The suspect in the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey is "a real problem case" who should have been put on a terror watch list — and who may very well have not acted alone, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Tuesday.
"Here is someone who clearly was a problem, but the problem was never defined sufficiently to prevent him from coming back into the United States," the California Democrat said of Ahmad Khan Rahami to Wolf Blitzer on CNN.
Feinstein, 83, who was first elected to Congress in 1991, is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Rahami, an Afghani immigrant who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, was charged Tuesday with four federal counts in the attacks, including use of weapons of mass destruction and bombing a place of public use.
In light of several visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan — and of his father's 2014 call to the FBI warning of his son's ties with terrorists — Rahami should have been put on a terror watch list, "but hindsight is always better than foresight," Feinstein said.
Regarding the pressure-cooker bombs used in both attacks, she said: "My understanding is they were more sophisticated than other bombs."
Feinstein added that "we don’t know" whether others might have helped Rahami, but "I would suspect that others may have conspired in making the bombs.
"There were a number of bombs. They were strangely placed. … There were in places that were quiet at that time, so this is kind of a problem — and you need unravel it.
"I suspect that we will find that he is a jihadist and he carried out an act of jihadism — and it's a real problem in this country with lone wolves," she said.
The assaults, Feinstein added, called for the United States "to look at the soundness of our immigration policies with respect to people going repeatedly to this type to a place where jihadism abounds."