Phill Kline, former Kansas Attorney General and current law professor at Liberty University School of Law, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) release of the 1,299 pages of writings left by Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale to independent journalist Megyn Kelly carries legal inconsistencies as a case brought by The Tennessee Star’s parent company regarding the materials continues to be litigated in federal court.
Star News Digital Media, Inc. (SNDM), which owns and operates The Star, and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy sued the FBI in May 2023 to compel the agency to release Hale’s writings.
U.S. District Court Judge Aleta A. Trauger has been reviewing Hale’s writings in camera since April 2024 in the case brought by SNDM.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) told The Star that it had no knowledge of the FBI’s decision to release the materials to Kelly.
Kline said the disconnect displayed between the FBI and DOJ regarding the Covenant School killer documents appears to reflect the fallout as a result of differences in how the agencies are being run under the Trump administration compared to the previous administration.
“I think several things are happening at once. First, you have the right hand not communicating with the left hand. You can combine that with the fact that the Biden administration was one of the least transparent administrations in this nation’s history. They selectively used exemptions to prevent the release of information, which they thought might be harmful to a political effort that they are engaged in…yet they would release everything and anything they had that would harm their political opponents without consideration of some of those requirements of privacy,” Kline explained on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“This was an administration that was weaponized, and so it made a decision that no matter what you did, it would fight you on these records. Now, there’s a new sheriff who says we probably ought to release these. I would then imagine whoever did it was not aware of the litigation and probably was seeking favor with Megyn Kelly,” Kline added.
Despite claiming in court that such a release of Hale’s writings would jeopardize its ongoing investigations, Kelly on Monday revealed that the FBI provided the killer’s writings to her with permission to analyze and report their contents but that her team was restricted from publishing the materials in their entirety.
Kline said if the FBI continues to fight the release of the same documents to The Star, he does not believe the agency’s argument will hold up in court.
“That’s not going to win. It shouldn’t, and no court should abide by that with an administration that has now flipped its position onto the law and is trying to carve out a position that allows it to curry favor with certain media representatives. That’s not how the law reads. It’s not released to who you can get a good report from or released to certain people. It is public access,” Kline said.
Kline further questioned the logic behind the FBI’s instructions to Kelly allowing her to report on documents without being allowed to publish them.
“What does publish mean? Does that mean that if she uses some of the same language in the documents, she has violated the order? How can you report on the content of something without making people aware of the content of what you’re reporting about? So I think this is a game of schematics. I don’t think it’ll work. They’re either public documents or they’re not. It makes no sense. It’s somebody who got caught being inconsistent,” Kline said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
