FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday dismissed Republican claims that the nation’s top law enforcement agency is being politically used to discriminate against conservatives, and also criticized mistakes made at the FBI under his predecessor, James Comey.
“The FBI has no interest in politically protecting anyone,” Wray told the House Judiciary Committee during more than three hours of testimony.
Wray also said the FBI is “absolutely not” engaged in “weaponizing” government resources against Americans. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, created a special subcommittee to examine what he called the “militarization of the federal government.”
“You personally worked to arm the FBI against conservatives,” Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo, told Wray.
Wray, a longtime member of the Federalist Society — a conservative legal group — scoffed. “The idea that I am biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my personal background,” he replied.
Republicans blame Wray for mistakes made under his predecessor
Nonetheless, committee Republicans have leveled a wide range of accusations against Wray and the FBI, often focusing on issues at the FBI that took place under Wray’s predecessor, James Comey, who was fired by the former president. Donald Trump in 2017.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told the story of a former FBI attorney who was sentenced to 12 months probation in 2021, for altering an email as part of a warrant application for search during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
“As Director of the FBI, these are the facts of the FBI under your watch,” Roy said.
“No, no, sir, this is important: not on my watch,” Wray told Roy.
Wray slams former FBI director Comey
At various points in the hearing, Wray made some of the most outspoken Comey-era criticism of the FBI he had made since being appointed to the position by Trump in 2017.
“I’m very aware that the reason I’m in this job is because my predecessor was fired and in a pretty scathing Inspector General’s report, one of the things he was criticized for was to sharing more information — both with the public and, frankly, with Congress — than was in accordance with federal rules,” Wray said.
Wray was vocal in his condemnation of mistakes made by the FBI in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which was called upon to investigate links between the Russian government and 2016 Trump campaign contacts.
Former special counsel John Durham released a report in May which concluded that “the FBI’s handling of significant aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane case was seriously flawed”.
Wray didn’t mince words: “I consider the conduct that was described in the Durham Report to be totally unacceptable and not representative of what I see from the FBI every day, and must never happen again.”
Questions on “Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology”
Jordan and other Republicans spent little time asking about some of the biggest issues he and others on the right have spoken about in the right-wing media, such as the allegations of a whistleblower from the IRS Says Investigation of President Biden’s Son, Hunter Biden, was “Slow March”.
Instead, Jordan asked about an internal memo written by an FBI field office in Richmond that warned against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology.”
Wray condemned the memo as “appalling” and said it “as far as we can tell has not resulted in any investigation, none.”
“As soon as I discovered this I was appalled and ordered it removed,” Wray said. He said the FBI was working on an internal review of the matter and planned to brief Congress this summer.
Jordan shows partial information on Bank of America requests
Jordan also insisted on FBI requests to Bank of America for information about customer transactions on January 15, 2021. But he selectively displayed information from an FBI email to a Bank of America official. America.
A doctored image of the email showed only two of the search criteria submitted by the FBI to Bank of America. The two criteria were “purchases of arms or arms-related vendors” in the previous six months, and among that group, those who made purchases in Washington, DC, on January 5 or January 6, 2021.
“I’m just nervous about it,” Jordan said, calling the FBI’s data requests overbroad and intrusive.
January 6, 2021 is the day Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in a violent assault, in an attempt to reverse Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.
It wasn’t until more than an hour later in the hearing, after Democrats asked Jordan to show an undocked image of the email, that Jordan posted the full e -mail. Other search criteria included hotel and AirBNB bookings in the Washington, D.C. area on or around Inauguration Day – January 20, 2021 – and purchase of airline tickets for DC around inauguration day.
“The intent,” the full email reads, “is to identify all potential threat networks versus individual threats through Inauguration Day and beyond.”
By focusing on only half of the search terms, Jordan’s presentation initially made it appear that the search was much broader than it actually was.
Censorship claims
Many Republicans present at the hearing accused the FBI of censoring Americans’ social media content. But the GOP claims often went beyond the facts.
Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., claimed FBI agents remove online content they don’t like. “Your agents took it off the internet,” Johnson said.
There is no evidence for this claim. Internal communications leaked in Twitter files and in a House Judiciary Committee report this week showed that the FBI and other government agencies — including officials from Trump’s White House and Biden’s White House — were communicating with social media companies about potentially inaccurate content.
“We don’t ask social media companies to censor or remove information,” Wray said. “We are very clear that it depends on the social media companies.”