It was “suicide by cop.” Remember that assessment?

On June 14, 2017, a deranged leftist and Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer named James Hodgkinson opened fire on a group of congressional Republicans who were practicing on a DC-area ball field for their annual Congressional Baseball Game.

Hodgkinson fired 136 rounds in all before he was ultimately shot and killed by two Capitol cops. The most seriously wounded of Hodgkinson’s victims was then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who was hit in the hip, nearly bled to death on the field, and required multiple life-saving surgeries in the ensuing weeks.

Before launching his attack, Hodgkinson asked a bystander whether the players on the field were Democrats or Republicans. As Ohio Republican Congressman Brad Wenstrup pointed out, “We know from [Hodgkinson’s] social media posts that he hated Republicans and that he hated President Trump. … We know he carried in his pocket that day a target list with names of Republican congressmen … that included their physical descriptions.”

And yet the FBI’s investigation concluded that Hodgkinson wasn’t driven by political intolerance. He just wanted a cop to kill him.

“Director,” a disgusted Wenstrup told the FBI’s Chris Wray, “you want suicide by cop, you just pull a gun on a cop. It doesn’t take 136 rounds. It takes one bullet.”

Only under pressure from Republicans did the FBI some four years later reclassify Hodgkinson’s murderous assault as an act of domestic terrorism.

We mention this because it’s been five days since 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks came within a providential head-turning inch of assassinating Donald Trump. It’s been three days since the FBI gained access to Crooks’s cellphone, and yet we still know next to nothing about his affiliations, his communications, and why he specifically targeted Trump. Somehow, the first thing we learned about Crooks, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, concurrent with the FBI’s release of his name, was that Crooks was “a registered Republican.”

To balance that news, we also learned that on January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Crooks gave $15 to ActBlue, a political action committee that backs Democrats.

But that’s been about it — at least until yesterday, when we learned via Fox News that Crooks wrote “a chilling online message that hinted at sinister plans,” posting, “July 13 will be my premiere, watch as it unfolds.”

We also learned yesterday that Crooks’s parents were concerned about him and called the cops shortly before the Saturday attack.

So the parents didn’t know where their 20-year-old son was for a few hours and it caused them to call the cops? Seems odd, unless they had a hunch he wasn’t just out being a 20-year-old.

Now more than ever, it seems to me that transparency is essential. How long does it take to go through a guy’s cellphone and piece together a profile? And are we really to believe that he didn’t harbor a specific animus toward Trump, or that he wasn’t somehow influenced by the Democrats’ vile and pervasive eight-year-long campaign to Hitlerize and otherwise dehumanize Trump and his supporters?

Now isn’t the time for another FBI whitewash. Especially given what we know about the culture within the bureau, which includes not just the pro-Democrat bias of those on the seventh floor but also, apparently, a creeping intolerance toward Republicans — or at least one particular Republican — among the bureau’s rank and file.

“AWWWW SO CLOSE,” laments the vile grim-reaper meme posted by FBI staffer Jenna Howell in the wake of the near-assassination of Trump.

Whether the Russia collusion hoax, or the Steele Dossier garbage, or Kevin Clinesmith’s falsification of a FISA warrant application to spy on Donald Trump and his associates, or the conveniently timed “fednapping” case of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or the election-rigging Hunter Biden laptop lie, or the bureau’s involvement in the incitement of the January 6 riot, or its mysterious failure to find the J6 pipe bomber or the easily identifiable guys who erected the “gallows” with which to “hang” Mike Pence, or the bureau’s overzealous and unjustified raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home: In all these matters, we see a deeply politicized FBI and a sordid history of conspiring to destroy Donald Trump or interfere in elections on behalf of his Democrat opponents.

The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann does a masterful job of explaining why Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray and all their DC staff should “recuse themselves from every investigation into Trump’s assassination attempt.” As Pullmann writes:

Whistleblowers recently revealed the FBI uses support for Trump as a litmus test to deny employment and security clearances. Obviously an agency that considers free speech and free association to be danger signs cannot be trusted either to defend the Constitution or to impartially seek truth related to the assassination attempt. An agency so politically corrupted it will not hire anyone who doesn’t hate Trump obviously cannot be trusted to investigate crimes against Trump and his supporters.

We’re not calling what we’ve seen so far from the FBI a whitewash. But neither are we convinced that the bureau is committed to transparency — at least where that transparency helps Trump and harms his haters.

The FBI has long since squandered the trust of conservatives and Republicans. Where the bureau is concerned, then, we should distrust and verify.

Updated with additional sourcing of the FBI’s anti-Trump bias.