"I’m a big fan of the FBI, but they had a little bit of a bad day," Donald Trump said. | Getty Trump says FBI had 'bad day' with Orlando tip

Donald Trump said the FBI had a “bad day” when it didn’t follow up on a tip from a Florida gun shop owner that the gunman who killed 49 people in Orlando last weekend was acting suspiciously.

The presumptive Republican nominee admitted that no system of background checks would successfully catch every terrorist looking to buy a gun, but he lamented the fact that the FBI had prior warning that an unidentified person who later turned out to be Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was acting suspiciously.


“This guy was, he was a bad dude. He was a bad dude. I mean, look, will somebody slip through? I guess,” Trump told ABC’s “This Week” in an interview with Jonathan Karl. “I guess the gun store owner reported him and the authorities didn’t act on it. What a shame.”

“What does that say to you?” Karl followed up.

“To me, it says very sad. They reported him and the authorities didn’t act,” Trump replied. “I think it’s very unusual. I’m a big fan of the FBI, but they had a little bit of a bad day.”

Robbie Abell, co-owner of Lotus Gunworks in Jensen Beach, Florida, said Thursday that an unidentified person had come to his store several weeks back and tried to buy body armor, which Abell's employees said they did not have. The would-be buyer left the store, and Abell said he reported the individual to the FBI as suspicious. The person, Abell realized after the shooting, was Mateen.

In his interview with Karl, taped backstage at one of Trump’s rallies this weekend in Texas, the Republican candidate renewed his promise to talk to the National Rifle Association about banning suspected terrorists from purchasing firearms. The presumptive nominee wouldn’t say whether he could budge the NRA on the issue, only that he wanted to “find out their thinking.”

“What I want, and I know what they want, they want it as much as anybody in the world, they want to make sure that terrorists don’t get guns,” Trump said. “I know that something really good is going to come out of all of this.”