It hasn’t been a good week for FBI Director Christopher Wray and his whole organization. He gave testimony for the House, and Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) asked him a question that he refused to answer about FBI agents or informants in the Capitol attack on January 6. That wasn’t a good look for Wray.
A couple of days later, Wray was testifying again before the Senate, and there were some things some senators needed to settle about the summer appearance Wray made before them.
Back on August 4, Wray wasn’t willing to stick around for about twenty more minutes of questioning from the GOP on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said he had a plane to catch.
Sen. Grassley (R-IA) reminded Wray that he was flying on a private jet, but Wray maintained that he had “other business.”
That business turned out to be flying on a private jet paid for by taxpayers so that he could go on vacation in the Adirondacks.
Again…not a good look.
And now on Thursday of this week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) called Wray out on lying to the Senate.
“So you left a statutorily required oversight hearing in order to go on a personal vacation in the Adirondacks?” Hawley stated.
Wray tried to get out of that jam by claiming that he was referring to a business meeting that took place the next week. But it was clear that he, in fact, left the meeting for a vacation and lied about it in the process.
Hawley went further, asking Wray whether or not he paid for the trip since it has been the practice for FBI officials in the past to pay for personal trips and reimburse taxpayers at the commercial rate.
Wray claimed that he paid for the flight and that he was required to use that plane.
But that was only the introduction to the questioning. Hawley then lit into Wray for all that was going on in his FBI while he was on vacation. The senator called Wray out for sending more than a dozen agents into the home of a pro-life activist to arrest him at gunpoint in front of his children in the early morning hours. This man posed no threat of violence and had previously offered to turn himself in.
Hawley also noted that whistleblowers at the FBI have alleged that there have been agents pulled off of other cases of extreme threat like child sex abuse and human trafficking so that they could focus on the January 6 case. He said that this was even happening in the Washington field office so that there was an “appearance” that there were hundreds of new domestic terrorism cases in the pipeline when this wasn’t the case.
The whistleblowers also brought to light concerns about the use of SWAT teams on nonviolent suspects who might have attended the January 6 riot at the Capitol. These actions have been used to “pad the stats” due to a partisan directive.
The whistleblowers said that FBI leadership deliberately pushed down investigations into Hunter Biden and have retaliated against them for talking to Congress about these issues.
“This is what is happening at your FBI while you are evading oversight hearings,” Hawley concluded.
Well, that really wasn’t all Hawley said. He declared that Wray was not “up to the job” and should have been gone a long time ago, and he also said that there was going to be a second round of questioning and asked whether the director was going to be “sticking around” for this one this time.
Mic drop.
