FBI Mishandled Investigating Congressional Baseball Shooting, House Committee Finds
The FBI mishandled its investigation of the 2017 shooting at a GOP practice one day before the annual Congressional Baseball Game—including not calling the incident domestic terrorism and not interviewing key figures, according to a report released on May 6 by the House Intelligence Committee.
Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) criticized the FBI for withholding the report.
'There's no reasonable or acceptable explanation for why the FBI stonewalled the committee for so long,' he said during a press conference.
'In fact, it's taken so long to get this case file, many of those members at the field on that fateful day are no longer in Congress.'
The
Scalise was shot in the hip and seriously wounded, requiring several surgeries and a lengthy recovery.
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Former Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) was not interviewed despite being at the scene during the shooting.
The shooter, James Hodgkinson, was shot and killed by Capitol Police, who were already on the scene due to Scalise's presence as he was a member of House GOP leadership and therefore afforded a security detail.
The report also found that the bureau did not come up with a timeline of events surrounding the shooting.
Additionally, it said that the FBI incorrectly deemed the shooting was 'suicide by cop' instead of domestic terrorism.
In the
The Intelligence Committee report criticized the press release, saying it failed to include information that would have contracted the 'suicide by cop' narrative.
'To commit suicide by cop, the perpetrator needs to demonstrate hostile intent in the presence of police. In this case, there were no observable police officers present,' according to the report, which noted that the officers were dressed in plain clothes.
Instead, Hodgkinson's motive was 'to impact government policy or the political system by targeting Republicans,' the committee found.
Hodgkinson had a far-left motivation behind the shooting as he sought to kill GOP members of Congress, the report determines.
It said that the FBI's 'conclusions failed to follow the facts, as it reached an unsupported conclusion without completing even the most basic of investigative activities.'
Moreover, the FBI's 'intelligence analysis of Hodgkinson's communications, activities, and behaviors, and associations is strained and logically flawed,' according to the report.
As an example, the FBI cited that Hodgkinson's brother believed that the aim of the shooting was for Hodgkinson to die by suicide by cop.
However, this was merely an opinion and not based on any communications, according to the report.
Another flaw in the FBI's probe, according to the report, was stating that Hodgkinson's list of GOP congressmen was not a 'hit list.'
The list named six people with physical descriptions for each, including size or weight: Brooks, former Reps. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.); and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), and Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.).
The FBI at the time, said that Hodgkinson's search history included only two names.
The report points out that this is a false premise since there is more than one way to create a hit list, and therefore it does not have to be done by conducting online searches of targets.
Furthermore, it's factually inaccurate since the case file shows that Hodgkinson did do web searches for all six congressmen on the list.
Scalise was made aware of the report by the committee, according to Crawford, who declined to elaborate as he did not want to speak on Scalise's behalf.
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