Miranda Devine: The FBI’s repeated non-answers on US terrorism attacks raises alarming red flags

The official response to my column Monday about the FBI’s failure to prevent four recent Islamic terror attacks has been unsatisfactory, to say the least, and the personal attacks by FBI Director Kash Patel’s private PR operatives have been downright deranged.

None of which is reassuring when it comes to the FBI’s preparedness to handle a heightened terror threat on home soil.

It’s not Patel’s fault that our foremost domestic counterterrorism agency has been degraded and politicized under his predecessors, but it’s his job to fix it fast and his defensiveness suggests a problem.

The most alarming case involves Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a convicted ISIS terrorist who was on supervised federal release when he yelled “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire on an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., last Thursday, killing the instructor before being killed himself.

Jalloh, a naturalized US citizen from Sierra Leone, had been released from federal prison in Allenwood, Pa., on Dec. 23, 2024, having served eight years of an 11-year sentence for “providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” the Islamic State group.

Specifically, he planned an attack on US military personnel during Ramadan.

He was placed on federal supervised release for five years until 2029.

‘Not our job’

I asked the FBI if it had forewarning of Jalloh’s attack in Norfolk, seeing he was on supervised release.

But the FBI insists it’s not their job to monitor released terrorists.

A spokesman replied: “The FBI does not oversee supervised release from prison; that would be up to the federal district courts . . . When the FBI has information or intelligence of a threat, the FBI works with our local and federal law enforcement to address those threats.”

I asked the question in a variety of ways and received the same ­answer.

Jalloh’s probation officer last visited him in November 2025 in Sterling, Va., where he lived with his sister, according to the federal affidavit supporting the criminal complaint against the man accused of selling him the gun, Kenya Mcchell Chapman, which was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

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The visits were scheduled once every six months.

I asked the FBI if it was informed by Jalloh’s probation officer of his November visit. I received the same answer: “Refer you to the federal district court.”

Jalloh lived just 22 miles from the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO), the bureau’s second largest office, whose jurisdiction includes Sterling, Va.

The WFO was the field office that handled Jalloh’s original 2016 arrest, so you would think the FBI would want to know that Jalloh had been released from prison and would make an effort to monitor him.

I asked if the FBI had kept an eye on Jalloh in the 14 months since his release; for instance had they covertly tailed him, monitored his contacts, his phone and computer use, tracked his finances or interacted with him?

The FBI replied: “As said, the FBI does not control supervised release from prison or post-release monitoring, which would include some actions you are referring to.”

That is extraordinary. Any proactive, thorough counterterrorism program should have had Jalloh in its sights as a potential threat and at least made an effort to mitigate it.

At about 12:30 p.m. on March 11, the day before the Norfolk attack, phone records show that Jalloh traveled to his alleged gun supplier’s house in Smithfield, Va., where he stayed for 1½ hours, “and then traveled to the vicinity of the Islamic Center of Hampton, Va.,” according to the Chapman affidavit.

He stayed at the mosque for more than nine hours before returning to Smithfield and staying overnight.

No red flag

That activity might have raised red flags if anyone had been tailing him.

In the past, the FBI has conducted surveillance of convicted Islamic terrorists for years after their release from federal prison.

Did something change?

Did then-FBI Director Christopher Wray focus all the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts on the Biden administration’s new designation of “domestic terrorist”?

Was the agency too busy rounding up J6 grandmas for trespass, Catholics for attending Latin mass, and parents at school-board meetings complaining about gender theory to worry about monitoring actual Islamist terrorists hellbent on killing infidels?

And if it’s not the FBI’s job, then why is the bureau automatically notified by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) when an inmate with a terrorism conviction is scheduled for release?

“Since 2005 the BOP has provided to the FBI a list of terrorist inmates who are scheduled for release from BOP custody so the FBI could perform appropriate follow-up activities if necessary,” noted a 2020 DOJ Inspector General audit of BOP, confirming “the ongoing policy requirement for identified terrorist inmates to enable FBI/JTTF [multiagency Joint Terrorism Task Force led by the FBI] follow-up, monitoring decisions, and watchlist maintenance.”

Monitored for years

There are several well-documented examples of other released Islamic terrorists being monitored by the FBI for years.

For example, John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” was released from prison in 2019 on three years of supervised release, during which the FBI tailed him and photographed him meeting another released jihadist, as documented in federal court filings in 2021.

The Lackawanna Six, Yemeni-American men who were convicted over an al Qaeda plot in 2003, were released in the mid-2010s and surveilled by the FBI for years.

High alert

Director Patel placed the FBI on high alert on Feb. 28 in response to Operation Epic Fury in Iran and declared the bureau was “at the forefront of deterring attacks here at home.”

I asked the FBI if its field offices, including the WFO, responded to the high alert by taking inventory of potential terrorism subjects like Jalloh?

What additional steps, if any, were taken to locate and monitor Jalloh?

The FBI replied: “As Director Patel said on 2/28, the FBI’s counterterrorism and intelligence teams were instructed to be on high alert and mobilize all assisting security assets needed. The FBI’s JTTFs throughout the country are working 24/7, as always, to address and disrupt any potential threats to the homeland.”

Well, they failed to do that four times in the past three weeks.

The answers from the FBI smell like obfuscation.

What are they trying to hide?