Maybe firing James Comey wasn’t enough. Maybe the entire FBI needs to be disbanded and a whole new agency created in its place.
That is the only conclusion I can draw from a news conference held yesterday by one Tim Slater, who leads the criminal division of the FBI’s Washington field office. According to the Associated Press, Slater told reporters that gunman James Hodgkinson “acted alone and had no connections to terror groups.”
So far, so good. Those details jibe with everything we heard in the aftermath of the shooting. But what came next will cause you do a spit take with your morning coffee. Slater went on to state:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
[The agency] had not yet clarified who, if anyone, he [Hodgkinson] planned to target, or why, beyond his animus toward President Donald Trump and the Republicans he felt were ruining the country. It wasn’t even clear whether he had prior plans to attack the baseball practice or whether he just happened upon it the morning of June 14.
The shooter had no specific target in mind? The shootings may have been spontaneous? Maybe someone ought to check out the water supply over at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
In the era of online media, it is remarkably easy to refute both the above generalizations. Consider:
- Hodgkinson had an “assassination list” on his person bearing the names of six Republican members of Congress.
- In November 2016 — shortly after Donald Trump won the election — he bought a 9 mm handgun, which he was carrying in a holster, along with a rifle, on the morning of the shooting.
- He took snapshots of the field and of other D.C. landmarks.
- He had been living in his van in the parking lot of a YMCA across the street from the field he would eventually shoot up.
- When he first entered the field on the morning of the attacks, he asked whether the players present were Republicans or Democrats.
Despite these many clues about the shooter’s motives, the FBI concluded that Hodgkinson “had no concrete plan to inflict violence” against Republicans and that it had not established a “context” for the hit list he had in his pocket. The agency also allowed as how it doesn’t believe that the photographs he took of the baseball field and other sites “represented surveillance of intended targets.”
In general, the agency’s investigation to date finds that Hodgkinson was little more than “a down-on-his-luck man with few future prospects.”
