The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) would not confirm that the purported leaked pages from the Nashville shooter’s manifesto were real during a Monday morning phone call.
Breitbart News spoke with TBI communications director Josh Devine, asking him if TBI could confirm the pages were real.
Devine said, “We cannot. We are offering no such confirmation on that.”
We followed with one more question, asking, “Has TBI looked at it and said, ‘We can’t confirm this,’ or is TBI not even going to look at it?”
Devine responded, “We’re aware of the images, yes, but we’re not offering confirmation on their authenticity.”
The images of the purported leaked pages in question were posted to X/Twitter by Steven Crowder and included statements, attributed to Hale, about killing “crackers” with “white privlages [sic].”
BREAKING: Nashville School Covenant Shooter Audrey Hale’s “DEATH DAY” Manifesto Targeted “Cr*ckers” with “white privlages”
“wanna kill all you little cr*ckers”
“I hope I have a high death count”
“I’m ready…I hope my victims aren’t.”
“Ready to die.”#NashvilleManifesto pic.twitter.com/89Ie6TlgRf
— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) November 6, 2023
The 28-year-old transgender who allegedly perpetrated the Nashville Christian school shooting left behind a suicide note, 19 journals, and other items, all of which have been kept from the public.
In April 2023, TBI Director David Rausch reportedly told law enforcement officers that “the killer did not write about specific political, religious or social issues” in these materials.
UPDATE: Several local outlets have corroborated the images published by Crowder. News Channel 5’s Phil Williams attacked the report, calling it a “selective leak of three pages.” The Tennessee Star, owned by former Breitbart contributor Michael Patrick Leahy, says it independently confirmed the images via “[s]sources in the Tennessee General Assembly who were allowed to view the Covenant Killer Manifesto by the Metro Nashville Police Department.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at [email protected]