If Christopher Wray is trying to rehabilitate the FBI’s image, he’s failing miserably.

“A wide-ranging interview with NBC News” conducted by legendary cupcake Lester Holt? Really? Talk about a friendly setting. And talk about a toothless series of toady questions. Why, the only thing that would’ve made it more laughable would be if they’d arranged for the CIA’s infamous mop-up man, Ken Dilanian, to do the write-up.

Oh, wait.

“Reacting for the first time to former President Donald Trump’s vow to order the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents,” Dilanian begins, “FBI Director Christopher Wray said he would not allow his agents to conduct any investigation that doesn’t comply with "our rules, our procedures, our best practices, our core values.”

Trump, though, didn’t “vow” to do any such thing. A vow is defined as a “solemn promise,” and Trump didn’t solemnly promise to sic the DOJ on his political opponents. When asked last November by a Spanish-speaking Univision reporter whether he’d turn the tables on the same government agencies that had demonstrably been “weaponized” against him, Trump responded with predictable but measured Trumpian bluster: “Yeah. If they do this, and they’ve already done it, but if they follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse.”

Apparently, Dilanian doesn’t know what a vow is.

As for “our rules, our procedures, our best practices, our core values,” what might those be, Director Wray? Might they include colluding with the CIA and lying on a FISA warrant to enable the bureau to spy on Trump and his associates?

Might those core values include targeting not only concerned parents but religious Catholics — or what the FBI weirdly called “radical-traditionalist Catholics”? Or colluding with Big Tech to stifle conservative speech and interfere with the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden? Might they include a conveniently timed pre-election entrapment case in Michigan? Or willfully misdirecting Republican senators as they attempt to conduct oversight? Or seizing the cellphone of a Trump-allied congressman and retired brigadier general? Might those “core values” include stonewalling Republican efforts to get to the truth about the bureau’s involvement in the incitement of the January 6 riot, or its pitiful attempts to investigate the construction of a fake gallows and the placement of mysterious pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC headquarters? Might they include raiding a former president’s private residence and snooping around in his wife’s underwear drawer?

A House GOP report has already determined that the FBI is “rotted at its core,” and it’s hard to argue with that assessment.

Asked about the vile, pro-Hamas, Jew-hating demonstrations breaking out on college campuses across the country, Wray said the FBI doesn’t monitor protests, but it does “share intelligence about specific threats of violence with campuses, with state and local law enforcement.”

Uh-huh. It certainly seems as though the FBI was, uh, monitoring the events of January 6 — and even helping them along.

Wray also warned that “China, Russia, and Iran may seek to interfere in the upcoming election,” but he doesn’t seem to understand the stunning irony of that statement. His bureau interfered in both the 2016 election and the 2020 election.

Finally, Wray tried to tug on the people’s heartstrings by painting a false equivalence of threats directed toward the bureau and those directed toward our nation’s law enforcement officers. “Certainly we’ve seen over the last few years an increase in threats against FBI personnel and FBI facilities,” said Wray. “That’s unacceptable. And, you know, frankly, despicable. But it’s part of a broader phenomenon of threats and violence against law enforcement, public officials.”

Comparing any abuse or invective being directed toward the FBI with the Left’s ongoing war on cops and the ever-present threat of death under which our nation’s law enforcement officers live is itself despicable. There’s simply no comparison.

The problem with the FBI is that it’s squandered an enormous amount of hard-earned trust. Wray didn’t launch the bureau’s weaponization against the Right, but it can no longer be trusted to act without a left-leaning political agenda. As I wrote nearly three years ago:

The bureau’s slide into rank partisanship didn’t happen overnight; it happened over the course of years. It was obvious that at least the leadership of the FBI had become corruptly partisan during the Barack Obama years, when it slow-walked the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s “private” email server and then launched a phony investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump — an investigation that hinged on a piece of uncorroborated oppo-research garbage called the Steele dossier, which was put together by a Trump-hating British spy, was chock-full of Russian disinformation, was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, was vouched for by smarmy, scummy, slippery FBI Director James Comey, and was used with devastating effect to secure FISA warrants for spying on Trump’s campaign.

Our Mark Alexander has noted, as I have, that there are plenty of good, decent, patriotic agents among the bureau’s 37,000 employees. We shouldn’t tar them with the same brush that we’ve used to expose its rank political corruption, which begins on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. But I believe the FBI, as it currently stands, should be ended, abolished, and rebuilt under new management and with a better mission.

There’s a much-needed reckoning due at the FBI, and it’s not going to come about through Chris Wray sitting for softball interviews.

Preparing to have my home raided and my finances audited in three, two, one…