Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, April 1, 2025 Real World News
Transparency at the FBI?
Turns out that when you aren’t tasked with targeting your political opponents, you can actually do the job the American people hired you to do.
After years of stonewalling under previous directors, FBI chief Kash Patel has turned over documents the bureau has regarding the 2017 shooting at a Congressional baseball practice by a Bernie Sanders supporter.
Republicans have long sought the documents and never bought the FBI’s initial insistence that the attack was “suicide by cop” instead of domestic terrorism. Andrew McCabe was acting director at the time of the shooting.
Leftist activist James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republicans at an Alexandria, Virginia baseball field on June 14, 2017. Hodgkinson had asked GOP congressmen who had left the practice early if the players were Republicans or Democrats.
GOP Congressman Steve Scalise nearly died as a result of the attack. Hodgkinson shot four people, including Scalise, U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika. A ten-minute shootout took place between Hodgkinson and officers from the Capitol and Alexandria Police before officers shot Hodgkinson, who died from his wounds later that day at George Washington University Hospital.
The FBI has never fully explained the “suicide by cop” conclusion, a position the bureau refused to reverse until 2021.
“I can report that the FBI has provided the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence all requested documents related to the Congressional Baseball Game shooting in 2017,” Patel wrote in a post to X last week. “These are documents sought by Capitol Hill officials for almost 8 years. Providing these documents was one of our top priorities in delivering a new FBI era of transparency. Thank you to the committee and Chairman Rep. Rick Crawford for your partnership in getting Americans the truth.”
Rep. Trent Kelly of Mississippi, the vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Patel that Congress had sent letters to the FBI in 2023 and 2024 asking for details about the baseball game shooting, and that “I know you will give us what we asked for so that we can put this to rest.”
Patel said the documents were provided to the committee “30 minutes later.”
“I really appreciate that Kash Patel is making that available,” Intelligence Committee chair Rick Crawford of Arkansas told Just the News.
“They had initially classified it, the FBI did, as ‘suicide by cop.’ Now here is a guy who went to the baseball field specifically looking to shoot and kill every Republican on the ballfield… How can you call that suicide by cop when he was trying to kill all of us, including the police officers?” Scalise told “The Alec Lace Show” in an interview posted last month. “We were offended and just alarmed at the FBI back in 2017. … We were very curious how the FBI came to some of those conclusions, but then they redacted so many items in that report. Now we’re going to get the full, unredacted report.”
Congressman Brad Wenstrup, Ohio Republican, revealed during a House Intelligence Committee meeting with then-Director Christopher Wray in mid-April 2021 that the FBI had privately informed Congress in November 2017 that the bureau considered the shooting to be “suicide by cop.”
“Much to our shock that day, the FBI concluded that this was a case of the attacker seeking suicide by cop,” Wenstrup said. “Director, you want suicide by cop, you just pull a gun on a cop. It doesn’t take 136 rounds. It takes one bullet. Both [Department of Homeland Security] and the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] published products labeling this attack as a domestic violent extremism event, specifically targeting Republican members of Congress. The FBI did not. The FBI still has not.”
Wray called the shooting “the horrific, horrific attack at the baseball field on that day” during the mid-April 2021 hearing, but the FBI chief did not explain why the bureau had labeled the attack suicide by cop nor why the bureau had declined to classify it as domestic terrorism. Wenstrup also penned a letter to Wray that month in 2021 that said the FBI’s conclusion “defies logic and contradicts the publicly known facts.”
“As a Member who was present during the attack and the November 2017 briefing, and as a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I request that the FBI Counterterrorism Division promptly review the investigative findings, interview all relevant witnesses, and update, as appropriate, the investigative conclusions-including an internal investigation of how the FBI reached its ‘suicide by cop’ conclusion,” Wenstrup told Wray in the letter.
Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, tweeted that month: “I was shot by a deranged Leftist who came to the baseball field with a list of Congressional Republicans to kill. This was NOT ‘suicide by cop.’ End of story.”
During a late-April 2021 hearing in front of a House appropriations subcommittee, Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, acknowledged it was an intentional attack on lawmakers and that, if it had happened in 2021, Wray’s FBI would now consider it to be domestic terrorism.
Then-Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegman told Congress in late April 2021 that Hodgkinson was a “domestic terrorist.” Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, when pressed on the “suicide by cop” versus “domestic terrorism” saga by House Republicans in early May 2021, told Congress that “I promise I will raise the issue with the FBI.”
That month, the FBI quietly admitted that the 2017 shooting had now been classified as “domestic terrorism” carried out by a “domestic violent extremist” targeting Republicans.
Scalise and other Republicans had sent Wray a May 2021 letter demanding answers, noting that Hodgkinson had “a potential ‘hit list’ of six Members of Congress – Republicans Trent Franks, Jim Jordan, Morgan Griffith, Scott DesJarlais, Jeff Duncan, and Mo Brooks – in his pocket” — yet the FBI had classified it as “suicide by cop.”
In response, the FBI’s admission the next week appeared in the middle of an appendix on page 35 of a 40-page FBI-DHS joint report released in May 2021 and titled “Security Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism.” In a section describing approximately 85 different “FBI-Designated Significant Domestic Terrorism Incidents in the United States from 2015 through 2019,” the Alexandria baseball field shooting appears, with the FBI categorizing the perpetrator as a “Domestic Violent Extremist.” The report described Hodgkinson as “an individual with a personalized violent ideology targeted and shot Republican members of Congress at a baseball field and wounded five people.”
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FBI under Patel finally turns over records on 2017 Congressional baseball shooting added by Editor Two on April 1, 2025
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