Today the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report on the FBI’s investigation of James (“Tom”) Hodgkinson’s attempt to assassinate the Republican House members’ baseball team. You can read the report here. The Committee excoriates the FBI for mislabeling Hodgkinson’s firing of 70 rounds at Republican Congressmen an instance of “suicide by cop.”
That claim never made any sense. Hodgkinson lived in Illinois, and if his overriding objective had been suicide, he didn’t need to drive to Washington, D.C. They have cops in Illinois. He didn’t need to case out the park where the Republican baseball team practiced for two months before launching his attack. He didn’t need to fire 70 rounds, and he probably would have waited until there were uniformed officers present before opening fire.
I always assumed that the FBI didn’t fool anyone. Hodgkinson’s political motivation was obvious. He was a campaign volunteer for Bernie Sanders and belonged to a Facebook group called “Terminate the Republican Party.” (Group members hailed his assassination attempt, which gravely wounded Steve Scalise among others, with “one, two, three shots you’re out at the old ball game!!!”) He verified with a bystander that the team on the field were Republicans before opening fire. And the notes Hodgkinson carried, referring to six Republican Congressmen with their office addresses and physical descriptions, obviously reflect a political motive and not a mere suicidal intent:
The committee report offers a great deal of evidence for the fact that Hodgkinson’s act was politically motivated, including statements in Hodgkinson’s own handwriting that had not previously been made public. One item they don’t mention is that Hodgkinson wrote, at the bottom of one page, “Map of West Virginia Harpers Ferry.” This suggests that Hodgkinson saw himself as a modern-day John Brown.
That the FBI bungled the investigation is not really in dispute. In 2021, for reasons unknown, the Bureau, on its own initiative, released a statement to the effect that it had recategorized Hodgkinson’s attack as domestic terrorism. But why did the FBI try to cover up Hodgkinson’s purpose in its 2017 public statements? The House committee report released today does not try to answer that question. It points out that we don’t know whether the “suicide by cop” theory was developed by the investigators on the scene, or was handed down by the Bureau’s notoriously politicized leadership. But, in either case, why?
I will hazard a guess: while Hodgkinson’s actions were obviously extreme, his political ideology was not. Rather, he was a garden-variety, mainstream Democratic Party volunteer. These are some of his political musings:
A man realizes the political scene has changed drastically over the last 35 years and wants to show the people how to win back the power of the people.
35 years = the Reagan administration.
Hodgkinson at a pro-tax protest
Congress passed Citizens United which let the rich put unlimited amounts of money into the election process. The rich had taken over the Republican party.
***
They’re truly un-American Against the poor and middle class As long as the rich get richer They have done their task. These are the elected congressmen of the republican party We should treat them w/ the despicable hatred That they [stir] in us For this great country will never be good again Till they are all out of office.
***
How the Republican party has duped the under educated, the religious fanatics, the backwoods, the racists, and the gungho war mongers in to following them.
***
Must have a hero Fighting the big corp and billionaires Must take action to teach and convince Show how media are all part of the 1%.
This is how Hodgkinson’s wife described his thinking:
“After Donald Trump was elected president, Tom was very unhappy. He incessantly posted on social media criticizing Trump. He spent hours every day on his computer. Tom hated President Trump.”
“Bernie Sanders was Tom’s idol, and he hated Republicans. Tom said that he wanted to go to Washington DC to ‘talk about taxes.’”
What is striking about these political views is their banality. Every one of them is a typical Democratic Party talking point of the time. Hodgkinson was faithfully parroting what he heard his idol, Bernie Sanders, say, along with just about every other elected Democrat.
I suspect that this is what made the FBI uncomfortable. It was not some exotic, alien, extremist ideology that led James (“Tom”) Hodgkinson to try to murder the Republican baseball team. Rather, it was the familiar anti-Republican hyperbole of the Democratic Party. This may have struck a little too close to home for the Bureau to want to publicize.
