Rep. Scalise on FBI Classifying 2017 GOP Baseball Team Practice Shooting as ‘Suicide by Cop’: ‘I Was Offended’

Reporter: “So, I saw your statement expressing some concerns after you’ve read the report. You’re asking the FBI director to look into that. What exactly are your concerns and how high do you think this went at the FBI?”
SCALISE: “So, if you go back to 2017, after the baseball shooting, the FBI had brought in the members of the team, Roger Williams was one of those members who was part of that briefing, and at that meeting they went through some of the information. Some of it was classified, some of it wasn’t, but they ultimately let us know what their conclusion was, and that’s when they said it was classified as suicide by cop. And I’ll tell you, I was offended, I think all of us there were highly offended that that was the conclusion that the FBI in 2017 came to, because it wasn’t what happened on the baseball field. He went there with the intention of killing all of us on the baseball field, and he had a list in his pocket of other Republicans he wanted to kill. It was very politically motivated and it was clear they suppressed a lot of facts. What the FBI report that Kash Patel’s FBI came out with today shows, they suppressed factual evidence to reach a different conclusion than what the facts lead to show. Suicide by cop was not the conclusion. They ultimately changed it to domestic terrorism. And I applaud the new FBI for making that change in the justification. But they also revealed some of the other facts that were suppressed. The fact that it was politically motivated. Even though they had some of that factual evidence, they hid that because they didn’t want to make it look like it was politically motivated. I mean, look, the guy went there and not only tried to kill all of us, I had two Capitol Police officers with me on my detail. He tried to kill both of them. Suicide by cop is not when you try to kill everybody around, including the cops. And by the way, he didn’t even know they were cops because they were dressed in plainclothes. He had every intention of carrying out a politically motivated message. He wrote about it, and they had that evidence and they suppressed it. So it was very disappointing. We walked out of the meeting that day because we were so infuriated that that was their conclusion. I’m glad that Kash Patel is getting the FBI back to a fact-based organization where they follow the evidence, not try to have a pre-disclosed conclusion, but where they actually look at the facts and make their conclusions based on the evidence. That’s what he’s done with this new report and I think it’s important that they got it right. It’s also important that they find out who the people were that suppressed evidence for politically motivated reason.”
Reporter: “Do you believe that— where do you believe that political motivation came from?”
SCALISE: “I don’t know. You know, we saw that some of those agencies were unfortunately being used for political purposes, to go after political enemies, to try to carry out political vendettas. That’s not why they’re there. Regardless of — you know, with the Gabby Giffords shooting, all of us, I was a member, fairly new member Congress at the time, and, you know, we were devastated by that attempt on Gabby’s life, but we also wanted to know what happened. We just wanted to know the facts. And if it led this direction or that direction, it didn’t — it really shouldn’t have mattered to the people going out to find the facts. The intelligence agency should have been just looking for the facts, not trying to have their own conclusion confirmed by suppressing evidence. And yet that’s what they did. Thank you.”