Former FBI Agent: Wray ‘Evasive’ Under Scrutiny Because Bureau Has Become ‘Ministry of Truth’
16:51 GMT 14.07.2023 (Updated: 17:26 GMT 14.07.2023)
© AP Photo / Alex Brandon
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FBI Director Christopher Wray was grilled by lawmakers at a Thursday hearing called by the House Judiciary Committee that demanded answers about the bureau’s coordination with social media companies, its alleged abuse of a secret intelligence court, and use of informants during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol Building.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has been blasted by US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) for "weaponization of the government against the American people,” which he said had eroded public confidence in the integrity of the FBI, on Thursday.
Jordan and other GOP lawmakers spent several hours interrogating the federal law enforcement chief about a number of incidents they said proved the FBI was being used as a political bludgeon against conservatives, including the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the 2016 election, a now-withdrawn memo from the FBI’s office in Richmond, Virginia, that suggested spying on Catholic anti-abortion groups over domestic terrorism fears, and news that some people involved in the breaching of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, were paid FBI informants who acted as provocateurs.
In response, Wray pointed to the fact that he is a registered Republican Party member, telling lawmakers that “the idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background.”
He also rejected the GOP lawmakers’ assertions that the FBI used agent provocateurs to encourage people to commit crimes on January 6 or that the agency was protecting the Biden family by sitting on potentially incriminating information or suppressing a news story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer. However, he acknowledged the FBI’s failings in properly using the FISC, in line with previous findings by special counsel John Durham and a DoJ Inspector General’s report.
Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent and whistleblower over the bureau’s failure to stop the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Wray was “evasive” and had to resort to “euphemistic bromides” to defend the FBI’s reputation, because of the demands placed on the bureau by US policies.
8 July 2023, 17:16 GMT
Noting that Wray had adopted a “9/11 changed everything” mindset, Rowley pointed out that “it's one of the few things they don't lie about: 9/11 did change everything. Between the Vietnam War and the so-called War on Terror, that now has morphed into a war on rival economic nuclear superpowers … has created all of this polarization and power mongering and control of the media through propaganda, which is what we're talking about with the FBI now serving as liaison - if you want to be a nice term for it - our liaison telling social media what to censor.”
She noted that in a recent federal court order blocking the Biden administration from much of the coordination over suppressing so-called “disinformation” on social media, the judge noted there are some 80 FBI agents working in that area.
“We talked about all the work on violent crime and the FBI work against child predators, etc. I disagree that those are the priorities. The priority has been supporting the narrative. And you can see this going all the way back to Russiagate with [Peter] Strzok and all the rest, trying to do what they could on election issues, etc., and carrying through to today where 80 FBI agents are in this disinformation component.”
“He tried to say, ‘no no, it's not about us declaring what is disinformation to the social media, it's all about foreign influence’. So he's trying to steer it in that direction, which makes it more difficult for the Republicans to attack. But in fact, I think it's been acknowledged that this was a truth ministry. And in fact, that's the Orwell term: Ministry of Truth. And that's actually in the judge's injunction, that the FBI is acting as a Ministry of Truth, deciding what is misinformation or not. And, of course, we're living in an era where government propaganda has been legalized.”
Rowley turned to the subject of Ray Epps, an Arizona man who has filed a lawsuit against Fox News for pushing a story that Epps was “an undercover FBI agent and was responsible for the mob that violently broke into the Capitol and interfered with the peaceful transition of power for the first time in this country’s history,” according to the filing.
8 June 2023, 04:35 GMT
In a short video, Epps can be heard telling demonstrators they need to go into the Capitol but will probably be arrested for doing so, after which someone started chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed!”
“Let me just explain a few additional points about this business of ’undercover agents,’” Rowley told Sputnik. “This was a confusing thing, some of the Congress people didn't understand: when you ask about an undercover agent, that's a specific meaning. That means an actual FBI special agent who has gone through the special training that they give, behavioral training, to assume a role. It goes through a whole process. So what they really wanted to ask, Ray Epps was not an undercover agent by the FBI definition. What he was, if anything, was an informant, or they call it now a ‘confidential human source’ or something like that - there's different categories even of confidential human sources.”
However, the former FBI agent pointed out that “when it comes to a protest, the FBI would have been remiss not to have lots of agents being on the ground. So, even if you go back to 2008 in the Twin Cities, when the Republican National Convention occurred, I was in a library room with 20 people talking about [how] there was going to be a march against the RNC and there was going to be a peace picnic, etc. And we were in this little library room: three of the people in the room were FBI or Joint Terrorism Task Force, okay? There were only 20 people listening and two or three of them were law enforcement. One guy was hiding, he thought I might recognize him, so he was hiding behind someone else.”
21 June 2023, 14:04 GMT
Rowley noted that the FBI also designates “special events” where they dispatch agents, which even includes non-political events such as golf tournaments.
“So that's one thing. Then the other thing is the operation of actual FBI informants. And that, of course, has to be cloaked with complete secrecy. So I don't know if it has to be in some cases, but that's the rule, that's the procedure. So of course, Wray was hedging on this. He would not answer.”
“A lot of the entrapments that we saw in the War on Terror, they were issues of an informant or a source egging on a group of people to pretend that they were, you know, bombing something. And that's the modus operandi here. And so then, of course, the source has to back out. They what they do is they egg it on and then at the end, they don't show up at the tail end. So for the actual event, that's a common profile. That's what in fact, that's what they're trying to do. So Ray Epps actually does fit that profile, whether or not he could have been just a normal person out there and, you know, maybe he got cold feet after a while. Or, he does fit the profile. And therefore, if Tucker Carlson said, ‘What's the explanation?’ You know, really, that's a good question. What is the truth? And, of course, the FBI won't tell you the truth about any informants who commit criminal acts,” Rowley explained. “They're allowed to do that under the cloak of secrecy.”
