this kind of attack targeting this area. we do know that in general, we ve spoken about this and you heard new york city officials there mention this as well, that isis and other groups have talked about using vehicles as a weapon against soft targets writ large in general terms, but i m told by the national counterterrorism center that there was no specific intelligence warning of this kind of attack at this particular target. you wanted to make one point. i know you ve got to run back to the hill, senator, but go ahead. you know, what doesn t quite square with all of this is the paint ball gun and pellet gun. and perhaps there was a fortune aspect of this, that he wasn t didn t have an assault weapon or something that would have literally killed tens or hundreds of people at that point, but the use of the truck certainly is the m.o. that s been used more and more by both homegrown and foreign terrorists. yeah. all right. senator, i know you ve got to run.
fbi has taken charge and working together with nypd? certainly, wolf, it has all the signs of an act of terrorism. we ve been very fortunate in avoiding this kind of fatal attack on our country after 9/11 due to the intelligence and surveillance and very hardened defenses that we have. but here s the other side of it, that isis has been on the run and on the defensive in iraq and the middle east and certainly it has boasted about metastasizing in effect this cancer of attacks on democracies all around the world. so it s attempting to reach america, the greatest democracy in the world, would not be surprising. because the fact that they re losing in iraq, they re losing their so-called caliphate in syria, they may try to take up more terrorist incidents in europe and the united states? there is intelligence as a member of the armed service committee, i can tell you that
second default you make right away is so ensure that you re confident that nobody else was part of a conspiracy. that there wasn t a follow-on attack. phil, hold on for a moment. jim sciutto is getting more information. what else are you learning? this is coming in the from the intelligence group that monitors terrorist groups and websites, posting, et cetera. they posted this picture. this was posted on an isis site in august of this year. august 2017. that is on that iphone there an isis flag displayed. and this site, if you can see in the background there, that is freedom tower, rising, of course, with what replaced the twin towers after the 9/11 attacks. but this photo taken with that isis flag within a mile of where today s attack took place, and the language attached to this photo when it was posted, warned crusaders that isis, the self-proclaimed islamic state supporters are in their lands and in effect a threat. we don t know if this is
that s what jihadis absolutely crave. they want to go to paradise. we saw that with an attack here in london just a couple of months ago on london bridge where the perpetrators were wearing fake suicide vests. the reason they did that, they wanted to draw gunfire, they wanted to die, go to paradise in their vision. in this case, this attacker has not had that wish granted. they would appear very much alive and will now be interrogated. one would imagine fairly soon about all of this, wolf. we were told he was shot in the abdomen. earlier we told you shot in the leg, but the abdomen, he s in a local new york city hospital. very interesting about the paint ball gun and the pellet gun. phil mudd, you listened very closely to this news conference as well. the fbi, the nypd. what was your reaction? i thought that was exactly what any american official should be saying in the wake of an event like this. there are two messages, wolf. one message is that of grief and being with the family
we re going to have you back on another day. there is a lot of other news we re going to be following as well. we re following the breaking news in new york city right now. senator blumenthal, thanks very much for joining us. i want to quickly go to our white house correspondent sara murray. we re beginning to get reaction from the president, sara? reporter: that s right. we did hear from sarah sanders, the white house press secretary. she informed reporters that the president has been briefed on the situation in new york. he was briefed by chief of staff john kelly. the president took to twitter to say this, in nyc looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person. law enforcement is following this closely. not in the usa. of course, this is unfolding on the streets in the united states of america and in new york city right now is the first lady melania trump. she was there today for meetings. she also took to twitter to say her heart is breaking for new york city. so sen