Credit to Fox News anchor Bret Baier for asking tough and direct questions of Christopher Wray. But the answers parried back were less than honest and forthright. No surprise there.
Wray ended up bobbing and weaving like a prize fighter. It wasn’t exactly a redux of the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” match. But he must have studied Muhammad Ali’s famous rope-a-dope routine before his bout with the Special Report host. The director is no heavyweight, that’s for sure.
When Wray wasn’t refusing to answer questions, he was dodging and deflecting in a most conspicuous fashion. He ducked an important inquiry about the many whistleblowers who have courageously exposed rampant internal corruption at the bureau. He pivoted away from explaining why the FBI concealed from the American voters Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal until after the recent mid-term elections.
The FBI director also refused to address polls that show Americans have lost all confidence in what was once the world’s premiere law enforcement agency. Under his stewardship, the bureau’s reputation is in tatters and has descended to all time low. But the director seems to have his head stuck squarely in the sand. Oblivious. Arrogant. Self-righteous. These are typical Washington contagions. Masks don’t help. No vaccine is available.
In the most revealing exchange, Wray denied outright any wrongdoing by the FBI, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Unbelievably, he claimed that agents didn’t “tell” social media companies to censor or suppress information like the Hunter Biden laptop story. This, despite reams of documents showing that the bureau did precisely that.
Wray tried to parse his language by using the word “tell.” It was a distinction without a difference. Hundreds of FBI emails and text messages, as well as testimony from former Twitter executives, show that the agency cajoled, encouraged, manipulated, pressured, and all but directed the platform to kill the laptop story, which it promptly did. The FBI sent encrypted missives to Twitter officials pushing them to banish people from the site based on purely political views. Every hour of every day Twitter was getting inundated by FBI demands.
Baier confronted the director with several examples of a “dual system of justice” and how people have been treated differently by the bureau depending on their politics. Wray simply rejected the premise by claiming that the FBI is “independent, objective, and fair.” What a load of manure. The record establishes just the opposite.
The FBI director’s imperious attitude was reminiscent of the old Marx Brothers quip, “Who you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”