FBI officials acknowledged Thursday that they have lost public trust after failing to investigate a potentially life-saving tip that came in before the Florida school shooting.
David Bowdich, the FBI's acting deputy director, said the mistake was the result of bad judgement.
Bowdich said he personally visited the FBI's West Virginia call center this week as part of a review of why a warning that Nikolas Cruz had access to guns and a "desire to kill" was not referred to agents in Florida for further investigation.
"People make judgments out on the street every day. Every now and then those judgments may not have been the best judgments based on the information they had at the time," Bowdich said, adding that the bureau is still trying to determine exactly what went wrong.
The comments came as the bureau faced a fresh wave of politically charged criticism, this time from the National Rifle Association, whose leaders seized on the failure as a chance to discredit the FBI's broader work.
The FBI is also facing unprecedented criticism from President Donald Trump and other Republicans, who have accused it of partisan bias in its investigations of both Hillary Clinton and Trump ties to Russia.