Christopher Wray is a low-down dirty liar and should be gone

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

FBI Director Christopher Wray has a habit of lying before Congress.

This is in addition to his running the FBI like a secret police force determined to take down anybody the current regime dislikes.

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None of this is news, but the evidence keeps piling up.

A month ago Jim Jordan of the House Judiciary Committee grilled FBI Director Wray about the infamous “Richmond” document in which the Field Office there described “opportunities” to surveil Catholic churches and recruit Catholic priests and parishioners to spy on supposed “radical traditional Catholics,” or what we like to call “Rad-Trads.”

The distinguishing feature of Rad-Trads is their preference for the Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II practices. Unsurprisingly traditional Catholics are more likely to be conservative, pro-life, and vote Republican.

This, apparently, makes them likely terrorists. Perhaps the connection to Latin led the Richmond Field Office to mistake them for drug traffickers, but that seems unlikely.

Among the claims Wray to the Committee was a pretty specific one: the Richmond memo was the result of a rogue set of FBI agents who worked alone and didn’t represent a larger movement within the FBI to go after political conservatives. Wray assured us that he was deeply concerned about this and was investigating how it happened.

That investigation, by the way, was his excuse for withholding information from the committee, including redacting documents and not allowing the agents involved to speak to the committee. In itself, this is a bizarre standard, as there are no criminal charges involved and the Congress is charged with oversight of the Executive Branch. Is it now the case that any time the FBI or any other agency wants to hide information from Congress they can just claim they are “investigating” the matter and will tell Congress nothing?

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Yesterday the House Oversight Committee released a less redacted version of the Richmond memo demonstrating that Wray deceived Jordan and the Judiciary Committee.

In other words, the FBI redacted the document in order to hide the fact that the effort to label conservative Catholics as terrorists was wider than was already known.

Remember the tempest this year when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was found to be targeting some Catholics as “extremists?” The bureau cast it as the work of a single rogue field office. Well, it looks like the effort was more widespread than our G-men admitted to the public.

That’s the news from a less-redacted internal FBI document released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Jim Jordan wants more information from the FBI on how broad this investigation really was.

This story began in February when a whistleblower leaked a heavily redacted January report from the FBI’s Richmond office: “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

The document defined “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as those who attend the Latin Mass and who frequently adhere to “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.” The agents relied on half-baked “open-source” reporting from liberal outlets to justify more bureau investigation.

FBI headquarters quickly said the report didn’t meet its “exacting standards” and had been withdrawn. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Judiciary Committee in July that the report was “a single product by a single field office.” He added that “as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” and he said he began an internal probe.

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Knowing a few Rad-Trads, I can assure you they are neither anti-Semitic nor white supremacist. They are likely to oppose open borders, but then so are most Americans. “Anti-LGBTQ” is probably accurate as far as it goes, although not in the sense that they seek to do violence against gays and lesbians.

There are no roving bands of Rad-Trads blowing things up or beating random gay people. They are, if nothing else, too busy raising a passel of kids. Rad-Trads have a lot of kids, you know.

Maybe that is why the Left hates them.

So what did Wray lie about specifically?

On July 25 the FBI finally provided the committee with a less-redacted version of that Richmond document. The report says that its information on Catholics was “primarily derived” from an “FBI Richmond contact”; an “FBI Portland liaison contact” who informed on a subject who “gravitated to” traditionalist catholicism; and an “FBI Undercover Employee” who reported on a subject who attended a Catholic church in California.

It also says the FBI’s Los Angeles field office “initiated an investigation” into a subject, and that the Richmond office “[c]oordinated with” FBI Portland to prepare the field report. In other words, this was a widespread bureau effort. Why was this suspicion about religion so widespread at the FBI?

Also troubling is the FBI’s decision to redact the Portland and Los Angeles roles from the original version of the Richmond document it provided Congress in March. In a letter with the less-redacted version, acting assistant FBI director Christopher Dunham said the redactions had been necessary to protect “information specific to ongoing criminal investigations.”

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A person “gravitated to” traditionalist Catholicism! Horrors!

As is clear by now our “Catholic” president is intensely hostile to pro-lifers and has essentially declared open season on Pro-life pregnancy centers, and now we learn that the FBI had what appears to be a more widespread effort to monitor traditional Catholics. The FBI is hiding the ball behind a non-criminal “investigation” that should be done in coordination with, not in opposition to Congressional oversight.

Is it any wonder that Congressional Republicans are angry at Wray?

Wray, no doubt, will provide Congress with a lawyerly explanation for why his prior testimony was not a lie, and no doubt he will skate.

Proving once again that if you have the right connections and serve the “Right People” you can get away with anything.

Ask James Clapper. He perjured himself and is a wealthy hero to the Left blathering on CNN, lying to the American people for more money.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 21, 2024
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