More from the Chris Wray grilling

To say that FBI Director Christopher Wray didn’t enjoy his time in the hot seat testifying before Congress this week would be a considerable understatement. Ed already covered the squirming moments when Wray was asked about persecuting traditional Catholics. The number of things that the FBI Director supposedly “didn’t know” about what’s been going on at the Bureau he directs beggars belief. But it wasn’t just the issue of the persecution of Catholics that seemed to leave Wray twisting in the wind. There was simply too much additional material to ignore. For example, here is a moment when Wray was confronted with a question about the FBI collecting private banking information from Bank of America regarding people who were at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

.@Jim_Jordan: “Did the FBI ask financial institutions to turn over their customers’ debit and credit card purchase history in the Washington DC area for January 5-6th, 2021?”

WRAY: “I don’t know the answer.”

JORDAN: “We do. Because Bank of America gave us this email from FBI to… pic.twitter.com/GSpiGd6zJt

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 12, 2023

Yet again, Wray claims to “not know” the answer. But this time Jim Jordan is holding the records in his hands as he asks. the question. That story has been all over the news for quite a while now. Are we really expected to believe that the Director of the FBI didn’t know that was going on and how dubious the practice clearly is? Shouldn’t he have simply assumed that he would be asked?

Returning to the anti-Catholic memo for a moment, Jordan went after Wray hard for the Bureau asserting in a FOIA response that the public “doesn’t have the right to know” who was involved in the creation and approval of the memo. (National Review)

CatholicVote, an organization advocating for religious freedoms and protections, revealed hours before Wray’s appearance that a freedom of information request submitted to the FBI led the agency to insist that “the public is ‘not entitled’ to the records” pertaining to the anti-Catholic memo.

The group went on to demand Republican committee members to “press @FBI Director Wray today on the targeting of Catholics.”

Jordan did just that, taking Wray to task for refusing to disclose the identity of the agent who drafted the memo and the identity of the supervisor who disclosed it

In case you missed it, check out this portion of Jordan’s opening statements. If you fast forward to about the two-minute mark, he gets down to the meat of the complaints against the FBI. He openly laughs at the idea that Wray brought up during his opening remarks about the “need” to renew FISA 702 in its current form. He also laughs at the idea of the FBI asking the taxpayers to pay for a new HQ building for them. And he does it all while Wray is sitting right in front of him listening.

pic.twitter.com/U99HmlICJX

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 12, 2023

When Mike Johnson had his turn, he referenced the court’s finding that the FBI had strongarmed social media companies to suppress information about topics including the coronavirus lab leak origin theory. Wray lamely tried to deny that the Bureau is ” in the business of moderating content.” But Johnson was having none of it.

“The FBI is not in the business of moderating content or causing any social media company to suppress or censor,” Wray replied.

“That is not what the court has found,” Johnson said, adding that the FBI also suppressed online information about the so-called “lab leak theory” of COVID-19’s origins. “The FBI was the only agency in the entire intelligence community to reach the assessment that it was more likely than not that that was the explanation, but your agents pulled it off the internet, sir. That’s what the evidence in the court is.”

Will any of this inspire any better behavior out of Wray and the rest of the Bureau? I wouldn’t hold my breath. As we’ve discussed here before, Christopher Wray knows that he really has nothing to worry about. Aside from a possible Contempt of Congress charge, nobody can lay a glove on him because the Justice Department under Joe Biden is not going to prosecute any of its own people. The only thing he has to worry about is if the GOP wins back the White House. And even then he can just quit and Biden would probably grant him a full pardon for anything he might have done before leaving office. It’s a sad state of affairs, but we’re going to have to face up to this unpleasant reality until the FBI can be given a full house cleaning.