Breitbart News presents live coverage of the aftermath of the jihadist Omar Mateen’s massacre at Orlando’s Pulse night club. Three days after the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, an opinion poll shows the public’s initial reaction to the various responses suggested by the country’s political figures.
All times Eastern Standard Time.
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Top developments:
• Mateen appeared to call a local news station and say he committed the attack for the Islamic State. This was not reported Sunday but three days later.
• Twitter suspends Milo Yiannopoulos hours before his speech at “Ground Zero” in Orlando
• Is Omar Mateen’s wife Noor on the lam?
• Milo condemns local mosque for hosting speaker who incited violence against gays
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10:32 PM: Boston Globe‘s Thursday front page:
10:23 PM: Orlando terrorist reportedly told co-workers he wanted to be a “martyr.”
10:20 PM: Craigslist ad warns San Diego is next.
9:35 PM:: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) asks Facebook to “provide all Facebook data on Mr. Mateen’s activities on his account and any affiliated Facebook accounts, including but not limited to activity logs, Facebook timeline information, Facebook messages, photos, and posts.” The Orlando terrorist may have had at least five accounts linked to him.
9:15 PM: Report: Orlando terrorist made 16 phone calls during the terrorist attack and searched for words like “Pulse Orlando.” Investigators are reportedly “tracking down each of the recipients of those calls.” He also searched for the San Bernardino terrorist couple.
8:35 PM: Authorities: Orlando terror investigation could take years.
7:50 PM: On CNN, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) says Trump can turn around his unfavorable number because his message, especially on trade and immigration, will resonate with working Americans.
7:40 PM: Joe Biden pushing gun control at Sandy Hook Promise Gala:
7:11 PM: CBS Poll: Plurality of Americans want more “conservative” policies.
Clinton holds lead over Trump in national CBS poll:
7:00 PM: FBI says gay night club was terrorist’s only target.
6:40 PM: Report: Orlando terrorist had a pattern of “disruptive behavior” stretching back to elementary school. Though he was born in New York, he was reportedly “sent to finish kindergarten at Frances K. Sweet Elementary because he was limited in reading, writing and speaking English, according to documents. Mateen’s first language was Afghani, which was primarily spoken at home, according to records.”
Mateen’s first language was Afghani, which was primarily spoken at home, according to records.
6:23 PM — Grand Jury will determine whether terrorist’s wife will be charged.
A U.S. attorney plans to bring evidence before a federal grand jury to determine whether charges will be brought against Noor Salman, the widow of Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen, according to two law enforcement officials.
6:21 PM —
6:17 PM — CNN reporter “alarmed” that many Americans favor a temporary ban on Muslim immigration:
6:15 PM — Suspects reportedly tried to run down Orlando police officer:
6:00 PM — Local Orlando children make care packages for police.
5:50 PM — 2016:
— Sanders campaign vows to go to convention.
— Cruz plots comeback as Rubio ponders another Senate run.
5:01 PM — Chilling Facebook post from Orlando terrorist moments before attack warns of more ISIS attacks in the U.S.
4:35 PM — Orlando terrorist reportedly abused gay man at gym.
4:30 PM —
4:25 PM — Also an indictment of the Republican establishment permanent political class:
After Orlando terror attack, Rubio reconsidering Senate run:
4:24 PM — Trump heading to the Lone Star State again:
4:21 PM — Sen. Warren, pushing more gun control after the Orlando attacks, says Senators will have “blood on their hands” if they fail to ban so-called “assault weapons.”
4:17 PM — Filibustering to push for gun control more important to some Senate Dems.
4:10 PM — Clinton uses post-Orlando press conference to slam Trump’s proposal to build a wall as campaign releases video attacking Trump (Trump has edge over Clinton on terrorism, according to multiple national polls):
4:00 PM — Obama finally calls Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
3:50 PM — Full doc on Mateen’s firearms proficiency:
3:44 PM —
3:31 PM — TMZ report: Mateen also tried to pick up women on dating app Plenty of Fish.
Cord Cedeno says he connected with Mateen a couple years ago on Grindr, but it was hardly titillating. Cedeno says Mateen — whose profile was a pic of him in a tie — would only say “Hi” over and over. He says he eventually blocked Mateen, but knows 4 friends who say the Orlando murderer remained active on other apps.
He says Mateen used Adam4Adam to send shots of his penis to men — but never showed his face. Cedeno says he has no knowledge Mateen was ever successful in hooking up with a man.
On the other hand … a female user on Plenty Of Fish says Mateen reached out to her 18 months ago. She says he was “nice, normal … mentioned he had a child, but said he was single and looking for a good woman to marry.”
3:25 PM —
3:22 PM — FBI stonewalling on the tip from Disney World.
3:18 PM — Possible new threat.
On Tuesday evening, a 10News viewer saw the post in the men-seeking-men section of the Craigslist San Diego personal ads. He took a screenshot and sent it to us before the post was flagged and removed.
The post is titled, “We need more Orlando’s (sic).” It is accompanied by a photo of a hand firing a revolver with a bullet coming out of the barrel.
The post read: “Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name. Those people were walking diseases, bug chasers, and thank god for AIDS and 9-11 and now Orlando. San Diego you are next…”
3:11 PM — Milo concludes with a denunciation of social media companies Twitter and Facebook, particularly the meeting that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had with conservatives several weeks ago.
3:07 PM — Milo: Gays are starting to pick up on the fact that Trump “could be the most gay-friendly president in history.”
3:04 PM — “The only people who are surprised” that Muslims want to kill gays “are the people who write your newspapers.”
3:02 PM — Milo says Twitter, with its largest investor being Saudi, has become “Sharia compliant” and American colleges are, as well.
3:01 PM — Milo says he has received too many death threats to read through; his “swag” store has received over 100 on its own. The threats are in Arabic and English. “My staff are freaked the fuck out.”
2:59 PM — “If there’s something you can do to save gay people in this country, it’s this: Close the border.”
2:57 PM — On Muslim community’s response: “This is not the time for ‘Out, damned spot.’ This is the time for ‘We fucked up and we’re sorry.'”
2:55 PM — Yiannopoulos references the Imam hosted at a mosque 45 minutes from Orlando who said it was “compassionate” to kill gays. Says moral equivalence from the likes of Sally Kohn is “offensive… a term I don’t use often.”
2:53 PM — “As a straight man standing up here with a gay man, I would just like to say ‘Fuck you, Islam.'” Milo then grabs Gavin’s head and kisses him.
2:50 PM — Gavin McInnes takes the spotlight. “We are consumed with Islamophobia… We would literally rather die than offend.”
2:48 PM — “Most of this talk would have got me arrested in Europe.”
2:47 PM — Milo encourages gay people to say “never again.” To signal to Islamic supremacists “that we will shoot back.”
2:43 PM — Milo says that Orlando mosques were “crawling” with police posted for protection yesterday — while a university said they could not muster enough police to protect him on its campus.
2:39 PM — Milo: Gun-free zones provide a safe space for killers. “They walk in there confident in the knowledge that no one will fight back.”
2:38 PM — He continues: the politicians do not have your back. The only response is to defend and protect yourselves.
2:37 PM — Milo: Recent survey shows 100% of British Muslims believe that homosexuality is unacceptable. “This is in the West… This is not radical Islam. This is Islam.”
2:36 PM — Milo arrives and quips of a rainbow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, “It should say, ‘Fire back.'”
2:33 PM — Scenes from site of Milo speech.
2:26 PM — Authorities have obtained video of Mateen and his wife purchasing ammunition.
2:25 PM — FBI poster for more info on Mateen. The bureau is now the lead investigative agency on this case:
2:23 PM — At site of Milo’s talk, Breitbart Texas’s Brandon Darby says on a Periscope live stream, “There’s a backpack here nobody’s claiming.”
2:12 PM —
2:07 PM — FBI spox says the attack is both terrorism and a hate crime.
2:03 PM — FBI spox says no other shooters aside from Mateen and police officers.
2:01 PM — FBI spox says no indications there were any other targets for an attack besides Pulse.
2:00 PM — Reporters asking questions now.
1:55 PM —
1:50 PM — Rick Scott: This is clearly an attack on the gay community, Hispanic community — and a terror attack on our nation and our way of life.
1:45 PM — Really, no new info at this presser.
1:41 PM — Nothing new.
1:38 PM —
1:36 PM — FBI spox says the bureau will investigate any acts of “retaliation” against local Muslims.
1:35 PM —
1:31 PM — Orlando press conference begins soon.
1:22 PM — Trump says Obama’s speech Tuesday “was all about political correctness.” Retorts: “we’re going down the wrong path and our country is in serious trouble.”
1:21 PM — Trump says that while Mateen while born here, “his ideas were born somewhere else.”
1:18 PM — Trump pivots to Germany’s problems with unchecked Islamic migration. He says friends who praised the country as a great place to live — for decades — are now moving away.
1:16 PM — Powerful address from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (with video):
1:14 PM — Trump says part of the reason terrorist attacks continue is because “they have no respect for us whatsoever.”
1:12 PM — If some of those great people who were in the club that night had guns strapped to their waists or guns strapped to their ankles, Trump says, it still would have been horrible but the carnage would have been nothing like the 100+ it became.
1:09 PM — Trump stresses support from LGBT community, his own history opening a club that welcomed gay patrons.
1:07 PM — Trump says it’s impossible to vet Middle Eastern refugees because they don’t have “papers.”
1:06 PM — Trump brings up Clinton Foundation taking in “tens of millions of dollars” from nations that “want to enslave women” and kill gays.
1:05 PM — Trump: “It’s going to happen again and again and again, because we are not doing what we have to be doing.”
1:01 PM — In Atlanta rally, Trump repeats accusation that Muslim terrorist family’s don’t report plots to the authorities.
12:54 PM —
12:51 PM — Mateen’s father, again:
The Orlando shooter’s father says terrorists planted the idea of carrying out a mass shooting in his son’s head — and he didn’t even know it was happening.
“My son was killed by terrorists,” said Seddique Mateen this morning from his home in Port St. Lucie. “Fifty people were killed by terrorism. This was a terrorist idea. (My son) learned from them.”
12:40 PM — Tiny detail to add, as the local report is not clear: Seddique was present at Noor’s sister’s house.
12:35 PM — Red alert.
At a Fort Pierce home owned by members of the Mateen family, deputies arrived, went into the house for a few minutes, then left at around noon Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, Seddique Mateen — father of the Orlando massacre shooter Omar Mateen — arrived at the home and said Omar’s wife Noor Salman is “no longer here” and that she was no longer in the area. He would not say where she had gone.
12:28 PM — Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. Obama thinks so little of Muslims that he won’t call out problems in the community:
Obama, in my reading, does not—contra his right-leaning critics—suffer illusions about the pathologies afflicting the broader Muslim world. If anything, his pessimism on matters related to the dysfunctions of Muslim states, and to the inability of the umma—the worldwide community of Muslims—to contain and ultimately neutralize the extremist elements in its midst, has, at times, an almost paralyzing effect on him. The president has come to the conclusion (as I outlined in my recent Atlantic cover story, “The Obama Doctrine”) that the underlying problems afflicting Islam are too deep, and too resistant to American intervention, to warrant implementation of the sort of policies that his critics, including his critics in foreign-policy think tanks, demand.
12:26 PM — Obama bringing gun control sermon to prayer vigil.
12:21 PM — NBC News corrects its headline from yesterday which buried the lede on Noor Salman:
Orlando Gunman’s Wife Gave No Warning to Cops Before Attack
The Orlando gunman’s wife feared he was going to attack a gay nightclub overnight Saturday and pleaded with him not to do anything violent — but failed to warn police after he left, NBC News has learned.
Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Zahi Salman, told the FBI that her husband assured her he was simply going to see friends, although she believed he was actually planning to unleash terror at the Pulse nightclub, a two-hour drive north from their home in Port St. Lucie.
12:11 PM — From CNN:
Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen visited online gay chat rooms despite expressing outrage at the sight of two men kissing and making inflammatory comments about gays, law enforcement officials said.
Investigators don’t know whether he visited the chat rooms for personal reasons or for surveillance before carrying out the brutal attack early Sunday at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people and wounding more than 50 others.
12:02 PM —
11:50 AM — Minutes after Milo’s suspension hits the top story on Drudge Report, he’s reinstated. Hmmm…
11:42 AM — Archive of Milo’s Twitter timeline from this morning. What could be the complaint? That he published a death threat Direct Message from an account set to Private?
Our guess is it has something to do with Milo saying that moderate Islam is a threat to gays, not just radical Islam, yesterday. It likely took Twitter some time to sign off on his punishment. They’re not giving any reasons to the public, however! Feel free to speculate until they do…
11:26 AM —
11:20 AM —
11:13 AM — Minor question: Why didn’t local news report the “I did it for ISIS” phone call on Sunday instead of, say, Wednesday?
11:11 AM — Chasing down all the important leads.
11:09 AM —
11:08 AM — Milo Yiannopoulos’s Twitter account @Nero has been suspended.
11:07 AM —
10:54 AM — From Reuters:
U.S. Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which received a briefing on the investigation into Sunday’s massacre, told CNN it appeared Salman had “some knowledge” of what was going on.
“She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be cooperating and can provide us with some important information,” King said.
10:51 AM — L’horreur.
10:40 AM — A close look at Seddique Mateen’s social media shows him posing with lawmakers like Charlie Rangel and visiting the State Department to lobby for Afghanistan (and against Pakistan).
10:37 AM — New York Times report makes it seem as though the FBI is waffling on whether to charge Mateen’s wife.
Ms. Salman is not in custody, the official said. While a person who withholds knowledge of a crime could face criminal charges, she is not facing imminent arrest, and no decisions have been made on whether she might be prosecuted, the official said.
10:35 AM — Florida man walks down driveway.
10:26 AM — The Huffington Post, never to be upstaged in the Hot Take Game:
10:22 AM —
10:17 AM — Following two cancellations at his first venue choice, Milo takes his talk to “Ground Zero” in Orlando.
10:14 AM —
10:12 AM —
9:57 AM —
9:56 AM —
9:55 AM — “Though the owner of Pulse nightclub is still in shock, Barbara Poma is adamant about one thing — an intent to rebuild the club as a place of safety and fun for the gay, lesbian and transgender community.”
9:43 AM — Thermonuclear take from bit player on Mad Men:
9:36 AM — Remember, per Vox: when you call someone a fascist/Nazi, that is an incitement to violence.
9:34 AM — CNN neck-and-neck with New York Times.
9:21 AM — CNN home page starting the day with a strong bid for Hottest Take:
9:18 AM — Purported photo of Mateen’s Jack’d profile “100% hoax.”
9:07 AM — Mateen was in a documentary about the BP oil spill.
Footage from a 2012 award-winning documentary, “The Big Fix,” has emerged showing Orlando gunman Omar Mateen working as a security guard contracted to the security company G4S following the 2010 BP oil spill. He seems skeptical of the cleanup efforts.
“No one gives a s*** here. Everybody’s just, get out to get paid. They’re like hoping for more oil to come out and more people to complain so they’ll have jobs,” Mateen tells a reporter. “They want more disaster to happen.”
A G4S spokesperson confirmed to CBS News that Mateen is indeed the man featured in the documentary.
9:02 AM — Chris Barron of GOProud is lobbying for Donald Trump in the wake of the Pulse massacre.
A prominent gay Republican is coordinating an effort to mobilize a coalition of conservative lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) voters in support of Donald Trump, CNN has learned, a project that has intensified in the wake of a terrorist attack at a gay club in Orlando, Florida.
Chris Barron, the former president of the now-defunct gay conservative group GOProud, was recently a vocal Trump critic, but now is circulating a letter among like-minded members of the LGBT community, arguing that Republican Trump will better-suited to protect them from acts of extremism as president than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“I have no doubt that Donald Trump would be better for LGBT Americans,” Barron said in an interview with CNN. “Hillary Clinton wants to continue a reckless foreign policy that has made the world less safe for all Americans, including LGBT Americans. She can find plenty of time to crucify Christians in the U.S. for perceived anti-gay bias, but when we’ve got ISIS throwing gay people off of buildings, when we have Muslim states that are prescribing the death penalty for people who are gay, I would think this would be something that a friend of the LGBT community would be able to speak out on, and Hillary Clinton finds it unable to do so.”
9:00 AM — The horror we have feared for days now. Orlando police chief admits friendly fire may have killed victims.
Monday, Orlando Police Chief John Mina and other law enforcement officers offered new details about the shooting, including the possibility that some victims may have been killed by officers trying to save them.
“I will say this, that’s all part of the investigation,” Mina said. “But I will say when our SWAT officers, about eight or nine officers, opened fire, the backdrop was a concrete wall, and they were being fired upon.”
A law enforcement source close to the investigation who asked not to be named said a crowd of up to 300 people and the complex layout of the dance club may have resulted in some patrons being struck by gunfire from officers.
8:56 AM — God bless America.
8:53 AM — During the shooting, someone called a local news station claiming to be Mateen.
Gentili said he was aware of the shooting. “Yes, I’m getting calls. I am hearing reports of a shooting,” he replied to the caller, who then cut him off.
“I’m the shooter. It’s me. I am the shooter,” the person on the other end said.
Gentili said he didn’t know what to say. The caller then started to say he committed the shooting for the Islamic State (militant group).
“He did it for ISIS, and he started speaking Arabic,” Gentili said of the early morning phone call. “At the time, I didn’t know what he was saying. He was speaking so fast. But it was … he was speaking fluently. Whatever language he was speaking, he knew it. And he was speaking it very quickly. And that is when I said to him, ‘Sir. Please. Speak in English, please.'”
8:49 AM — CBS News poll, conducted this Monday and Tuesday (surveying Americans in general, not likely voters):
President Obama gets net positive ratings for his response to the shooting in Orlando. 44 percent approve, while 34 percent disapprove. About a quarter don’t have an opinion.
When asked to assess the responses of the presumptive nominees for President, Americans are divided on Hillary Clinton’s response to the attack, while ratings of Trump are more negative. 51 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is responding to the Orlando attack, while just 25 percent approve.
Most Democrats (62 percent) approve of Clinton’s response, while just half of Republicans (50 percent) approve of Trump’s. More independents are critical of Trump’s response than Clinton’s.