It’s now been well over a month since transgender mass shooter Audrey Hale shot and killed six people including three children in a Christian school in Tennessee. Initial statements from the police indicated that the shooter had left behind a suicide note and a “manifesto,” along with other documents. But unlike other mass shootings, the FBI kept the documents from the public while they were conducting their investigation. On April 27, the Nashville Police said they were nearly finished and anticipated releasing the documents to the media. But now the FBI has turned around yet again and refused to do so. This week, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty is taking the FBI to court in an effort to compel them to give up the manifesto. (Townhall)

A conservative law firm is taking the Federal Bureau of Investigation to federal court for withholding the manifesto of trans-identified shooter Audrey “Aiden” Hale, who mass murdered six victims, including three children, at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27, as litigation mounts over law enforcement’s refusal to release Hale’s writings.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL)’s lawsuit against the FBI was filed Wednesday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee on behalf of its clients: The Star News Network, a Nashville-headquartered conservative media company that operates a nationwide family of digital newspapers; its editor-in-chief Mike Leahy; and reporter Matt Kittle.

While understanding the shooter’s motives will be a crucial part of the process to prevent future tragedies like this one, I was willing to let the process play out in the beginning. After all, if it turned out that Hale had one or more accomplices or was coordinating with someone else to plan another shooting, you wouldn’t want to let the cat out of the bag too early. That could spoil the investigation and potentially tip off other suspects.

But now it just seems simply ridiculous. If there was another suspect, they would either already be in custody by now or the public would have been told their identity and asked for help in locating them. Hale clearly acted alone. What is left for the FBI to investigate at this point? If they have an excuse they should let us know. If not, they need to release the manifesto.

But they’re not doing that and the White House is backing up that decision. Why? There is clearly something in Hale’s writings that they don’t want the public to learn about. And if it isn’t something involving another criminal investigation (which seems unlikely in the extreme), it is almost certainly something that runs counter to The Narrative and would be politically awkward for the left.

Let’s consider the most likely possibilities. If Hale had simply written that her mental health issues had caused her to become suicidal and she was just looking for a way to force the police to kill her, this would still be a tragedy but it would be understandable. And that was no doubt part of what drove her to act out in that fashion. But if the manifesto describes some sort of violent hatred of Christians, conservatives, or anyone else and she figured it was worth the cost of her life to “punish” them, the picture changes significantly. It’s very important to the liberal media to paint Hale as one of the “victims” in this massacre, as they have attempted to do from the beginning. But the real story likely doesn’t fit that narrative.

The FBI is only making things worse for themselves by keeping these documents locked away. They’re leaving the door open to rampant speculation. And when the manifesto is eventually released (assuming they don’t somehow “lose it”), it’s only going to make it all the more obvious what they were up to. People are trying to learn from this tragedy to prevent it from happening again at another school. The Bureau is hindering that process and it’s time to apply some sunshine to the situation.