The FBI botched its investigation of the 2017 congressional baseball shooting — downplaying the gunman’s anti-GOP motives despite having handwritten evidence, a blistering House report found.

The House Judiciary Committee, Intelligence Committee and Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigation released the scathing, unclassified report on its findings Tuesday after combing through roughly 3,000 case file documents it was given last month on the attack that wounded six, including current House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), and led to the death of gunman James T. Hodgkinson.

“This is the same FBI that can’t tell us who planted the pipe bomb [on Jan. 6, 2021], who can’t tell us who leaked the Dobbs opinion and who can tell us who put cocaine at the White House,” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chided Tuesday morning.

“We shouldn’t be surprised that they reached the wrong conclusion. They knew what the facts were.”

Shortly after Hodgkinson’s June 14, 2017, attack on a Republican practice session for the congressional baseball game in suburban Alexandria, Va., the FBI wrote up an executive intelligence briefing that concluded he wanted to commit “suicide by cop.”

Four years later, in 2021, the FBI abruptly changed its determination — without new evidence, according to Tuesday’s report — to conclude that Hodgkinson’s attack was actually motivated by domestic violent extremism.

“The FBI then spent the next four years privately guarding the basis for its determinations by impeding Congressional oversight,” the report assessed. “It was not until the FBI was investigating January 6 protesters and the application of Congressional pressure that the FBI changed course.”

“The FBI used false statements, manipulation of known facts, and biased and butchered analysis to support a narrative that Hodgkinson committed suicide by cop without any nexus to domestic terrorism.”

But congressional investigators have since found evidence that the bureau concealed information from the public that would have undermined its initial “suicide by cop” conclusion.

That suppressed evidence includes key details about a handwritten note found on Hodgkinson that listed several Republicans as targets.

At the time, the FBI said it found a sheet of paper that had names of six members of Congress, but did not elaborate. 

GOP lawmakers argued that the case file made clear the attack was a “premeditated assassination attempt on Republican congressmen by a radical, left-wing political extremist, who was seeking to affect the conduct of our government.”

“The guy had a hit list in his pocket,” Jordan said. “[Former FBI director James] Comey, [former FBI deputy director Andrew] McCabe, [former FBI director Christopher] Wray, they all knew it was domestic terrorism, but that didn’t fit their narrative.”

The report identified three major failures by the FBI: neglecting to interview key shooting victims and witnesses, failing to establish “a comprehensive timeline of events,” and “improperly” classifying parts of its case file on the shooting rampage.

One of the witnesses that the congressional review faulted the bureau for failing to interview was then-Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who was both present for the shooting and on Hodgkinson’s “hit list” —  even fashioning a tourniquet out of his belt to help stop Scalise’s bleeding after the Louisianan took a bullet to the hip.

US Capitol Police later awarded Brooks a Medal of Merit for his “bravery in the face of an active shooter.”

However, the FBI didn’t interview Brooks or include him on its secondary victim list.

To defend its assessment that Hodgkinson intended to die by suicide via law enforcement shooting, the FBI pointed to two “goodbye” letters that he sent in the mail and the fact that he gave away some of his possessions with notes to the effect of “you may not see me again.”

Lawmakers faulted the bureau for not “considering context” that helps “differentiate between Hodgkinson being a domestic terrorist, aware he might die as opposed to simply being suicidal.”

They also pointed to actions he took “that may indicate he hoped to survive the firefight,” such as searching for directions from Alexandria, Virginia, to his home in Belleville, Ill. and texting his wife that he was returning home the night before the shooting. 

Lawmakers also noted that witnesses saw Hodgkinson hiding behind a storage building while firing, another indicator that he was not planning to go out in a blaze of glory.

“Regardless of whether Hodgkinson intended to die that day, suicide is not mutually exclusive with domestic terrorism,” the report said.

As had been publicly reported not long after the attack, Hodgkinson harbored a deep animus against Republicans. 

He was a member of a Facebook group named “Terminate the Republican Party,” members of which praised him after the attack. 

“I was getting older and wanted to make a statement in my life before the end,” the gunman wrote in one note. 

“A man realizes the political scene has changed drastically over the last 35 years and wants to show the people how to win back the power of the people,” he wrote elsewhere.

The Post reached out to the FBI for comment. 

Scalise, 59, praised the congressional investigators and FBI director Kash Patel for making the report possible. 

“This report definitively shows the FBI completely mishandled the investigation into the Congressional baseball shooting of 2017 – ignoring crucial and obvious facts in order to sell a false narrative that the shooting was not politically motivated,” the majority leader said in a statement. 

“I want to thank FBI Director Kash Patel, Chairman Rick Crawford, and the staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for finally getting to the truth of the matter: this was a deliberate and planned act of domestic terrorism toward Republican Members of Congress.”

In conclusion, the report called for the FBI to investigate how it initially arrived at the “suicide by cop” conclusion during its assessment of the 2017 congressional baseball game shooting. 

Lawmakers also advised Congress to mull legislation that would lay out criminal liability for instances of intelligence analyses being politicized.

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee concurred with much of the report’s findings about the FBI’s failures, but argued that their Republican counterparts failed to provide evidence that political considerations led to the bureau’s initial conclusions and opposed the recommendation for criminal liability against politicization of intelligence assessments. 

This year’s congressional baseball game is slated to take place on June 11.