By Joshua Arnold

The FBI employed “false statements and manipulation of known facts” to downplay the significance of a 2017 assassination attempt on Republican congressmen, according to a 27-page report released Tuesday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “This demonstrates why it was important to get the Deep State out of control of DOJ and FBI,” said Chris Gacek, Family Research Council senior fellow, in a statement to The Washington Stand.

On June 14, 2017, James Hodgkinson traveled from his home in Belleville, Ill. to Alexandria, Va., where he shot more than 50 rounds from cover at Republican members of Congress practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. Hodgkinson shot four people, including two police officers and then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), before he was shot and killed by police.

Hodgkinson supported Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and had a history of anti-Republican statements. Nevertheless, within a week of the attack, the FBI announced that it was “investigating this shooting as an assault on a member of Congress and an assault on a federal officer,” but did “not believe there is a nexus to terrorism.”

This conclusion provoked strong reactions for its loose relationship with the facts. “I have always been incensed by this obvious fraud,” Gacek bemoaned.

Among those upset by the FBI’s conclusion were those familiar with the definition of domestic terrorism stated in U.S. law (18 U.S.C. §2331(5)):

“activities that — (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended — (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”

If the motive was not terrorism, there had to be an alternative explanation. “An FBI Executive Intelligence Briefing doubled down on this hasty determination,” claiming that the shooter’s motive “most aligns with an act of ‘suicide by cop,’” the congressional report narrated. However, the report observed the illogic of this conclusion, pointing out that “there were no uniformed police officers present at the time of the attack,” “Hodgkinson took several actions that may indicate he hoped to survive the firefight,” and “suicide is not mutually exclusive with domestic terrorism.”

These facts were evident at the time of the shooting in 2017. But, at that time, the Russia collusion hoax was at its height, Special Counsel Mueller’s grueling, lengthy, and ultimately fruitless investigation was in full swing, and the media was far too focused on painting Trump as a villain to pursue any news item featuring a left-wing domestic terrorist.

The report’s negative verdict does not rely on long-known facts but on new evidence. Specifically, the committee perused 2,500 pages of documentation in March and another 1,900 pages in April — all the information the FBI has on the incident. FBI Director Kash Patel provided this information to the committee after Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.) — a member of the committee who was at the fateful baseball practice — pressed him to set the record straight.

In fact, the FBI likely recognized that its initial hasty cover story to explain away the incident would never pass serious muster. “The FBI — as I understand it — released a ‘Clean-Up on Aisle Nine’ report in 2021 — when Biden was safely in power and the lies in the first report no longer had to be maintained,” said Gacek.

The committee report makes the same point. “The FBI then spent the next four years privately guarding the basis for its determinations by impeding Congressional oversight. It was not until the FBI was investigating January 6 protesters and the application of Congressional pressure that the FBI changed course,” it said. The FBI then admitted, “The shooter was motivated by a desire to commit an attack on Members of Congress. … This conduct is something that we would today characterize as a domestic terrorism event.”

But “Members of Congress” is an imprecise description of the shooter’s hit list. The shooter wanted to kill Republican members of Congress. According to an FBI Internal Executive Analytical Report cited by the committee, “Hodgkinson … had a history of writing ‘angry’ letters to his local newspaper and making phone calls to his local congressman highly critical of the Republican Party, conservative political agendas, and the current administration. Law enforcement also found a piece of paper with a list of Congressional Members containing six Republican names.”

If the committee report is correct, the FBI’s 2021 retreat was still far too generous to the grievous mishandling of the 2017 investigation — or perhaps “cover-up” is a more appropriate word.

For starters, “the FBI investigation failed even to conduct substantive interviews of all the shooting victims and other eyewitnesses,” the report stated. “For example, Congressman Mo Brooks was neither on the list [of secondary victims] nor interviewed. Yet, he was on the attacker’s handwritten list, was present for the baseball practice, and even received a Medal of Merit from the U.S. Capitol Police for his ‘bravery in the face of an active shooter.’”

Another aspect of thorough investigations that was missing from the FBI case file was “a comprehensive timeline and detailed description of events,” the report added. “It does not even describe Hodgkinson’s route that morning as he carried out the attack.” The FBI could still impose a predetermined political conclusion on a thorough investigation, insisting that Americans simply take its word for it. But here, it even failed to conduct a thorough investigation.

That raises another issue: instead of sharing information about such a highly relevant matter in a transparent fashion, the FBI insisted that Americans — and even members of Congress — simply take its word for it. “The entire investigative case file is classified at the Secret level,” the report notes. Yet “there were only four documents marked as classified,” and these documents were “either unclassified material that was improperly marked or documents that do not belong in an investigative case file.”

“A principal and grave concern of the Committee is the degradation of investigative standards and the Intelligence Community’s (IC’s) analytical integrity and objectivity,” the report opined. “Time and again in high-profile cases, the IC has violated the objectivity standard that is required by 50 U.S.C. § 3364 and necessary for our Republic. From Russian collusion to Anomalous Health Incidents, political considerations appear to have been the primary factor in analyzing facts for end-use intelligence products.”

“This demonstrates why it was important to get the Deep State out of control of DOJ and FBI,” Gacek concluded. “In Trump-45, it was basically weaponized against the administration. Part of that was covering up terrorism, like this crime, that would counter the Left’s narrative about Trump.”

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.