More than 14 months after a trans psychopath stormed into Nashville’s Covenant School and gunned down three 9-year-olds and three staff members, the police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation refuse to publicly release the killer’s “manifesto.” A newly obtained FBI memo to Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake suggests what many have long suspected: President Joe Biden’s identity politics-steeped Department of Justice is leading a cover-up of the deadliest transgender-directed shootings in U.S. history. 

“We have a lot of other documents from the investigation in our possession. And after reviewing them … I will tell you I am absolutely convinced that this is an orchestrated political cover-up because the shooter was a transgender who was on various medications but basically was prone to high levels of violence,” Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star and its parent company the Star News Network, told me Wednesday on The Dan O’Donnell Show in Milwaukee. 

‘Legacy Tokens’

Leahy and his company filed a lawsuit on May 10, 2023, demanding the FBI turn over the manifesto and related communications of Audrey Elizabeth Hale, the 28-year-old killer who was shot dead by police minutes after she began her deadly errand. Leahy and Star News also sued the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, alleging the agency violated the state’s public record laws in refusing to release the documents to news organizations seeking them. I, too, am a plaintiff in the lawsuits as one of the Star News Network’s investigative reporters covering the shooting at the time. The U.S. Department of Justice hastily denied my Freedom of Information Act request seeking the Covenant Killer’s manifesto. 

One day after the Star News Network sued the FBI, the agency sent the chief the memo titled “Protection of Legacy Tokens.” The memo, obtained by the Tennessee Star, “strongly discourages” MNPD from releasing “legacy tokens” left by a mass murderer. In this case, it appears the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, based in  Quantico, Va., was referring to Hale and her manifesto, which reportedly details the killer’s motives and madness. 

“What you may ask is a ‘legacy token?’ As it turns out, it’s a made-up word from the FBI that refers to any documents or videos prepared by the instigator of a mass shooting to be discovered later, which shows the motivation for that,” Leahy said. 

‘Experts Agree’

The memo goes on to advise the chief that there is precedent for destroying such macabre communications. It notes law enforcement officials destroyed the “basement tapes” produced by the teen mass murderers in the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. FBI officials warn that the release of manifestos and other mass shooting materials only feeds the fires of twisted minds, emboldening them to carry out similar attacks. 

Releasing legacy tokens is “likely” to “spark incredibly intense interest and study by potential offenders who are considering a school-based attack,” the memo states. FBI officials claimed “[e]xperts agree” that “limiting the availability of legacy tokens for ideation, study, and inspiration by those considering an attack” is a prudent course of action.

Open government and free press advocates strongly disagree. The combined lawsuit against the Metro Nashville Police Department includes news outlets, a Second Amendment advocacy organization, and a police union in its plaintiff ranks — each raising the same concern: making law enforcement the gatekeeper of such information puts in peril the public’s right to know. 

More so, President Joe Biden’s FBI, as it did in trying to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election, claims releasing mass killer documents and video would only spread “false narratives.” Sound familiar? Federal agencies — from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to the Big Brother CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) — have worked with Big Tech and corporate media outlets to suppress “disinformation” that has turned out to be uncomfortable and inconvenient information for the powers that be. 

“Public access to legacy tokens will also facilitate false narratives and inaccurate information,” the FBI claimed, adding that making mass shooter manifestos public will lead to “pontificators” and “self-professed ‘experts’” who “will proffer their perspectives” in the press, “potentially inflaming the public.”

Protecting Biden’s Trans Agenda

Releasing the manifesto and related documents from Audrey Hale, who seemed to believe she was a man named Aiden, would disrupt the Biden administration’s demand that Americans genuflect at the altar of transgender rights. It might also debunk some of the narratives spun by the LGBT network insisting transgenderism is mainstream. 

Four days after the Covenant Christian school shootings, Biden issued a statement insisting that “Transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul.” As New York Post columnist Miranda Devine noted, 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.” 

Divine pointed out that in the wake of the Covenant School murders, corporate media decided the real victims were members of the “Trans Community,” racked with fear “amid focus on Nashville shooter’s gender identity,” as the NBC News headline screamed. 

As the Tennessee Star reported in May 2023, the Department of Justice operates a shadowy uncomfortable information suppresser known as the Community Relations Service. 

“The CRS was involved in the George Zimmerman case, with evidence to suggest the shadowy unit helped organize rallies over the self-defense shooting of black teen Trayvon Martin. The CRS was involved in Ferguson, the Baltimore-Six case, and others,” the publication reported. “Created by Title X of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the CRS was ostensibly designed to help state and local governments, private and public organizations, educational institutions, and community groups resolve racial issues.”

“As ‘America’s Peacekeeper for communities in conflict,’ CRS is charged with ‘mediating disputes and enhancing community capacity to independently prevent and resolve future conflicts,’” the article continues. 

“But the service’s background status gives it the ability to ‘control the information that is at the center of their topic, charge or investigation,’” according to critics. 

Meanwhile, a raft of documents obtained by the Tennessee Star paints a picture of a deeply troubled biological woman militantly rallying around the trans flag. Among the “dozens of handwritten pages,” the Star this week reported that one of the documents had previously been leaked to conservative commentator Steven Crowder. In the pages Crowder released last November, 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].” 

The FBI did not return a request for comment. 

Listen to the interview with Michael Patrick Leahy.

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.