From a good BuzzFeed piece on the attempted mass shooting of congressional Republicans.
But many lawmakers are mad, or frustrated, or saddened, at how quickly the story disappeared from the headlines given that the shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, targeted Republicans. The FBI concluded the shooting wasn’t politically motivated — suicide by cop, they told members after an investigation.
But Hodgkinson carried a list of names of lawmakers in his pocket: Mo Brooks, Jim Jordan, Trent Franks, Scott DesJarlais, Jeff Duncan, and Morgan Griffith. The list included their office numbers and short physical descriptions. He’d recorded video of the field in April of of that year — a sign, the prosecutor wrote in his official report, that Hodgkinson “had already selected Simpson field as a potential target as early as April 2017.”
His social media was filled with Bernie and anti-Republican content.
A spokesperson for the FBI’s Washington Field Office said that Hodgkinson “espoused anti-Republican rhetoric,” but that because Hodgkinson is dead, “We may never know his motivations.”
The FBI has no trouble figuring out the motives of dead killers and terrorists. Especially when they leave behind clear evidence of their motive, intention and worldview.
Let’s imagine a pro-life activist, who had spent a lot of time posting pro-life material to his Facebook page, went up to an abortion clinic, asked if this is where they do the abortions and shot it up. Is there any possibility that the FBI would insist that his motives were unknowable?
“I think most people were really upset,” Palmer says. “I think I may have been the first one that really called them out, and then after I did everybody kind of piled on. I guess everybody was upset. Everybody knew that what they were saying was a crock. The guy had a list. He came there to shoot Republicans.”
He thinks they “misrepresented what happened because of concerns over the political fallout.”
“I felt like they blew it off.”
“They said, ‘So essentially this was suicide by cop.’ And we’re like, ‘Only?’ And I can tell you, I can buy that from what I saw at the end, where he walked out openly shooting,” Wenstrup says. “But let’s not kid ourselves here. You look at his website. He hates Republicans. He had the names of six Republicans in his pocket. He had — his social media is full of it. He camped out there for two months planning this, to kill Republicans. Did he hope to die at the end? Maybe.”
The bizarre claim made by FBI people that it wasn’t politically motivated remains one of the most shockingly underreported stories. It’s a signpost of something deeply rotten. A warning that the FBI leadership answers to a Democrat agenda.
See the full story here.
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