Patel’s FBI Could Shine Light On Trans Shooter’s Manifesto

For those who believe politically weaponized justice is injustice, Pam Bondi running the Department of Justice and Kash Patel at the helm of the FBI feels like a warm spring breeze after a brutally cold winter. For those who turned federal law enforcement into the Stasi and cheered on the myriad abuses (I’m looking at you Schiff, you weasel), things are about to get, well, difficult. 

There’s much to look forward to in the reckoning that Trump 2.0 is bringing to the people who transformed America’s DOJ into a banana republic. It’s long past time for accountability and, hopefully, justice served to the wicked. 

Transparency is absolutely essential in that pursuit. Patel could go a long way on that front by lifting the Biden-era FBI shroud over the records from some of the most egregious crimes committed and covered up in the name of identity politics. In particular, America could use much more light on the dark minds of gender-bending killers. 

Case in point, Audrey Hale, the 28-year-old woman masquerading as a man who nearly two years ago stormed into a Nashville Christian school and gunned down three children and three adult staff members. The FBI and the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department have refused to turn over Hale’s manifesto, absurdly claiming that doing so could harm their “ongoing investigation.” Police responding to the Covenant School attack on March 27, 2023 fatally shot the killer. Police have said there are no other suspects. There is nothing more to investigate.

So why the holdup? Why have law enforcement in leftist-led Nashville and at the Biden administration Department of Justice fought multiple attempts — including several open records lawsuits — to release the documents? 

Because they had an agenda and, it seems, something to hide. 

Lawsuits and Threats

No one has covered the story more assiduously than Michael Patrick Leahy and his Tennessee Star. Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of Star News Digital Media and its flagship Nashville news outlet, faced the threat of contempt of court charges and sanctions for reporting on the journals covering the last few months of Hale’s life, copies obtained from “a source familiar with the investigation.” The judge who made the threats but ultimately retreated also presided over an open records lawsuit seeking the release of the trans shooter’s writings. She eventually ruled against the Star and other parties seeking the records, opining that the investigation was ongoing and, audaciously, that Covenant School parents had a copyright on the records. 

As lead investigative reporter with the Star News Network in 2023, I joined Leahy as a plaintiff in an open-records lawsuit against Christopher Wray’s FBI after DOJ attorneys rejected our Freedom of Information Act request. The argument, again, was that there was an ongoing investigation. That case has long languished in federal court. 

“As you know, when there’s a mass murder at a school, a school shooting, the local police and the FBI begin the investigations jointly,” Leahy told me last year on “The Federalist Radio Hour” podcast. 

And the FBI, as we have learned, calls the shots in these nationally watched investigations. Particularly when the shooter doesn’t fit the general profile of the angry white male.

‘False Narratives and Inaccurate Information’

As the Tennessee Star reported, the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service is a little-known public-relations firmed ostensibly charged with “mediating disputes and enhancing community capacity to independently prevent and resolve future conflicts.” But the service’s background status gives it the ability to “control the information that is at the center of their topic, charge or investigation,” critics say. Among other high-profile investigations, CRC was involved in the ginned-up, race-baiting Trayvon Martin case in the Obama years. 

In the batch of records it obtained, the Star obtained an FBI memo sent to the Metro Nashville Police Department on May 11, 2023, shortly after the news organization filed its FOIA lawsuit. The memo, without noting Hale, “strongly discourages” the local police department from releasing “legacy tokens” left by mass murderers. According to the FBI, memory tokens are often items the shooter leaves behind “to claim credit for the attack and / or articulate the motivation behind it.”

Interestingly, a federal agency known for lying claimed that releasing “legacy tokens” would spawn “false narratives and inaccurate information.” The same FBI that “misled” Congress and the world about “Russian collusion” and Hunter Biden’s laptop insisted that publicly releasing records from mass shooters would encourage  “pontificators” and “self-professed ‘experts’” who “will proffer their perspectives” in the press, “potentially inflaming the public.”

But only in certain cases. 

The FOIA lawsuit, prepared by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, notes that federal law enforcement often have moved quickly to release the manifestos and other writings of mass murderers. Why not in the Hale case and others like it? Because the agency believes it is the final authority on what the public should and should not know. The FBI, according to the memo, insists it is protecting against “unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound.” 

That’s the claim, anyway. 

“The federal government does not get to pick and choose whether they release information that lawfully belongs to the public. Our efforts are critical to holding our federal government accountable and promoting transparency,” said WILL Deputy Counsel Lucas Vebber in a press release. 

While trans activists and other leftist groups claim that concerns over violent crimes committed by biological men insisting they’re women and biological women claiming to be men are just so much right-wing bigotry, the incidents are becoming harder to hide. 

But a recent arrest suggests there may be a different direction on transparency at the FBI when it comes to what the previous administration deemed community sensitive mass shootings. 

‘A Lot of Homicidal Thoughts’

An 18-year-old female student who reportedly identifies as a male is accused of plotting a Parkland-style massacre on Valentine’s Day at her Indiana high school. The plot was thwarted by a call to a tip line. Trinity Shockley is facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder, intimidation and conspiracy to commit intimidation, according to reports. The judge in the case had found Shockley presented a “significant threat to the safety of herself and the public,” according to Fox59. 

The FBI received the tip and reached out to the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department, according to Fox59. Unlike the Nashville shootings, authorities have released some details from the suspect’s writings. Newsweek reported that “law enforcement officials seized a number of notebooks from Shockley’s room.” Shockley’s notebooks, according to the publication, included several passages, including one where Shockley identified as “Dex … a transgender male (who has) a lot of homicidal thoughts.”

“During the search, law enforcement collected photos on a wall of mass shooters like [Parkland school shooter Nikolas] Cruz, as well as Dylann Roof, the man who killed multiple people in a church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. The documents said that Shockley also had a photo album of mass shooters, as well as buttons with their faces on it,” Fox59 reported.

‘There will be Accountability’ 

Leahy is hopeful the change of administration — especially at the DOJ and inside the FBI — will open the lock on Nashville’s Covenant killer docs. On Thursday, he and the Tennessee Star filed a FOIA request with the FBI seeking a list of all “protection of legacy tokens” memos sent to local law enforcement by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit since the policy was adopted by the FBI in 2018.  

“When the FBI complies with that FOIA, we will learn if such a memo was sent to local Indiana law enforcement after that thwarted Valentine’s Day attack,” Leahy told The Federalist. “Since the attack was thwarted and no one was killed, the ‘protection of legacy tokens’ policy may not have been cited by the FBI in this instance since that policy was created to deal with mass murderers, not thwarted mass murderers.”

Biden DOJ representatives following the November election turned down an offer to settle the Star News lawsuit and release the records. After Patel was confirmed late last week, Dan Lennington, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s lead attorney on the lawsuit, sent a new settlement request. DOJ officials had not responded to the latest offer as of Thursday. 

After taking the oath of office, Patel pledged a new direction at the troubled law enforcement agency he now leads. 

“I promise you the following: There will be accountability at the FBI and outside of the FBI, and we will do it with rigorous constitutional oversight,” he said. 

Opening up the records that his and Bondi’s predecessors have kept hidden is a real good place to start. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.