Maria Bartiromo left aghast after GOP rep details how FBI botched Steve Scalise shooting probe

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo expressed shock Wednesday when Republican Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas detailed the findings of a House Intelligence Committee report on the FBI’s investigation of the 2017 attack on Republicans at a practice for the Congressional baseball game.

Then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana was shot in the June 2017 attack carried out by James Hodgkinson, a supporter of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont’s 2016 presidential campaign. Crawford told Bartiromo that FBI Director Kash Patel “pulled back the curtain” to allow a review of the agency’s probe into the attack, which also wounded a staffer and a police officer.

“How is this allowed?” Bartiromo asked Crawford after reading from the report. “There was no connection to terrorism initially and now we see a completely different narrative in the report.”

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“It took us eight years to get that. But for Director Patel committing to us he would have it to us, we would still be waiting,” Crawford told Bartiromo. “Director Patel came in and he has kind of pulled the curtain back and I’ll do what he can he’s been transparent with us as possible and that’s exactly what he did.”

The report criticized the FBI, saying the case file showed that Hodgkinson carried out “a premeditated assassination attempt” against Republican members of Congress and was “seeking to affect” how the United States government conducted itself.

“First off, [the] suicide by cop narrative was on its face wrong because there was no uniformed police officers present when the shooting started,” Crawford said. “So, he was there, and we knew he had a manifesto on his person and he had a list of other Republican members in his pocket and he was engaged in a long-term, a ten-minute firefight. In a firefight, ten minutes is a long time. That was not suicide by cop and any reasonable person would have dismissed that immediately.”

“They stuck with the narrative until 2021. In May of 2021, for whatever reason, there was no new information introduced in the investigation, but they decided in May of 2021 to say, you know, if we had to do it over, maybe we would consider a nexus to domestic terrorism,” Crawford continued. “That’s a problem. The fact that it took them four years to come to the conclusion without any new information is the investigation. So, there was, this investigation is chock-full of questionable conclusions and really, the methods that they used and the political bias that was demonstrated is unconscionable.”

Bartiromo expressed shock as Crawford detailed the report’s findings about the FBI’s probe, which took place while Andrew McCabe served as acting director. McCabe was fired as deputy director of the FBI in 2018 following an inspector general’s report that accused him of lying about leaks to the media, but the firing was reversed in 2021 following a legal settlement with the Biden administration.

“The whole thing is unconscionable!” Bartiromo exclaimed. “How are we supposed to trust our elected leaders if it’s all lies because of their insistence on keeping their grip on power? That’s all this is about!”

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