The Tennessee Star on Thursday filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requesting the FBI provide all of its internal records regarding “legacy tokens,” including those related to the May 2023 memo that “strongly” advised the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) not to release documents like the manifesto left by Audrey Elizabeth Hale, the biological woman who identified as a transgender man when she killed six at the Covenant School on March 27, 2023.
Obtained by The Star last June, the May 11, 2023, memo was addressed to MNPD Chief John Drake and sent from the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, part of the agency’s Critical Incident Response Group, from an address in Quantico, Virginia.
The document claimed that releasing “legacy tokens,” which the agency defined in 2018 as any records left by a mass killer that could explain their actions, would contribute to future attacks, fail to provide closure to victims and their families, and “facilitate false narratives and inaccurate information,” potentially leading “to unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories.”