House Judiciary Chairman Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) stated that San Bernardino attacker Tashfeen Malik either overstayed her visa in Saudi Arabia, which should have raised red flags, or never met her fiancé, and that her visa to the US was “inexplicably” approved on Tuesday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on the Fox News Channel.
Goodlatte said, “Well, we don’t know that she was being consistently honest, and we also don’t know that the consular officer who was conducting the interview of her got all the information that was requested of her before they then, inexplicably went ahead and approved the visa for her to come to the United States.”
He added, “there’s a person in the consular office in Saudi Arabia where she applied for this K-1 — actually in Pakistan, where she applied for this K-1 visa. And one of the requirements was that you have to prove for a Fiancé(e) visa that you actually have met the person that you’re intending to go to the United States to get married to, and there’s very little evidence in this file that they have. There’s an affidavit from the husband-to-be, and there is also a request in the file for a translation of their passport stamp to show they were even in Saudi Arabia at the same time, and the information in the file does not allow them to exclude that because, first of all, they didn’t get the translation that they requested. They should not have approved the application until they got the translation. When they got the — when we got the document with the file, we had a translator come in to translate it, and you cannot determine it, from the translation the date that she departed Saudi Arabia. In fact, she was admitted for only 60 days. She arrived on June 4. The allegation is they met when he was in Saudi Arabia between October 1 and October 20, but she was supposed to leave by August 4. So either she overstayed her visa, which should have raised questions right there, or they never met.”
Goodlatte concluded, “it also raises questions about how this woman, who the FBI says was radicalized prior to this immigration process even beginning, went through three interviews before these attacks took place, and in none of the interviews did they ascertain this radicalized mindset on her part. So, we need to be looking at what more needs to be done to ask the right questions, and to do more background information before someone’s admitted.”
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