of the explosion was a bomb placed in the Tesla Cybertruck.