WASHINGTON — In his address to the nation on Sunday night, President Obama will most likely urge Americans to “not give in to fear,” detail measures the country is already taking to combat extremism and ask Congress to explore new ones, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said on Sunday.
“What you’re going to hear from him is a discussion about what government is doing to ensure all of our highest priority — the protection of the American people,” Ms. Lynch said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The address, scheduled for 8 p.m. Eastern time, comes four days after a husband and wife killed 14 people and wounded 21 others in San Bernardino, Calif., and amid what Ms. Lynch reiterated was a continuing F.B.I. investigation into the assailants’ possible radicalization and their motivations.
“At this point we do not have any evidence that they were part of a larger group, or a cell, or were planning anything else,” Ms. Lynch told NBC’s Chuck Todd, referring to news media reports she said might be misleading.
“I would caution people not to try and define either of these individuals right now,” she added.
The couple — Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan, and Syed Rizwan Farook, who was born in the United States — had stockpiled weapons, including pipe bombs, in their home before the shooting, which was the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. Ms. Malik had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, in a Facebook post. On Saturday during a radio broadcast, the group identified the couple as “supporters,” a term viewed as further removed than members or operatives.
Ms. Lynch said that social media was playing a relatively small part in the larger terrorism investigation but said she could not discuss specific details of the case.
She urged individuals who notice a suspicious change in the behavior of friends or family members to contact law enforcement, but she said the standard for screening individuals should not necessarily be lowered.
In the speech, Mr. Obama is expected to reassure a nation on edge by resetting his emotional and rhetorical response to a massacre that investigators now believe was a homegrown terrorist attack inspired by the Islamic State.
The attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., represent the first time that terrorists with suspected ties to the Islamic State have successfully struck the United States. And it comes in the wake of the deadly assault on multiple locations in Paris last month and the takedown of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt, both attributed to the Islamic State.
For Mr. Obama, the arrival of Islamic State-inspired terror in the United States underscores urgent questions about the military and diplomatic effort his administration initiated more than a year ago, when the terror group surged into Iraq, seizing territory there and in neighboring Syria.
The president has relied on airstrikes, financial sanctions and targeted special operations to counter the growth of the Islamic State, while building a diplomatic coalition of dozens of nations and resisting any call for the introduction of large numbers of American ground troops in the Middle East.
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