When James Hodgkinson stepped onto the Alexandria, Va., baseball field on June 14, 2017, he came armed with an SKS rifle and a hit list containing the names of six GOP congressional reps in his pocket. Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in the hip and nearly bled out on the field where the GOP reps practiced for the yearly congressional baseball game, becoming easy targets for the crazed would-be assassin. The nation was horrified.
The Rachel Maddow fan, Trump hater, and Bernie Sanders volunteer who did the shooting came armed to kill that day, but the FBI made an astounding decision when classifying the shooting. Instead of labeling the attempted assassinations the clear-cut case of domestic terrorism by a Leftist, hellbent on killing Republicans, the FBI labeled the attack a case of “suicide-by-cop.” Americans in April were stunned to learn this news during a congressional hearing when one of the men who narrowly escaped assassination pressed the bureau on it.
It was preposterous.
That’s preposterous.
— Victoria Taft – Parler, Minds, Facebook, 5VTShow (@VictoriaTaft) April 21, 2021
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On a scale of dumb and dumber, it was on par with calling the Fort Hood terror attack by an Army doctor and avowed “Soldier of Allah” a case of “workplace violence,” which is what the Obama administration called it.
FBI investigators knew that the political extremist didn’t know there would be cops with the GOP baseball players that day. There nearly weren’t. But this was Acting Director Andrew McCabe’s FBI of Trump-Is-a-Russian-Secret-Agent infamy and thereafter Chris Wray’s hyper-politicized FBI, after all.
As the nation now knows, the only reason that three heroic Capitol Police officers were there that day to return Hodgkinson’s rifle fire was because Scalise’s GOP leadership role gave him a protective detail.
Hodgkinson left plenty of clues pointing to his GOP hatred on his social media footprint.
The Washington Examiner reported that Hodgkinson posted Maddow and Sanders Facebook fan boy stuff and called for the termination of the Republican Party:
The shooter, James Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, was an active Bernie Sanders supporter who hated Republicans and particularly hated then-President Donald Trump. “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.,” Hodgkinson posted on his Facebook page. He thought of himself as part of the Resistance. He joined Facebook groups like “Terminate The Republican Party” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”
But the Examiner reports that late Friday, after reporters had put their stories to bed and gone to a favorite watering hole, the FBI “quietly” slipped in a different explanation for the baseball field attack: domestic terrorism.
The revelation appears in the middle of an appendix on page 35 of a 40-page FBI-DHS report released on Friday 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” and describing the incident thusly: “An individual with a personalized violent ideology targeted and shot Republican members of Congress at a baseball field and wounded five people. The subject died as a result of engagement with law enforcement.”
There it was, in the middle of page 35 of a domestic terrorism report covering 2015 to 2019 released on Friday.
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The FBI executive director of the the National Security Branch, Jill Sanborn, recently told a congressional hearing that if the shooting happened today, the branch would call it a domestic terror incident. Asked why the obvious attack was inexplicably called “suicide by cop” instead, she replied:
I would have to get back to you on the specifics of what that rationale was, but in going back and looking at it, and honestly at the trend of that personalized grievance motivation, it fits squarely into the phenomena that the director, and I have talked about often, which is this very personalized sort of blending of ideologies that motivates somebody.
Maybe at some point they’ll figure out that January 6 at the Capitol was a riot involving a few people and not an insurrection, but don’t hold your breath. They’ll “have to get back to you” on that.
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