The White House did not invite the most senior US official charged with preventing terrorist attacks — FBI Director James Comey — to the three-day summit meeting this week on countering violent extremism because the US administration did not want the event too focused on law enforcement issues, senior US officials said.
However, Comey’s Russian counterpart — Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the Russian Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet KGB — was at the meeting, even though international human rights groups have repeatedly accused the Russian security service of unjustly detaining and spying on Russians and others.
The service also declined to provide US counterterrorism and intelligence officials with information before the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that would likely have led to more scrutiny of one of the suspects.
Several other foreign law enforcement officials attended the conference, which was held in Washington. The meeting has been criticized as ineffectual and irrelevant, and not focused on immediate and tangible solutions to stop terrorists. And some Republicans said that US President Barack Obama’s speech to the assembled leaders on Wednesday did not lay out a strategy for defeating groups like the Islamic State.
The omission of Comey adds further uncertainty over who in the government is in charge of the anti-extremist effort. Just a few months ago, the FBI put out a lengthy bulletin on its Web site about how it was leading “a new approach to countering violent extremism.” Many of the strategies listed by the FBI appear similar to ones mentioned at the meeting.
A senior Obama administration official defended the decision not to invite Comey, saying: “While the FBI works tirelessly to keep the country safe, this conference was not centered on federal law enforcement.”
The official said that the administration’s efforts to counter violent extremists “are premised on the notion that local officials and communities can be an effective bulwark against violent extremism, and most of the participants — spanning community leaders, local, law enforcement, private sector innovators and others — reflected this bottom-up approach.”
A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment.
Comey’s boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, attended the conference, and several FBI officials participated in its panels, the official said.
The US administration did not specifically invite Bortnikov, the official said. Instead, it had sent a general invitation to the Russian government, which chose Bortnikov, along with others, to come to Washington. The administration did not try to prevent Bortnikov, who rarely visits the US, from attending, said the official, who did not want to be identified discussing internal White House deliberations. Bortnikov is on the EU sanctions list in response to the crisis in Ukraine, but he is not subject to US sanctions.
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