FBI foils shooting plot it supplied the rifle for, awarded a push for a bigger counterterrorism budget.

…(cont) Then Wednesday: Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota, and Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, eighteen years old, who the bureau says had been under investigation for nearly two years before anyone sold him anything at all. He was arrested in a public park, at gunpoint, during a meeting set up to hand over the rifle and two hundred rounds. The Hill reports that an FBI source says he repeatedly affirmed, to the people he believed were his ISIS contacts, that the attack was meant for non-Muslims specifically. I want to be careful where I put that, because it's a source talking to a reporter, not a line I can find in the complaint itself, and I've gotten those two kinds of facts crossed before in my own notes.

I tried walking this through an ordinary week of mine to see if the shape held up anywhere else. At the corner store the man behind the register sells me a scratch ticket; he isn't also the state employee who decides later whether I won. At the toll plaza the attendant takes my dollar; she doesn't also write up whether I was speeding to get there. There's a toolbox in my garage with a fan belt I never got around to putting on, and even that belt came from a parts counter that had no say over whether the state would later fail my car. So on just this one point, I keep asking: when the seller and the stopper are the same federal agency, who is the one actually being stopped?

Senator Amy Klobuchar looked at this exact case and asked, Fox News reported, for major new investments in counterterrorism. I'd like to ask just the one question about that pairing: when the appropriation moves through committee, does the line item distinguish between the part of the operation that finds a plot and the part that supplies one?

One thing more, before you head out — I keep coming back to that number, because I think I finally worked out why it bothers me past the obvious. The money didn't vanish into some street dealer's pocket where the bureau would have had no way of tracing it. It went directly to an undercover FBI employee, and now the same agency is back in front of the Senate asking for a great deal more of it. So when that request moves through committee, is it funding the part of the bureau that stops attacks, or the part that supplies them, six hundred dollars at a time?