The public wants information, yes, but doesn’t expect the FBI to know everything instantly or to tell the public everything agents think they know.

On New Year’s morning, we were trying to distill the various media reports and government statements about circumstances surrounding the terrorist attack in New Orleans (including, astonishingly, whether it actually was a terrorist attack, even as it was already known that a man flying the notorious jihadist flag had plowed a pickup truck into crowd of Bourbon Street revelers, and that ten were dead — a number that has since risen to 14). In my first post on the matter — having been through this scenario too many times in the 32 years since the 1993 World Trade Center — I cautioned that “initial reports on these incidents tend to be rife with error.”

With respect to the reporters, as a general matter (there are always exceptions) I find that errors in these situations are just that, errors, not intentional misstatements. People are trying to get it right, and they’re usually good about couching their assertions in uncertainty if they are uncertain.

So why are there mistakes? It’s a “fog of war” effect. In the immediate aftermath of a mass-casualty event, there is chaos on the scene. There is also lurking fear that the strike is not a one-off — there may be other players and plans for additional attacks. The result is that there is a natural conflation of (a) the things we can clearly observe with (b) our hypotheses, or at least reasonable suspicions, about what those things may portend.

In the telling and retelling, just as in a game of telephone, some of that hypothesizing gets mistranslated as if it were established fact. And in the competition to be first — or, better, in the effort to provide a distraught public with relevant information — journalists who learn that investigators are looking into specific leads can inadvertently blur the line between evidence (what we can say for sure) and theory (what we infer from the evidence).

The ‘Border Crossing’

For example, as I detailed in my second post that day, there was Fox News reporting that the pickup truck was spotted crossing the southern border from Mexico into Eagle Pass, Texas. The initial reporting indicated that the crossing had happened two days before the attack (i.e., December 30), but just before we published my post, Fox corrected the date — in fact, the vehicle had been spotted on November 16. Meanwhile, various reporting had confirmed that the truck was a rental; naturally, that prompted the question of whether the driver who carried out the attack (not yet identified at that point) was the same one who rented the truck. (As I said in the second post, this was unclear.)

It would have been common sense for investigators to surmise that, because our border security has been so lax during the Biden years, and because it is well known that people with terrorist ties have exploited that vulnerability, an attack that may have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization could have involved a border crossing — which could have been why the truck was seen in Eagle Pass, a hot spot for illegal entries. On the other hand, because it was known that the truck was a rental, it was entirely possible that its being seen in mid-November, either crossing or proximate to the border, could be explained by its having been rented to someone totally unconnected to the terrorist attack six weeks later (i.e., it may well have been rented by one or more people before being rented by the terrorist we now know as the deceased Shamsud-Din Jabbar).

To make a long story short, Fox News has been reporting for a couple of days now that the truck was spotted in Eagle Pass being operated by someone who was not Jabbar, and that there is no known hard evidence that it crossed the border prior to being observed. Furthermore, the happenstance of where the truck was on November 16, while it would certainly have been intriguing for investigators, now looks like it is probably irrelevant to the atrocity in New Orleans on Wednesday.

The Las Vegas Cybertruck Explosion

Because of the temporal closeness of the Bourbon Street attack (3:15 a.m. Central Time) and the implosion of the Tesla Cybertruck at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, also on New Year’s morning (8:40 a.m. Pacific Time), it was natural to hypothesize that these could have been coordinated terrorist attacks — it would be odd not to consider that possibility.

Very soon, some interesting coincidences came to light. Both the 42-year-old Jabbar and the 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, the Cybertruck driver (who appears to have shot himself to death before the explosion), were U.S. Army vets: Livelsberger was active-duty; Jabbar was honorably discharged from the Reserve in approximately 2020, and had been active for almost ten years up to 2015. Both of them served in Afghanistan in 2009. Both of them were based for a time at Fort Bragg (now known as Fort Liberty). And both of them used the same app — Turo — to rent the trucks involved in the two incidents.

Of course, there were also reasons for skepticism that the two incidents were related. Most prominently, it quickly emerged that Jabbar was a jihadist who was conducting an attack of precisely the kind one would expect based on that ideological motivation. By contrast, there was no reason to believe Livelsberger was a jihadist, and his attack — he was a troubled person, but I assume it was an attack — seemed political: blowing up a Tesla, manufactured by the company of Elon Musk, President-elect Trump’s very public adviser, outside a hotel partially owned by and named after Trump, who is about to reenter the Oval Office.

There are still many questions about both incidents, but it now seems highly unlikely that they are connected.

The fact that both men were in the U.S. Army, while interesting for a number of reasons, does not connect them personally — there’s no evidence they’ve ever met. Livelsberger was Special Forces; Jabbar was not — he appears to have been an IT specialist attached to the 82nd Airborne Division. Because of the intensification of the war in Afghanistan circa 2009–10, over 100,000 troops served there at that time, and most were not in contact with each other. It doesn’t appear that Livelsberger and Jabbar were assigned to Fort Bragg at the same time; even if they had been, it is a huge complex — the largest Army base in the world — sprawling over 250 square miles and touching four counties in North Carolina, with over 60,000 military and support personnel assigned.

As for Turo, while I had never heard of it before this week, it is a substantial business — as CNN put it, “think Airbnb, but for cars.” As of late September, it says it had 350,000 active vehicle listings and 3.5 guest renters across five countries. No, it’s not the size of Hertz, but the fact that two people used the platform at the same time — Jabbar in Texas, Livelsberger in Colorado Springs — is not a meaningful connection.

Again, you can understand why people jump to conclusions in the aftermath of horrific events. We want to know why things happen, and connections are the way we work that out. But what looks like a potentially relevant tie often disintegrates quickly once you have time to scrutinize it.

The Tragicomic FBI

I’ll have more to say Saturday about why the FBI — like the broader U.S. government — chokes on the word “terrorism” when Muslims are implicated. For now, I believe that, Wednesday morning, the bureau’s main spokesperson on the scene, Alethea Duncan, the assistant agent in charge (ASAC) of the New Orleans field office, started the FBI’s public interface with a moronic pronouncement: “This is not a terrorist event.” ASAC Duncan was instantly contradicted by the mayor and the stark evidence already known to the public. There is no agency in the federal government more self-conscious about its public image than the FBI (which is saying something), so words were barely out of Duncan’s mouth before unnamed FBI sources were telling the media that the bureau was indeed investigating the matter as a terrorist event — it was just that the ASAC needed to be careful about the words used at this premature stage of the probe.

Uh-huh . . . and saying it was not terrorism was . . . careful?

As happens too often, after the bureau made the first misstep, it overcorrected. Fearful that the public would deduce that its initial whopper meant it must be hiding something, it erred on the side of providing too much information. And I do mean erred.

Apparently, there was surveillance evidence that suggested four people might have had some connection to the placement of explosive devices found in the French Quarter. When something like that emerges, the experienced investigator runs it down — you don’t announce investigative leads publicly before you know what you’re dealing with. Instead, the bureau let it be known that agents now believed Jabbar had accomplices — maybe three to five, maybe more. But it then turned out that, apparently upon conducting interviews and other rudimentary follow-up, the agents determined that the four (unidentified) people seen in the surveillance video were not complicit. (Since the early reports were that these “suspects” were observed “planting” bombs, it will be interesting to hear what made officials say that in the first place, and why they changed their minds.) And now, as our Haley Strack has reported, the bureau has done another 180 and concluded that Jabbar acted alone.

In less than 48 hours, then, we went from “it’s not terrorism” to “it is absolutely terrorism,” and from “ongoing conspiracy plot” with potential ISIS ties to “lone wolf.” It’s a terrible look for the FBI, obviously.

Again, more on the overarching problems tomorrow. For now, I’ll leave it at this: If you don’t feel the need to put out politically driven spin, then you won’t make the first mistake; and if you don’t make the first mistake, then you won’t make additional mistakes out of rash overcorrection. Always remember that it’s an investigation. Sure, the public wants to know everything, but the public doesn’t actually expect the FBI to know everything instantly, nor to tell the public everything agents think they know. If you want to keep people as calm as the circumstances allow, be straight with them: Don’t lie, don’t spin, and if there’s something you can’t or shouldn’t discuss publicly because it could undermine the investigators’ efforts to collect information, then just say so. Of course people won’t like that, but most will understand why it has to be that way.