Wray Takes a Final Friendly
After dodging his final call to testify before Congress, FBI Director Chris Wray found time to sit for an easy interview with “60 Minutes.”
Just under two months ago, two weeks after Donald Trump notched his resounding electoral win, Chris Wray gave the middle finger to the American people. Twice.
On successive days in late November, our nation’s FBI director, along with its Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, decided not to show up for hearings before a House committee on one day and a Senate committee on the next. Their decision to do so, said Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters, a Democrat, “robs the American people of critical information” and “will deal a serious blow to trust in our government.”
He’s telling us. Two witnesses, two hearings, two days, two cowardly cancellations.
Mayorkas was, of course, impeached by House Republicans for his catastrophic border malfeasance, and history will judge him accordingly. But Wray managed to avoid that fate even though he has, since 2017, overseen an FBI fraught with corrupt and disgraceful behavior. Clearly, by dodging Congress’s constitutionally prescribed oversight, Wray was trying to avoid a replay of the sort of grilling he’d gotten from Texas Senator Ted Cruz in 2022.
.@SenTedCruz Confronts FBI Director Wray About The Governor Whitmer Kidnapping Plot & FBI Entrapment
— The Columbia Bugle :us: (@ColumbiaBugle) August 4, 2022
Senator @tedcruz Also Asks About The Promotion Of FBI Special Agent In Charge Of The Detroit FBI Field Office To The DC FBI Field Office Now Overseeing The 1/6 Investigation pic.twitter.com/aza2QXLhcp
Funny, though: Wray clearly had plenty of time to sit down this weekend for a friendly and fruitless “60 Minutes” session with CBS’s incurious Scott Pelley. The affair had the feel of an exit interview, with Pelley lobbing softballs to Wray, and Wray answering them in a straight-faced, pseudo-serious way.
Regarding the various controversies swirling around the bureau and the two-tiered justice that it seems to mete out, Wray said his people “tackle the job with a level of rigor, and tenacity, and professionalism, and objectivity that I think is unparalleled.”
Many agents do, certainly, but other agents — especially those in some very high-profile cases — do not.
Asked by Pelley about the greatest threat the Trump administration will face, Wray responded, “Well, the greatest long-term threat facing our country, in my view, is represented by the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese government, which I consider to be the defining threat of our generation.” Wray continued:
China’s cyber program is by far and away the world’s largest — bigger than that of every major nation combined and has stolen more of Americans’ personal and corporate data than that of every nation, big or small, combined. But even beyond the cyber theft. There’s another part of the Chinese cyber threat that I think has not gotten the attention publicly that it I think desperately deserves. And that is the Chinese government’s pre-positioning on American civilian critical infrastructure. To lie in wait on those networks to be in a position to wreak havoc and can inflict real-world harm at a time and place of their choosing.
On this, we agree with Wray: China is, without question, our number one geopolitical threat. But while China has been poisoning us with fentanyl and laying the groundwork for attacking our critical infrastructure, Wray’s FBI has been spending its time investigating concerned parents at school board meetings, and so-called “radical-traditionalist” Catholics, and January 6 Capitol tourists, and Melania Trump’s underwear drawer.
This, after all, is the same FBI that in recent years concocted and carried out the Russia collusion hoax; that lied on a FISA warrant application so it could spy on Donald Trump and his entire campaign team; that entrapped a bunch of “pro-Trump” rabble in a phony kidnapping plot against Michigan’s Democrat governor less than a month before the 2020 election; that sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for nearly a year before the 2020 election; that colluded with Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter to censor the New York Post’s laptop bombshell two weeks before the election; that helped push the Gang of 51’s “Russian disinformation” letter even though it had already authenticated the laptop; that targeted parents who attended school board meetings because they were concerned about CRT and other hard-left ideologies being taught in their children’s schools; that targeted “radical-traditionalist Catholics” in their churches; that repeatedly targeted peaceful pro-life activists; that unlawfully seized the cellphone of a Trump-allied congressman and retired brigadier general; that gave two Republican senators a phony “defensive briefing” about Russian disinformation when they were investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine and other countries; that placed numerous agents provocateur at the January 6 protest-turned-riot and continues to stonewall Congress about it; that conducted an armed raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and rifled through the first lady’s underwear drawer because of a documents dispute with the National Archives; that intentionally screened out conservatives and Trump supporters in its hiring practices; and that cracked down on pro-Trump agents and patriotic whistleblowers within the bureau.
In addition, we learned recently from Georgia Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk, who chairs the Committee on House Administration’s Oversight Subcommittee, that cellular carriers “have told Congress they possess intact phone usage data from the vicinity where two pipe bombs were planted” just before the January 6 Capitol riot, and this revelation is “directly disputing FBI testimony that agents couldn’t identify a suspect because the phone data was corrupted.”
Remember: Those pipe bombs were planted at both the DNC and RNC headquarters in one of the most heavily surveilled areas in the entire world, and the FBI can’t seem to identify this person even though the bureau has released video footage of the suspect sitting on a bench in front of the DNC headquarters while using his cellphone.
Maybe it really is time to end the FBI.
Or maybe not. Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Wray, is expected to sail through to confirmation in the newly Republican-controlled Senate, and he promises to break some stuff when he gets there.
As Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen told Fox News yesterday, “Wray presided over an absolute collapse in trust of the FBI. He took over in 2017, and two years after he took over, public support for the FBI was at 57%. Today, it’s at 41% — a 16-point collapse. This is a guy who raided Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, who questioned whether he had even been shot. He needed to go, and we need new leadership to restore trust in our criminal justice system.”
Adios, Chris Wray. And good riddance.
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