(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The FBI has released another batch of records about the March 2023 Nashville elementary school attack that killed six people, including three children. According to the records, Biden’s Justice Department declined to investigate the matter as a federal hate crime, despite calls from Republicans in Congress to do so.
A day after the shooting, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Iowa, wrote to the DOJ on March 28, 2023, to demand a hate crime investigation.
“Federal law explicitly criminalizes acts of violence against individuals based on religious affiliation as hate crimes … Hale’s attack was both premeditated and ‘targeted’ against this Christian school,” Hawley said in a letter to then-FBI Director Chris Wray and then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
🚨NEW: The FBI has released more records on Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale — including one suggesting that Biden's DOJ stymied a federal investigation into the matter.
At the time of the March 2023 shooting, Republicans in Congress were pushing for the DOJ to probe the… pic.twitter.com/CFV015ACvK— Headline USA (@HeadlineUSA) July 3, 2025
“The full resources of the federal government must be brought to bear to determine how this crime occurred, and who may have influenced the deranged shooter to carry out these horrific crimes.”
Reps. Mary Miller and Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote a similar letter on the same day.
However, an FBI record from a week later shows that the DOJ declined to pursue the matter as a federal hate crime.
According to an April 20, 2023, FBI memo, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department requested the FBI’s assistance in shutting down Hale’s social online accounts and issuing search warrants on social media firms. In response, the Joe Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee “denied federal search warrants absent federal nexus or charges,” the FBI memo states.
The U.S. Attorney at the time was the Biden-appointed Henry Cabell Leventis.
Instead of federal search warrants, the FBI assisted local law enforcement is issuing state warrants on social media firms.
At one point, law enforcement reportedly was looking into whether Vanderbilt University Medical Center—where the shooter, Audrey Hale, had been receiving treatment since 2001, when she was six years old— for failing to report Hale’s warning signs.
However, the MNPD issued a 50-page investigative case summary on the shooting in early April without recommending charges.
Transgender Christian school shooter Audrey Hale began receiving treatment at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2001, when she was 6.
According to the Nashville police report released today, Hale first fantasized about committing a mass shooting in November 2017.
In 2019,… pic.twitter.com/rlDSRZCmXh
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) April 2, 2025
According to that report, Hale left behind “a series of notebooks, art composition books, and media files created by Hale documenting her planning and preparation for the attack, the events in her life that motivated her to commit the attack, and her hopes regarding the outcome of the attack,” police determined. Hale, who once attended Covenant, was killed by police.
Hale, a biological woman, identified as a man at the time of the attack, but the police report uses female pronouns. The report doesn’t refer to Hale as transgender.
The evidence held by law enforcement on Hale includes more than 100 gigabytes of data, which includes over 900 pages of her writings.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
