At today's House Republican leadership press briefing, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) reacted to a new report on the FBI probe of the 2017 GOP Congressional Baseball Team shooting.
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00:00So if you go back to 2017, after the baseball shooting, the FBI had brought in the members
00:21of the team.
00:22Roger Williams was one of those members who was part of that briefing.
00:27And at that meeting, they went through some of the information.
00:31Some of it was classified.
00:33Some of it wasn't.
00:34But they ultimately let us know what their conclusion was.
00:38And that's when they said it was classified as suicide by cop.
00:43And I'll tell you, I was offended.
00:45I think all of us there were highly offended that that was the conclusion that the FBI
00:51in 2017 came to because it wasn't what happened on the baseball field.
00:56He went there with the intention of killing all of us on the baseball field.
01:00And he had a list in his pocket of other Republicans he wanted to kill.
01:04It was very politically motivated.
01:06And it was clear they suppressed a lot of facts.
01:08And what the FBI report that Kash Patel's FBI came out with today shows they suppressed factual
01:17evidence to reach a different conclusion than what the facts led to show.
01:23Suicide by cop was not the conclusion.
01:25They ultimately changed it to domestic terrorism.
01:28They applauded the new FBI for making that change in the justification.
01:32But they also revealed some of the other facts that were suppressed.
01:38The fact that it was politically motivated, even though they had some of that factual evidence,
01:43they hid that because they didn't want to make it look like it was politically motivated.
01:50And, you know, I mean, look, the guy went there and not only tried to kill all of us.
01:54I had two Capitol Police officers with me on my detail.
01:58He tried to kill both of them.
02:00Suicide by cop is not when you try to kill everybody around, including the cops.
02:05And by the way, he didn't even know they were cops because they were dressed in plain clothes.
02:09And he had every intention of carrying out a politically motivated message.
02:15He wrote about it and they had that evidence and they suppressed it.
02:18So it was very disappointing.
02:20We walked out of the meeting that day because we were so infuriated that that was their conclusion.
02:26I'm glad that Kash Patel is getting the FBI back to a fact based organization where they follow the evidence,
02:33not try to have a predisclosed conclusion, but where they actually look at the facts
02:38and make their conclusion based on the evidence.
02:41That's what he's done with this new report.
02:44And I think it's important that they got it right.
02:47It's also important that they find out who the people were that suppressed evidence for a political motivated reason.
02:54Where do you believe that political motivation came from?
02:59I don't know.
03:00You know, we saw that some of those agencies were were unfortunately being used for political purpose.
03:08to go after political enemies, to try to carry out political vendettas.
03:13It's not why they're there.
03:15Regardless of, you know, in the Gabby Gifford shooting, all of us, I was a member, a fairly new member of Congress at the time.
03:22And, you know, we were devastated by that attempt on Gabby's life, but we also wanted to know what happened.
03:30We just wanted to know the facts.
03:32And 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.
03:41The intelligence agencies should have been just looking for the facts, not trying to have their own conclusion confirmed by suppressing evidence.
03:49And, and yet that's what they did.
03:51And yet that's what they did.