The FBI now says that the 2017 Alexandria, Virginia, baseball field shooting that nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise would have been classified as “domestic terrorism” if it happened today.
Last week, Republican congressmen criticized the decision by the FBI, led in an acting capacity at the time by Andrew McCabe, not to label the shooting by James Hodgkinson as domestic terrorism despite his targeting of elected Republican leaders as they practiced for the annual Congressional Baseball Game, calling upon FBI Director Christopher Wray, who has led the bureau since August 2017, to provide answers.
During a Thursday hearing in front of a House appropriations subcommittee, Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, acknowledged it was an intentional attack on lawmakers and that, if it happened today, Wray’s FBI would consider it to be domestic terrorism.
Rep. Robert Aderholt argued Thursday that “the shooter was a deranged shooter of Bernie Sanders who … had a list of Republican members of Congress in his pocket when he ambushed the group” and said that “classifying the attack as a suicide by cop really defies logic.” The Alabama Republican asked if “the FBI cleared up this by reclassifying the incident as an act of domestic terrorism.”
“It’s fair to say that the shooter was motivated by a desire to commit an attack on members of Congress and then knowing by doing so he would likely be killed in the process,” Sanborn said.
“Cases like this are challenging because there were, as you mentioned, a couple clues left behind, but he died in the process, never allowing us to fully examine through, say, an interview, his motivation.
“There are also indicators that the shooter intended the shooting to be his final act on earth, but those things are not inconsistent with someone who is motivated by a variety of factors to commit violent acts based on a blend of ideological or personal motivations, and this conduct is something that today we would characterize as a domestic terrorism event.”
Sanborn added: “This is also a good example of … a trend we started to see probably 2016-ish, which is that the motivation and sort of what drove someone to mobilize is a very personalized grievance that they hold, which is something different from the domestic terrorism threat that we saw in years past.”
Aderholt asked if that meant the FBI considered the shooting to be an act of domestic terrorism, and Sanborn replied, “If it were to happen today, we would open this as a domestic terrorism case.”
The Republican asked why the FBI hadn’t classified it as domestic terrorism in the first place, and 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.”
In June 2017, Hodgkinson, a man from Illinois who was living out of a van in Alexandria, opened fire after asking GOP Rep. Jeff Duncan, who was leaving practice early, if the players were Republicans or Democrats. Hodgkinson struck Scalise in the hip, hit lobbyist Matt Mika in the chest, and injured two Capitol Police officers, Crystal Griner and David Bailey. Scalise nearly bled to death and required multiple surgeries before returning to Congress.
Hodgkinson, an avid liberal and supporter of Democratic presidential primary candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, was killed by law enforcement. He had posted on Facebook that “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” and joined other groups such as “Terminate The Republican Party” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, broke the news during a House Intelligence Committee meeting last week that the FBI privately informed Congress in November 2017 that it considered the shooting to be “suicide by cop.”
“Much to our shock that day, the FBI concluded that this was a case of the attacker seeking suicide by cop,” Wenstrup said. “Director, you want suicide by cop, you just pull a gun on a cop. It doesn’t take 136 rounds. It takes one bullet. Both the DHS and the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] published products labeling this attack as a domestic violent extremism event, specifically targeting Republican members of Congress. The FBI did not.”
Rep. Jackie Speier and Rep. Jim Cooper, Democrats from California and Tennessee, backed Wenstrup’s criticism. Wenstrup also penned a letter that said the FBI’s conclusion “defies logic and contradicts the publicly known facts.”
Wray called the shooting “the horrific, horrific attack at the baseball field on that day.”
Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, tweeted last Thursday: “I was shot by a deranged Leftist who came to the baseball field with a list of Congressional Republicans to kill. This was NOT ‘suicide by cop.’ End of story.”
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Alexandria’s top prosecutor, Bryan Porter, released a report in October 2017 concluding the shooting was terrorism.
“The evidence in this case establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect, fueled by rage against Republican legislators, decided to commit an act of terrorism as that term is defined by the Code of Virginia,” the report read. “The suspect, using a lawfully-purchased assault rifle and handgun, ambushed a peaceful assembly of people practicing baseball and began to fire indiscriminately in an effort to kill and maim as many people as possible.”
Virginia’s code defines terrorism as “an act of violence … committed with the intent to intimidate the civilian population at large or influence the conduct or activities of the government … through intimidation.”
But a week after the shooting, an FBI report said it “does not believe there is a nexus to terrorism.”
