A sprawling U.S. mail sorting facility near the Opa-locka airport — the size of five football fields — took center stage Thursday when federal investigators discovered that at least one of the bomb-filled packages targeting an array of Democratic figures passed through the location.
Where that package originated, however, remained unclear because the Opa-locka postal facility sorts hundreds of thousands of packages daily that come in and out of South Florida. The bigger mystery was who plotted the series of mailings and why.
The package in question is likely the one that ended up Wednesday at the Sunrise congressional office of U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, according to a federal law enforcement official familiar with the probe.
That package was originally sent to the office of former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in the Washington, D.C., area, but it did not get delivered and was sent back to the return address, which was listed as the congresswoman’s office in Sunrise. Before it got there, it was rerouted through the giant Opa-locka mail sorting facility, the official said.
That development capped a frenetic day for the FBI-led counter-terrorism team leading a nationwide search. The packages containing crudely fashioned devices that looked like pipe bombs have now been recovered in South Florida, New York , the Washington, D.C., area, California and Delaware. They were sent to at least 10 prominent Democratic politicians and other vocal critics of President Donald Trump from presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to actor Robert De Niro.
The U.S Postal Service directed investigators to Opa-locka after reviews of mail scans showed some of the devices had found their way through the massive sorting facility.
On Friday, the FBI confirmed that an 11th package, similar in appearance to the others, was “recovered in Florida” and addressed to Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. But in the brief news update, the agency did not say whether the manila envelope, which also listed Wasserman Schultz on the return address, was processed at the Opa-locka mail facility.
It was also reported that a 12th package, addressed to James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, was intercepted at a New York City mail facility. The package was addressed to Clapper at CNN’s news offices in New York.
The bombing devices — clearly aiming to shake up the political landscape just two weeks before the midterm elections — were so poorly constructed that at least one source involved in the investigation told The Miami Herald that they could not detonate. Whether they were intentionally designed that way was not known.
