Wray Defends the Weaponization of Government
The FBI director had multiple opportunities to be candid with the American people yesterday, and he refused at every turn.
If FBI Director Christopher Wray wants to reassure the American people that he isn’t a Democrat stooge and his bureau isn’t a private security force for the same, he sure has a funny way of showing it.
Early on in yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearings, he had a chance to shed some much-needed light on the events of January 6 — specifically, the FBI’s involvement that day — but all he did was dodge and dissemble.
“FBI Director Wray just told me he ‘does not believe’ there were any undercover FBI agents in or around the U.S. Capitol on January 6,” said Arizona Republican Andy Biggs. “This claim has been already debunked — including by the former U.S. Capitol Police Chief. Wray will be held accountable for this lie.”
Strong words from Biggs, but he’s certainly right. (California’s Darrell Issa followed up on this line of questioning, with similarly dismal results.) The director’s obfuscation and his lack of candor were both obvious and disappointing to everyone who’d like to know the whole truth about January 6, as opposed to being served up only the patchwork of lies that were trotted out in Nancy Pelosi’s committee’s J6 report.
FBI Director Wray just told me he “does not believe” there were any undercover FBI agents in or around the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) July 12, 2023
This claim has been already debunked—including by the former U.S. Capitol Police Chief.
Wray will be held accountable for this lie. pic.twitter.com/jJ4RV3PINE
“I’m not sure there were undercover agents on the scene.”
That’s what the FBI director wants the American people to believe. And it’s a lie. The sworn congressional testimony of FBI whistleblower George Hill and others has already pre-bunked Wray’s claim. Heck, if the matter weren’t so serious and infuriating, we’d make a howler of a joke about how the FBI busted up an FBI terrorism plot. Let’s hope Congressman Biggs and his colleagues really do hold Wray accountable for this repeated falsehood.
Aside from being grilled about his bureau’s involvement on January 6, there were other minefields — other matters concerning the weaponization of government against the citizenry — that awaited the director. These included the bureau’s apparent cover-up of a suspect in the January 6 pipe bomb case; the FBI’s targeting of churchgoing Catholics, whom it shamefully deemed “radical traditional Catholics” in a January 23 memo from the FBI Richmond field office; its targeting of concerned parents at school board meetings; and its heavily armed raid of the home of a peaceful pro-life activist, Mark Houck — which, as Texas Congressman Chip Roy reminded Wray, came “after Mr. Houck’s lawyer reached out and said he would voluntarily appear because the incident in question occurred almost a year earlier, in October of 2021.”
Wray apologized for none of it, not even the Houck outrage. “I’m not going to second-guess the judgment of the career agents on the ground who made the determination,” he said.
The case of the DC pipe bomber is particularly interesting, given that he’s somehow avoided capture for a crime that was committed in the most heavily surveilled area of the most heavily surveilled city in the nation. As political analyst Tristan Justice notes: “A whistleblower revealed the agency identified the car used by the prime suspect but refused to track the vehicle down. Both bombs were reportedly inoperable, according to the whistleblower.” When Director Wray refused to talk about the oddities of this case, Kentucky Congressman Brian Massie reminded him that it’s been some 900 days since the bombs were discovered. Why hasn’t the FBI gotten to the bottom of it?
Democrats did their best to defend Wray and his corrupt bureau, with California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren going as far as to charge the GOP with “engaging in conspiracy theories” to delegitimize the FBI “without any evidence.”
Without any evidence? How many FBI whistleblowers need to come forward before Lofgren sees both the smoke and the fire? Has she not paid any attention to the Twitter Files? Does she not know about Missouri v. Biden and the scathing 155-page opinion of U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty about the federal government’s systemic and coordinated censorship, which he said was “arguably the most massive attack on the American people’s First Amendment right to free speech in American history”?
Another matter that bubbled up yesterday was the FBI’s cooperation with its Ukrainian counterpart, the SBU, to censor so-called “Russian disinformation” — that is, information deemed inconvenient by the Ukrainian government. As veteran political observer Jazz Shaw reports:
If you had any doubts whatsoever about a judge’s order to have the government stop talking to social media platforms, this story should answer the last of your questions. (The Justice Department is fighting the order.) It’s now being reported that the FBI has, over the past year, been working with the SBU — the Ukrainian Security Service, similar to America’s FBI — to shut down the spread of supposed “Russian disinformation.” The method of choice is, as you would guess, to shut down the social media accounts of people or groups critical of the Ukrainian government or the war in Ukraine. And they’ve shut down quite a few of them, including those of American journalists reporting on events in the region.
Clearly, the FBI’s weaponization doesn’t stop at the water’s edge, nor with American citizens.
It seems that the only area of bipartisan agreement was about the bureau’s abuse of the FISA process. There was plenty of agreement on both sides of the aisle about this. Maybe some additional reforms will come out of it.
In perhaps the most side-splitting, spit-taking moment of the session, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz read back the damning transcript of Hunter Biden’s WhatsApp message to a Chinese business associate — the one in which he says: “I’m sitting here with my father. I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows, and my ability to forever hold a grudge, that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
Matt Gaetz sparked a contentious exchange with FBI Director Christopher Wray in today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing by questioning if Wray was “protecting the Bidens?”
— POLITICO (@politico) July 12, 2023
“Absolutely not,” Wray responded. “The FBI has no interest in protecting anyone politically.” pic.twitter.com/QsFr5klFmW
When Wray refused to comment on the smoking-gun transcript of that shakedown, Gaetz remarked that Wray seemed “deeply uncurious … almost suspiciously uncurious” about the exchange. He then asked Wray if he was “protecting the Bidens.”
To which Wray replied: “Absolutely not. The FBI does not, has no interest in protecting anyone politically.”
And if you believe that, you’re either a Democrat or you haven’t been paying attention these past two years. But we repeat ourselves.
“We need changes in the FBI,” said Republican House Judiciary Committee member Mike Johnson to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, “and if they want to continue to request the funding, for example, for a billion-dollar new headquarters, they have to show us they can respect the constitutional rights of the people they are supposed to serve and protect.”
Asked about the American people’s loss of faith in their government due to the censorship and the targeting due to political affiliation, Johnson said: “Yeah, the people have lost faith in the FBI, because, frankly, they’ve lost count of the number of scandals that have mounted. Just in the last couple of years, they have really and truly weaponized the Department of Justice and the FBI, the premier law enforcement agency in the country.”
Johnson went on to note that a recent poll showed that only 37% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the FBI.
Think about that. There was a time not too long ago when the FBI was held in the same high regard as the American military. Now the bureau is about as popular as Joe Biden. Does Chris Wray even care that he’s presiding over the collapse of this once-proud agency? If he does, he’s got a weird way of showing it. As we’ve noted before, we think he’s simply trying to run out the clock on a lot of these matters, especially the ones that pertain to the Biden Crime Family.
Paula Bolyard at PJ Media sums things up nicely maddeningly: “The detention of J6 protesters. The Russia collusion hoax. The arrest at gunpoint of a Catholic father. The monitoring of parents speaking at school board meetings. The failure to investigate attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers. The corruption runs deep at the FBI.”
Yes it does. And based on yesterday’s performance by Chris Wray, we can be confident that not only does the corruption run deep, it runs clear to the top.
