Sometimes they put a dude under surveillance and only act when a threat seems imminent, such as he’s stuffing bombs into a bag, searching a location in maps, and gassing up the car.

They do this for due diligence and also to levy the highest possible charges against the suspect.

You’d be surprised how little time you can get for just owning a pile of pipe bombs. Acting with intent to use pipe bombs to do murder against a specific target gets you way more time, hence the feds aim for the sweet spot just before a major violence occurs, instead of nabbing the dude when he goes to the Ag store to get his first bag of Ammonium nitrate

Yes, ideally it would be days, not months, but realistically 2 months is not that bad. There are so many threats, reports, etc. Ideally the FBI could investigate every possible threat, but there are too many false threats. I think it makes sense, the 2 reports part. I person says it, just one of thousands of reports daily, 2 reports, there is much higher likelihood of there being something.

For an example of how many threats,

Where I live, it’s not a large city, but the school district gets a threat or report agianst a school about once a week. Boy who cried wolf, they can’t treat everyone as legitimate, at best they notify parents.

Of course these are symptoms of systematic government and societal problems, after all I don’t know any other “First world country”, we have to drill preschoolers and thier teachers active shooter drills as much as fire and earthquakes.

I’d bet that who or what the attack was planned for had something to do with that.

And yet, they make sure to point out the encrypted communication. Lazy fucks.

It’s possible they were hoping to find out if he truly had accomplices and had him under surveillance

They need to make sure they have enough for a rock solid warrant/arrest.

Wouldn’t want someone like that to get off on a technicality.