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Attorney General Loretta Lynch wouldn't say who made the decision to redact part of the Orlando 911 call transcript. | AP Photo Lynch won't say who edited Orlando 911 transcript

Attorney General Loretta Lynch refused Wednesday to say who made the decision to remove references to the Islamic State and its leader from the publicly released version of a transcript of a 911 call involving the Orlando nightclub shooter.

"The goal is of course the greatest transparency. The initial thought was we did not want to provide a further platform for the propaganda of the killer. Once it became an issue, we decided we would go ahead and release the full transcript," Lynch said Wednesday during a press conference about a crackdown on Medicare fraud.

Pressed on who decided to remove the references to ISIL, as well as the name of deceased shooter Omar Mateen, Lynch remained vague.

"I'm not going to go into the detail of the process behind it," Lynch said. "Our review was not to further spread the propaganda, but once it became a distraction, we released the whole transcript."

Soon after release of the edited transcript on Monday, federal officials were slammed by Republican lawmakers including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who suggested that the deleted references to ISIL and its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi reflected the Obama administration's reluctance to acknowledge the threat posed by radical Islam.

The White House has denied any involvement in the initial decision or the reversal. Officials have said the FBI had the lead role in distribution of the initial transcript, which was linked to an interagency press conference in Orlando Monday morning.

At a briefing for reporters last week, FBI Director James Comey made a point of not using Mateen's name.

"You will notice that I am not using the killer's name and I will try not to do that. Part of what motivates sick people to do this kind of thing is some twisted notion of fame or glory and I don't want to be part of that for the sake of the victims and their families and so that other twisted minds don't think that this is a path to fame and recognition," the FBI chief said.

Nevertheless, Comey made clear in that briefing that Mateen had pledged loyalty to ISIL and Al-Baghdadi, making the decision to edit the transcript puzzling.

While the full transcript of one 50-second 911 call by Mateen is now public, the bulk of the rest of his communications with police remains unreleased.

At Wednesday's news conference, Lynch continued to suggest that in addition to "online radicalization," anti-gay bias was also part of the reason for Mateen's attack on the LGBT nightclub last Sunday, killing 49 people.

"This was clearly an act of terror and an act of hate," she said.

However, neither the transcript nor other excerpts released by investigators show any anti-gay rhetoric on Mateen's part. Lynch would not elaborate on why authorities believe it is clear that "hate" was one of the killer's motives.

"People can have more than one motivation. We are trying to determine: was one a predominant motivation?" the attorney general added. "I would caution anyone to trying to at this point ascribe a percentage point to anything."

