FBI Director Wray calls Republican charges of FBI bias 'insane'

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday repudiated Republican claims that the nation’s top law enforcement agency is being used in a political manner to discriminate against conservatives, and also criticized mistakes made at the FBI under his predecessor, James Comey.

“The FBI has no interest in protecting anyone politically,” Wray told the House Judiciary Committee during more than three hours of testimony.

Wray also said that the FBI is “absolutely not” engaged in “weaponizing” government resources against Americans. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has created a special subcommittee to examine what he has labeled as the “weaponization of the federal government.”

"You have personally worked to weaponize 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'm biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” he replied.

Republicans blame Wray for mistakes made under his predecessor

Nonetheless, Republicans on the committee lobbed a wide array of charges against Wray and the FBI, often focusing on problems at the FBI that took place under Wray’s predecessor, James Comey, who was fired by former President Donald Trump in 2017.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, recounted the story of a former FBI lawyer who was sentenced to 12 months' probation in 2021, for altering an email as part of a search warrant application during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“As director of the FBI, those are the facts of the FBI under your watch,” Roy said.

“No, no, sir, it's important: Not under my watch,” Wray told Roy.

Wray criticizes previous FBI Director Comey

At different points throughout the hearing, Wray made some of the most forthright criticisms of the Comey era at the FBI he had made since he was appointed to the job by Trump in 2017.

“I'm very mindful of the fact that the whole reason I'm in this job is because my predecessor was fired and, in a fairly scathing Inspector General Report, one of the things he was criticized for was sharing more information — both with the public and, frankly, with Congress — than was consistent with federal rules,” Wray said.

Wray was unsparing in his condemnation of mistakes made by the FBI in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which was called to investigate links between the Russian government and contacts in the 2016 Trump campaign.

Former special counsel John Durham issued a report in May that found that “the FBI’s handling of important aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane matter were seriously deficient.”

Wray did not mince words: “I consider the conduct that was described in the Durham report as totally unacceptable and unrepresentative of what I see from the FBI every day, and must never be allowed to happen again.”

Questions about 'radical traditionalist Catholic ideology'

Jordan and other Republicans spent little time asking about some of the bigger issues that he and others on the right have talked about on right-wing media outlets, such as allegations from an IRS whistleblower that an investigation into President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was “slow-walked.”

Rather, Jordan asked about an internal memo written by a Richmond field office of the FBI that warned against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology.”

Wray condemned the memo as “appalling” and said it “as far as what we can tell, did not result in any investigative action, none.”

“As soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it removed,” Wray said. He said the FBI is working on an internal review of the matter and plans to brief Congress this summer.

Jordan shows partial info on Bank of America requests

Jordan also harped on requests from the FBI to Bank of America for information about customer transactions on Jan. 15, 2021. But he selectively displayed information from an email from the FBI to a Bank of America official.

A doctored image of the e-mail showed only two of the search criteria that were submitted by the FBI to Bank of America. The two criteria were “weapons or weapons related-vendor purchases" in the six months prior, and among that group, those who made purchases in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 or Jan. 6, 2021.

“I’m just nervous about that,” Jordan said, casting the FBI data requests as overly broad and intrusive.

Jan. 6, 2021, was the day Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent assault, to try to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

It wasn’t until over an hour later in the hearing, after Democrats asked Jordan to show an undoctored image of the email, that Jordan displayed the full email. Other search criteria included hotel and AirBNB reservations in the Washington, D.C., area on or around Inauguration Day — Jan. 20, 2021 — and the purchase of airline tickets to D.C. around Inauguration Day.

"The intention,” the full email read, “is to identify all potential networks of threats vs individual threats to Inauguration Day and beyond.”

By focusing on only half the search terms, Jordan’s presentation initially made it appear that the search was much broader than it actually was.

Claims of censorship

Many Republicans in the hearing accused the FBI of censoring Americans’ social media content. But GOP claims often went beyond the facts.

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., claimed that FBI agents were removing online content they did not like. “Your agents pulled it off the internet,” Johnson said.

There is no evidence of this claim. Internal communications disclosed in the Twitter files and in a House Judiciary Committee report this week have shown the FBI and other government agencies — including officials from the Trump White House and the Biden White House — communicating with social media companies about potentially inaccurate content.

“We don't ask social media companies to censor information or suppress information,” Wray said. “We're very clear that it's up to the social media companies.”