The FBI on Monday will release a partial transcript of Omar Mateen’s negotiations with police from inside the Orlando nightclub where he slaughtered 49 people — but the feds will redact “his pledges” to ISIS, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday.
“I say partial, because we’re not going to be, for example, broadcasting his pledges of allegiance. We are trying not to re-victimize those who went through that horror,” Lynch said on ABC’s “This Week.”
President Obama was roundly criticized last week for failing to refer to Mateen as a radical Islamic terrorist.
Lynch also said Sunday that Mateen — a closeted gay man, according witnesses and men who said he hit on them — made no mention of disdain for homosexuals in his phone conversations with cops while holed up in the Pulse club.
“These are the calls with the Orlando PD negotiating team who were trying to ascertain who he was, where he was and why he was doing this, all the while the rescue operations were continuing,” Lynch said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Mateen was killed by police in a shootout.
Lynch said she will fly to Orlando Tuesday to be briefed on the investigation that is now focused on Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman.
Salman could be hit with a host of criminal charges, including aiding and abetting, sources have told The Post.
Lynch said authorities were reviewing two earlier FBI investigations into Mateen, but signaled that the agency had conducted thorough examinations in both cases, which were eventually closed without charges being filed against him.
“The FBI did everything it could to see [if he] was he about to carry out anything,” she told “This Week.”
“This was about two years ago, and I can assure you that had he indicated he was going to take action, that they would have stayed on that investigation.”
But a Florida gun-shop owner, Robbie Abell, said he alerted the FBI that a suspicious man later identified as Mateen had tried to purchase 1,000 rounds of ammunition and body armor from his store weeks before the massacre.
During a press conference last week, Abell said his employee turned Mateen away and immediately called the FBI, but federal agents never showed up to investigate.
The House Homeland Security Committee will be “conducting oversight hearings” to see if the FBI could have done more, said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump weighed in on the issue, saying it was a “shame” the authorities didn’t follow up on Abell’s tip about Mateen.
“I’m a big fan of the FBI, but they had a little bit of a bad day,” Trump said on “This Week.”