Obama DOJ Still Keeping Secret Two Other Phone Calls With Orlando Shooter

...based on a previous description of Mateen's 911 calls given by FBI Director James Comey last week, it appears that the federal investigators continued to withhold details of a second conversation Mateen had with the 911 operator, which was not referred to at all in the government's timeline. "He made 911 calls from the club, during the attack," Comey said last week. "He called and he hung up. He called again and spoke briefly with the dispatcher, and then he hung up, and then the dispatcher called him back again and they spoke briefly. There were three total calls."

Also missing from the transcript and summary of the conversations was any mention of the fact that, as Comey also said last week, Mateen had expressed solidarity with the Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, and Moner Mohammad Abusalha, a Floridian who carried out a suicide bombing in Syria in 2014 on behalf of al Qaeda's representatives there, the Nusra Front. The FBI's Boston office revealed that Mateen had referred to the Tsarnaev brothers as his "homeboys" during one of the 911 calls, despite a lack of evidence that he had ever been in contact with them.

At a news conference in Orlando on Monday morning, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Tampa field office, Ron Hopper, said that while "the audio is compelling," it would not be released as part of an effort to not glorify such attackers.

Pressed by reporters as to why the transcript released on Monday was partial and edited, Hopper seemed to refer to Mateen's words about the other attackers. "Part of the redacting is meant to not give credence to individuals who have done terrorist attacks in the past," he said. "We're not going to propagate their rhetoric, their violent rhetoric, and we see no value in putting those individuals' names back out there."

"We're trying to prevent future acts from happening again," he continued, "and for cowards like this one, people like that influence them, so we are not going to continue to put their names out front."