Joined: 10-18-2005 Posts: 98,552
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One of the Republican congressmen who survived an attempted mass shooting at a Virginia baseball field in 2017 is demanding the FBI reassess the attack after he revealed during a hearing last week that the bureau had designated the incident a "suicide by cop."
"This conclusion defies logic and contradicts the publicly known facts about the perpetrator and the attack," Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. "The shooter had an extensive social media record highlighting his hatred of President Trump and Republicans."
The gunman, James Hodgkinson, fired well over 100 rounds at the congressmen, their aides and others present on the ballfield.
He had asked whether the ballplayers were Democrats or Republicans before opening fire and was carrying a list of GOP lawmakers and their physical descriptions. The GOP team was there practicing for an annual charity baseball game in which the two parties had squared off annually since 1909.
Many took refuge in the opposite dugout as Capitol police, who were nearby because Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., as a member of House leadership had a security detail, and responding officers from Alexandria, Va., exchanged gunfire with the attacker for 10 minutes before taking him out.
Scalise, then the House Majority Whip, was severely injured in the shooting and nearly died. On Wednesday, he ripped the newly unveiled conclusion, which Wenstrup said had been told privately to members five months after the attack.
"I was shot by a deranged leftist who came to the baseball field with a list of congressional Republicans to kill," he said Wednesday. "This was not ‘suicide by cop.’ End of story."Film at 11...
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