Staff Report –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s curious that the MAGA Republicans controlling the House bombarded FBI director Chris Wray with criticisms on Wednesday about his role in investigating former President Donald Trump, considering that Wray is a Republican himself who was appointed to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation by Trump himself.

Committee Republicans, led by the chairman, Trump bulldog Jim Jordan of Ohio, treated Wray as if he were a hostile witness — repeatedly interrupting his attempts to answer their rapid-fire queries with shouted rebuttals, according to the New York Times coverage of the show.

Most of the Republicans on the panel sought to portray the nation’s premier law enforcement agency and Wray as a political tool of the Democrats in their mysterious campaign to undermine the bureau’s legitimacy with the public.

Time and again Wray rejected accusations that he had sought to shield President Biden or his son, Hunter Biden, or that he had targeted Trump. The FBI’s search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate last August as agents sought to recover sensitive documents from his time in office was lawful, Wray said. He said it was “restrained and prompted by a court order.”

“The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” Wray said, responding to Representative Harriet M. Hageman, a Wyoming Republican who unseated Liz Cheney last year, as she claimed that he had perpetuated a “two-tiered” system of justice. In earlier questioning, he flatly denied that the bureau was being weaponized.

“The FBI does not and has no interest in protecting anyone politically,” he said when another committee Republican asked if he was “protecting” the Bidens.

The five-hour session produced little in the way of new information, according to the Times.

Wray, who has adopted a cautious approach in previous congressional testimony, repeatedly refused to answer questions about open investigations but at times was “visibly annoyed.” Still, the hearing highlighted a political reorientation of sorts for Republicans. In decades past, they defended the bureau as a bulwark of law and order, but are now seeking to erode public confidence in the agency’s impartiality, stoked by Trump’s anger and mistakes the FBI made while investigating him.

Since his appointment in 2017, Wray has been under constant pressure from Republicans, who have simultaneously denounced lawlessness in cities run by Democrats and attacked the FBI’s role in political investigations.

Wray infuriated Trump, who viewed the director’s declaration of independence as disloyalty.

Trump and his supporters — as well as a vocal group of former FBI officials who have aligned themselves with Republicans in Congress — say the government is trying to silence and punish conservatives and see the bureau as a dangerous extension of that effort. Jordan has even hired former FBI officials to help with his investigations.

Already, House Republicans have voted to investigate law enforcement, creating the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in January. And last month, House Republicans on the Oversight Committee moved to hold Wray in contempt of Congress. (They called off a planned vote days later.)

That dynamic was on full display on Wednesday, as Jordan opened the hearing by accusing the FBI of a litany of abuses. He urged Democratic lawmakers to join Republicans in blocking the reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program known as Section 702 and raised questions about funding for the bureau’s new headquarters.

“I hope they will work with us in the appropriations process to stop the weaponization of the government against the American people and end this double standard that exists now in our justice system,” he said.

For the most part, Democrats defended Wray. But some on the committee grilled him about the FBI ’s practice of extracting the personal information of American citizens from the internet, and Representative Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat, took aim at the bureau’s history of surveilling progressive movements.

Jordan and his allies pursued several areas of questioning raised in earlier hearings where other federal law enforcement officials, including Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, testified.

Several Republicans took issue with the FBI ’s role in monitoring misinformation and threats on social media, claiming that Wray had conspired with social media companies to suppress reports on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he denied.

In one exchange, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, grilled Wray about the FBI ’s use of Section 702, pointing to a court ruling in May that found that the bureau violated rules governing the program.

The opinion, which was partly redacted, said that the FBI had improperly searched a database of communications intercepted under the law for information on people suspected of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Republicans also criticized the FBI for a memo, drafted by an analyst in the bureau’s Richmond, Va., field office, that cited potential threats from Catholic extremists in the run-up to the 2024 election. Jordan said several bureau officials, including a lawyer in the Richmond office, apparently approved the memo. Wray, describing himself as “aghast” after seeing it, replied that he immediately shelved the memo and that the matter was under internal review.

Wray pushed back hard when Representative Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, accused agents of using excessive force to arrest an anti-abortion activist in Pennsylvania, Mark Houck, who was acquitted of charges that he used violence to block access to a Planned Parenthood clinic. Among Republicans, FBI Houck has become a symbol of FBI overreach and animus toward conservatives. But Wray refused to second-guess the way his agents, who had decades of experience, handled the arrest.

“They did not storm his house,” Wray said. “They knocked on his door and identified themselves.”

The director was reluctant to engage on questions involving the FBI ’s search of Trump’s Florida residence and resort last summer, other than to confirm that his agents waited until the former president left Mar-a-Lago before conducting the search. He said he agreed with a federal judge that the government had probable cause to search the property given Trump’s repeated refusal to turn over sensitive government documents he took from the White House.

But he went even further when a committee Democrat asked about the disclosure that Trump had stacked boxes of government documents in common areas of his Mar-a-Lago club — as opposed to the sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs, used to provide officials with security clearances to classified materials.

“There are specific rules about where to store classified information and that those need to be stored in a SCIF,” Wray said. “And in my experience, ballrooms, bathrooms and bedrooms are not SCIFs.”

There was one area in which Wray and Republicans mostly agreed: the criticisms of the bureau raised in the final report from John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, who examined the origins of the FBI ’s investigation into ties Trump’s campaign had with Russia but found no evidence of politically motivated misconduct.

Wray said he had enacted a series of changes and referred employees involved in the Russia inquiry, known as Crossfire Hurricane, to the FBI ’s office of professional responsibility.

Even as Trump and his loyalists insisted that Durham’s investigation would unearth a “deep state” conspiracy intended to damage him politically, Durham never charged high-level government officials.

Instead, he developed only two peripheral cases involving accusations of making false statements, both of which ended in acquittals, while using his report to cite flaws in the FBI’s early investigative steps that he attributed to confirmation bias.

Even though Wray sat alone at the witness table, his Republican interlocutors made it clear the entire bureau, and its 38,000 employees, was in effect on trial.

In a heated exchange, Gaetz said the American public trusted the FBI more under J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s first director, than under the leadership of Wray. The director countered that the number of FBI applicants had surged in Gaetz’s home state of Florida. Gaetz said he was “deeply proud” of these people and added that “they deserve better than you.”

Wray said talk on the right that the bureau be defunded and dismantled was an “ill-conceived effort.”

“It would hurt the American people, neighborhoods and communities all across this country — the people we are protecting from cartels, violent criminals, gang members, predators, foreign and domestic terrorists, cyberattacks,” he said.

In an effort to counter the effort to discredit the agency, the U.S. Department of Justice put out a press release making the case for what the agency is doing to protect the American people.

“The men and women of the FBI work tirelessly every day to protect the American people from a staggering array of threats,” Director Wray said. “The strength of any organization is its people. The threats we face as a nation have never been greater or more diverse, and the expectations placed on the FBI have never been higher. Our fellow citizens look to the FBI to protect the United States from all of those threats, and the men and women of the FBI continue to meet and exceed those expectations, every day. I want to thank them for their dedicated service.”

Director Wray highlighted the results of working shoulder-to-shoulder with federal, state, and local partners to:

* Arrest more than 20,000 violent criminals and child predators in 2022

* Target the leadership of cartels who are exploiting our southern border to traffic fentanyl and other dangerous drugs.

* Seize hundreds of kilograms of fentanyl so far in 2023.

* Run thousands of investigations into the Chinese government’s efforts to rob our businesses of their ideas and innovation and to repress freedom of speech in the United States.

Director Wray noted that during a time when other law enforcement agencies have struggled to recruit and retain employees, the FBI continues to attract applicants in near-record numbers and maintain a low attrition rate among special agents. These applicants and employees share a commitment to public service and a willingness to put others before themselves, he said.

Director Wray also addressed criticism of FBI leadership.

“Today’s FBI leaders reflect the best of this organization,” Wray said. “An organization that’s made up of 38,000 men and women who are patriots, professionals, and dedicated public servants.”

Speaking about the FBI’s leadership team, Director Wray noted that the top eight leaders in the Bureau—none of whom is a political appointee—have worked in 21 different field offices and have a combined 130 years of field experience. Prior to joining the FBI, they have served in the Air Force, the Army, the Marines, as well as in state and local law enforcement.

Among the topics Director Wray was prepared to answer questions about include:

Violent crime
Southwest border
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Section 702
Responsiveness to congressional oversight
Impact of proposed budget cuts to the FBI
New FBI Headquarters
Documents investigations
Social media engagement
Domestic terrorism
Report of Special Counsel John Durham
Attorney General’s school board memorandum
Richmond Field Office’s intelligence product
Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act
Whistleblowers
Subpoena of FD-1023
Origins of COVID-19

Find more information about each of these topics on the agency’s website.