FBI Director Christopher Wray had barely completed his opening statement at the House Judiciary Committee’s FBI oversight hearing on July 12 when Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) began a rapid-fire barrage of pointed questions that culminated in a clash of utterly opposed perspectives.
“The court ordered the White House, [Department of Justice], and the FBI, among others, to immediately cease colluding with and coercing social media companies to suppress Americans’ speech, conservative speech in particular. Director Wray, I find it stunning you made no mention of this court opinion either in your opening statement or in this lengthy 14-page report that you prepared on July 12, which was eight days after the court ruling.”
“Have you read the ruling, Sir?”
Mr. Wray replied, “I am familiar with the ruling, and I have reviewed it with our Office of General Counsel.”
Mr. Johnson responded, “Are you deeply disturbed by what they’ve told you about the ruling if you haven’t read it yourself.”
Mr. Wray said, “Obviously, we are going to comply with the court’s order, the court’s injunction. We sent out guidance to the field and headquarters about how to do that. Needless to say, the injunction itself is the subject of ongoing litigation, and so I will decline to comment further.”
Mr. Johnson instantly responded.
“Let me tell you what the court concluded because it should be the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about at night,” he said. “The court wrote that ‘apparently the FBI engaged in a massive effort to suppress disfavored conservative speech and blatantly ignored the First Amendment right to free speech.’”
He continued reading from the court’s opinion, which described in great detail how the FBI’s actions had the effect “of suppressing millions of free speech postings by Americans.” As an example, the court pointed to the fact that “millions of Americans did not hear about the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election,” as well as a lengthy list of other controversial issues.
“Our emphasis is on malign foreign disinformation from hostile actors who engage in covert actions to subvert our social media platforms, which is something that is not seriously in dispute,” a grimacing Mr. Wray said.
At that point, an agitated Mr. Johnson insisted, “That is not accurate; you need to read this opinion because you are in charge of enforcing it.”
He also pointed out that an FBI official in charge of the censorship program claimed a 50 percent success rate in getting targeted posts suppressed.
“Well, first off, I am not sure that is a correct characterization, but what I would say is the FBI is not in the business of moderating content or pressuring any social media to suppress or censor.” Mr. Wray said angrily.
Mr. Johnson responded, “That is not what the court said.”
And thus it went back and forth throughout the lengthy hearing, with Republicans pointing to the extremely detailed July 4 opinion by Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana and numerous similar findings by others on recent FBI actions against free speech, clashing with the embattled FBI director who flatly and repeatedly denied that his agency has done anything remotely like censorship.
A similarly yawning gulf remained throughout the hearing between the Republicans and Democrats on the judiciary panel. The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), devoted the bulk of his opening statement to accusing committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and his Republican colleagues of being interested only in “performance art, an elaborate show with only two purposes in mind: to protect Donald Trump from the consequences of his actions and to return him to the White House in the next election.”
Mr. Nadler argued that “for months, committee Republicans have claimed the FBI is rotten, corrupt, politicized and, their favorite word, weaponized against the American people,” and accused Mr. Jordan of “launching a number of baseless investigations into the FBI, most based on absurd conspiracy theories,” which the New York Democrat insisted couldn’t possibly be believed.
“But this is where the extreme MAGA [Make America Great Again] leadership of this Congress has brought us. Today, the MAGA Republicans will attack the FBI for having the audacity to treat Donald Trump like any other citizen,” Mr. Nadler said.
Other Democrats echoed the Trump/MAGA claim.
Former House Administration Committee Chairman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said that “it’s actually sad that the majority is engaging in conspiracy theories and efforts to try and discredit one of the premier law enforcement agencies in the United States.”
But Ms. Lofgren then told Mr. Wray that she’s concerned that the FBI has been laggard in seeking to expose Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol, noting that she was a member of the Democrat-appointed House special committee that investigated the violence.
Ms. Lofgren, who ranks just behind Mr. Nadler in seniority among the panel’s Democrats, emphasized that the special committee concluded “that [Mr. Trump] was the center of a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the [2020 presidential] election.”
Toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) said passages of the “screed” written by Texas Walmart murderer Patrick Wood Crusius, who shot and killed 23 people in the store in 2019, contained “some of the same ugly xenophobic rhetoric that I hear my colleagues on the other side of the aisle use.”
Ms. Escobar then asked Mr. Wray what the FBI “is doing about domestic terrorism.”
