More than two years after facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for playing politics with a trans killer’s manifesto, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has agreed to a settlement.
The agreement is a victory for transparency and open government, but it’s personal for this reporter.
‘Did Not Want the Public to Know’
I was a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit demanding that the FBI release the manifesto of Audrey Hale, the biological woman identifying as a man who in March 2023 burst into a Nashville Christian school and murdered three third-graders and three staff members before being fatally shot by responding police.
At the time, I was National Political Editor for the Star News Network, which has done some of the best investigative work in bringing to light the dark mind of a mentally deranged mass murderer despite law enforcement efforts to keep the killer’s motives shrouded in secrecy. President Joe Biden’s FBI, which pulled the levers behind the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s (MNPD) handling of the politically charged case, denied my FOIA request for Hale’s manifesto. The file includes hundreds of pages of the 28-year-old woman’s journals and other writings.
In May 2023, Star News CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy and I filed a lawsuit seeking the documents. Star News also sued the Nashville Police Department, joining the Tennessean newspaper and other groups in what became a combined complaint.
We were represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a nonprofit conservative law firm based in Milwaukee. On Wednesday, WILL announced the settlement, in which the FBI has agreed to turn over 120 pages of the shooter’s manifesto and to pay the law firm more than $86,000 in legal fees.
The lawsuit would likely still be tied up in federal court had the FBI, under new management, not agreed to end the Biden FBI’s prolonged fight to keep the public in the dark. FBI Director Kash Patel ultimately ended an empty “investigation” into a trans school shooter who died at the scene and had no accomplices.
“This was a case in which the Biden administration did not want the public to know what motivated this transgender shooter to shoot up the school and kill six people,” Dan Lennington, WILL’s deputy counsel, told me Wednesday on the Dan O’Donnell Show.
The trans-centric Biden administration wanted to protect the trans agenda, and, as the Star News Network reported, the FBI advised against releasing information that it believed could put males pretending to be females and females identifying as males at risk. As The Federalist reported, four days after the shooting at the Christian elementary school, Biden issued a statement insisting that “Transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul.” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine at the time noted that the far-left president railed against “MAGA extremists [who] are advancing hundreds of hateful and extreme state laws that target transgender kids and their families. … These attacks are un-American and must end.” He said nothing about a twisted trans Nashville area resident indoctrinated in hate.
‘Fighting Back’
We learned more about that thanks to reporting by the Tennessee Star, the flagship news site of the Star News Network. The online outlet obtained from a source familiar with the investigation the killer’s full 2023 journal, which paints a picture of a deeply troubled biological woman militantly rallying around the trans flag.
In the copies of “dozens of handwritten pages” obtained last year, Hale detailed an hour-by-hour plan for her attack and made racist declarations that she wanted to “kill all you little crackers” — expressing rage over “their white privlages [sic].”
“Now that we have the manifesto we do know what her motivations were,” Lennington said in the radio interview. “She had significant anti-white motivations … motivations based on her sexuality, other people’s sexuality. A deep hatred of basically western family values motivated her.”
“And we knew that the FBI had this information. They did not want to release it to the public. They withheld it, requiring us to sue them,” the attorney added.
The judge overseeing the open records lawsuit against the Nashville Police Department threatened Leahy with contempt charges and possible jail time in the records leak, charges unsubstantiated by the facts of the case and records laws.
“Journalists everywhere should be willing to go to the mat to hold their government accountable, regardless of the story or who is in charge at the nation’s capital,” Leahy said in a press release. “We appreciate WILL for taking our case and fighting back against the Biden administration’s reckless and dangerous record retention policies.”
‘No Good Justification’
The FBI also agreed to release 112 pages of the killer’s writings to Judicial Watch. There remain hundreds more pages in the possession of the law enforcement agencies. As the Tennessee Star noted Wednesday, its publication last year of Hale’s 2023 journal accounted for about 15 percent of her total writings seized by police.
In early April, the FBI reportedly sent the Megyn Kelly Show 1,000 pages of the trans killer’s writings. Why the agency did so remains unclear. Kelly did not have to go to court and through a lengthy settlement process to receive them. The FBI also sent the documents to members of Congress.
Rep. John Rose, a Tennessee Republican, was able to review Hale’s full writings, according to the Tennessee Star.
“Like many of you, I have long suspected some of this information was shielded from public view because this shooter considered herself to be transgender,” Rose said in a statement to the news outlet. “After having read through the evidence, I remain convinced that there is no good justification for keeping most of the evidence from the public square.”
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.
