Attorney general mum on motive for San Bernardino

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday that while authorities are investigating the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., as a terrorist act, it’s too early to pin down the motivations of the married couple who carried it out.

“This investigation is ongoing, it’s wide-ranging, it’s very complex,” Lynch said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” adding that officials have conducted over 300 interviews and searched multiple locations after the urban center shooting that killed 14 on Wednesday, and they’ve only just begun.

{mosads}”We’re looking at everything we can find about about these two killers’ lives. How they grew up, where they grew up, how they met — all of those things will provide us guidance,” Lynch said.

Tashfeen Malik, the Pakistan-born wife of Syed Farook, allegedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as the two were carrying out the deadly assault, but Lynch said there’s currently no evidence they were directly involved with the group.

“Obviously we have concerns whenever we see people with large stockpiles of weapons, or appear to be in the process of accumulating weapons and ammunition. At this point we do not have any evidence that they were part of a larger group or a cell, or that they were planning anything else,” she said.

The inspired-terrorist model, she said, is becoming both more prevalent and in some ways harder to prevent.

“We have come from a time of the large-scale, planned, al Qaeda-style attacks to the encouragement of lone wolves — Fort Hood, Chattanooga — to the encouragement of people to act on their own,” she said.

The attorney general repeated the “if you see something, say something” call often heard from law enforcement officials. Reports have emerged that Malik and Farook underwent behavioral changes in recent years, becoming more extreme in their beliefs.

“Report your concerns to law enforcement: they will be reviewed. Sometimes they’re nothing, sometimes they’re something. Sometimes there’s a connection that years later may show up. All of this information is useful,” Lynch said.