EXCLUSIVE: House Intel Committee trio on the FBI's "cover up" of the Congressional Baseball Game shooting

On the morning of June 14th, 2017, James Hodgkinson — a former volunteer for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign — walked to a practice field where members of Congress were getting ready for that summer’s Congressional Baseball Game.

Hodgkinson asked then-Reps. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) and Jeff Duncan (R., S.C.) if the players were Democrats or Republicans. Upon being told that the players are Republicans, Hodgkinson opened fire on the all-Republican field, critically injuring Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) and several others in an act of political terrorism.

Rep. Trent Kelly (R., Miss.) was among those on the field, and Kelly discussed the release of oft-requested FBI file on the latest episode of the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point podcast, obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter.

Kelly, a combat veteran, discussed how Hodgkinson “shot at me from 25 feet, feet, not yards, feet. It hit a chain link fence and that is the reason it didn't shoot me in the chest and kill me right there.”

“I immediately knew it was gunfire. And the first three shots were at me, including the one that hit Scalise,” Kelly said. “It crossed by. I heard it crack in front of me.”

For years, Republicans in Congress — including those who were shot by the left-wing terrorist — have asked the FBI for its file on its investigation, only to be rebuffed. Kelly detailed the FBI’s failures, explaining that “what really frustrated me is I'm the closest guy [to the shooting].”

“Was never more than 40 yards away, and not once did an FBI agent talk to me during the entire process,” he said. “So we started asking for the file and report, because it was classified as suicide by cop. And trust me, he wasn't trying to die. He was trying to kill us, and he hit five of us. And it frustrated me, because we asked for the reports and we got a PowerPoint slide that was heavily redacted with names so that we couldn't tell who had conducted the investigation.”

“They sat me down,” Kelly said of the FBI team. “And they literally were going to tell me what happened that morning. ‘You idiots, I know what happened.”

“You didn't ask me what happened, but you don't know what happened. You weren't there.’ They talked to no first-hand witnesses at the scene. I was a district attorney. There is no way I would prosecute or present a case where I didn't talk to the eyewitnesses. But they didn't. They talked to people who weren't there.”

Joining Kelly on the RSC’s podcast were Reps. Rick Crawford (R., Ark.), the new chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Ben Cline (R., Va.), a newcomer to the committee. One of Crawford’s first accomplishments as chairman was obtaining the FBI’s files. Some members, like Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio), who were present on the day of the shooting, had been requesting the file for years, to no avail, until Kash Patel took over the FBI.

“Dr. Brad Wenstrup was on the Intel Committee the entire time up until last year,” Crawford said. “And he would every year ask for that baseball file, and we never got it, until Kash Patel got in there, and at our request, he delivered that.”

“In fact, we made the request in the open hearing, and by the time we gave it out, he had delivered the report to the SCIF,” Crawford said.

“They just kept dragging their feet, and they would say it's an open investigation,” Kelly explained. “And that frustrated me, Chairman, because it happened June 14, 2017 and this is two years ago, or three years ago at this point, and we still haven't seen the file five, six years later, and they just absolutely cannot do anything and give us anything.”

“And it was a cover up until Kash Patel came in. … Kash Patel, on day one, while I had him in that open hearing, he provided everything that we asked and but even then, there was hesitation from some of the people who worked for him. The FBI, they did not talk to any of their victim assistance team, and that was horrible. The first time they offered to see if I needed any psychological or mental or physical help was literally eight years later. Eight years later.”

“I don't think I clearly made that point. Mister Chairman, they said it was an open file,” Kelly emphasized. “They couldn't disclose it yet. He was killed on June 14, 2017; he was dead on the scene, right? But it's an open investigation into a dead person.”

Crawford added that, following the report’s release, his committee “discovered the FBI investigation failed to substantively interview the shooting victims, as Trent mentioned, the FBI investigation failed to develop a comprehensive timeline of events, and the FBI case file was improperly classified, which Trent also mentioned, which may have assisted the FBI in obfuscating and in substandard investigative efforts and analysis.”

While Cline wasn’t in Congress during the shooting itself, he’s frequently heard about how “horrific” it was. And despite his newness on the Intel Committee, he said it already “really is clear that the FBI was engaged in a serious effort to misdirect and there needs to be accountability for that.”

Crawford, the chair, agreed. “Absolutely,” he replied. “One of the things that we did fairly quickly was we took up the Congressional Baseball report.”

One of Crawford’s priorities as Chair of the Intel Committee has been depoliticizing the intelligence community (IC), and he sees a link between the FBI’s failures following Hodgkinson’s terrorism and the broader failures his committee continues to tackle.

“One of the things that we talk about on the Intel Committee is analytic integrity and how important that is,” he said. “It's foundational to good intelligence and to good decision making. We're trying to turn the corner as much as we can on that and we certainly again want to thank Director Patel for his forthright approach to responding to our request, and we appreciate that.”

Cline added that from his perspective from other committees in Congress, he saw “just how politicized the intelligence community had become under Joe Biden, and I really wanted to make some changes,” he said.

However, Kelly clarified that while he’s “definitely” seen how the IC “has been politicized over time,” he added that “the men and women who are at the lower levels of these agencies are amazing warriors and Americans, and they do a great job; these are patriots, but when you get up to mid and some of the higher level management, especially at the second and third tier of leadership, they're extremely political.”

“They extremely have political agendas and so we've got to hold those people accountable,” Kelly said. “Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe, who was a former member of this committee, are trying to weed out the problems. It's not a Republican or a Democrat thing, it's not a conservative or a liberal thing.”

“It is literally the interest of our nation. And so these people have to be nonpartisan — nonpartisan, not bipartisan, nonpartisan — and they have to do the work of the American people in a way that represents and protects our nation, and I think we're getting better,” he said.

Republicans on the Intel Committee have loved what they’ve been seeing from the Trump administration thus far. Crawford separately told the Reporter that Gabbard’s reorganization of her office is much-needed and Cline praised her “efforts to restore accountability, rebuild trust” to the Reporter.

For Kelly, the left-wing terrorism of Hodkinson didn’t happen in a vacuum; and he said that his Democratic colleagues who assaulted an ICE facility in New Jersey should “be held accountable” for their actions.

“Anarchy is not a good place,” he said. “You don't storm the gates and you do not extract violence towards police officers who are serving, they have families, and so they think that violence is okay, and this kind of stunts are the same thing that caused this idiot who shot at us on the baseball field.”

The Democrats who attacked the ICE facility “should be punished criminally if they broke laws, and I think that they did, and if they assaulted any police officers, they need to be held accountable,” Kelly said. “They don't need to be treated any better or worse than any other citizen, because they're members of Congress or members of government.”