wray fbi

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all FBI dir gop

wray fedsoc clerked for LUTTIG

SEE DOMESTIC CTR TERROR

is FBI deep state? comey went after hillary (good) but then failed so bad?

wray name became mantra?

any residual G-Man cred? waco ruby ridge?

i keep forgetting this guy never got fired (oops spoke a day to soon)

testimony on meddling and

Foolish’ GOP congressman gets called out during House hearing for his threat to ‘drop’ protesters

David Edwards / Raw Story September 17, 2020

During a hearing in front of Congress this Thursday, FBI Director Christopher Wray was questioned by Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) on whether or not the agency sees Black Lives Matter…

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BAILED UNDER PRESSURE 12 24?

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epstein drama

// m traitor g no not dangerous, brn fail

no x gfx pix

an 11 25

President Donald Trump is targeting his former FBI Director in a series of social media posts, including a repost that accused Christopher Wray of treason.

Trump reposted a post on Monday that placed Wray among sixteen people — including several former FBI officials — and labeled them as “Obama’s Russia HOAX Treason Club.”

Those depicted as members of the alleged “Treason Club” include Wray’s predecessor, former FBI Director Jim Comey; former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe; former CIA Directors John Brennan and Gina Haspel; former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Another post that Trump reposted accused former Director Wray of lying when he testified before Congress that he did not put FBI agents in the crowd on January 6.

Trump wrote: “Wray lied!!!”

The president also reposted a post he wrote in September, that reads in part, “It was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed, against all Rules, Regulations, Protocols, and Standards, 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax.”

Trump did not appear to provide evidence that supported his allegations.

Wray has denied there were FBI agents in the crowd as some form of operation.

A September Associated Press headline reported: “Alleged FBI documents do not prove federal agents incited Jan. 6 Capitol attack.”

Trump has also been calling for the prosecutions of his political adversaries, including U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI Director Comey, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.

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MMA

Jesse Watters: “The Democrat reaction to January 6 was worse than January 6”

Watters: “What they need to do is either appoint a special counsel or have some sort of Senate select committee”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 10/07/25 6:39 PM EDT

Video

Citation

From the October 7, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): The Democrat reaction to January 6 was worse than January 6. We only know this from a whistleblower. Wray buried this inside some secret vault somewhere. A whistleblower had to come bring this to our attention. Imagine what else we're about to find out.

So, they cracked into these phones. That means you know where the senator was, exactly, who was calling him, who he called, how long the phone conversation was, and that's an incredibly abusive overreach. And what they were probably trying to do is cast this wide net to create some grand criminal conspiracy and indict the entire Republican Party. And they used the guy that prosecuted war crimes in the Hague to do it.

This guy should be in prison. And what they need to do is either appoint a special counsel or have some sort of Senate select committee to go up, do hearings, put Wray, put Garland, put Smith under oath, and if they lie, you throw them in prison.

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fedsoc pal fired

an 7 25 ah

During his first presidency, Donald Trump angrily clashed with some of his own appointees to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — including two U.S. attorneys general: Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr. And he ended up hating Christopher A. Wray, the conservative Republican he chose to replace James Comey as FBI director.

The fact that Wray enjoyed strong bipartisan support and remained as FBI director under former President Joe Biden intensified Trump's disdain for him. And when he nominated far-right conspiracy theorist Kash Patel for that position, Trump sent out a loud message that he wanted ultra-MAGA loyalists running the FBI.

In an article published on July 29, attorney/legal expert Quinta Jurecic warns that six months into Trump's second presidency, the FBI is in total disarray.

Jurecic points to the resignation of former FBI special agent Michael Feinberg as a prime example of the agency's dysfunction: Feinberg, according to Jurecic, was under pressure merely for being friends with a former agent who was critical of Trump. Feinberg, like Wray, resigned before Trump had a chance to fire him.

IFrame Content

"The FBI has long seen itself as an organization built on expertise," Jurecic explains. "Its founder, J. Edgar Hoover, was an early and devoted advocate of professionalizing the government bureaucracy, to the point of mandating that agents wear a dark suit and striped tie. Now, however, the bureau is in the early stages of something like a radical deprofessionalization. The most important quality for an FBI official to have now appears to be not competence but loyalty. The exiling of Feinberg and others like him is an effort to engineer and accelerate this transformation."

Jurecic continues, "Feinberg’s boss, Special Agent in Charge Dominique Evans, didn't allege any misconduct on his part, Feinberg told me. Rather, as Feinberg set out in his resignation letter…. Evans explained that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino had found out that Feinberg had maintained a friendship with the former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, a longtime target of Trump's ire."

Feinberg, Jurecic notes, is lamenting the "decay" of the FBI.

"An FBI without constraint or apolitical oversight is exactly what Trump wants, and what Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel seem to be working toward," the attorney warns. "Trump launched his 2024 campaign by declaring to his supporters, 'I am your retribution,' and in their previous lives as MAGA influencers, both Patel and Bongino voiced support for locking up the president's opponents. Citing 'Justice Department sources,' Fox News recently reported that the FBI has opened a criminal investigation into former intelligence chiefs who led the government's assessment of Russian election interference in 2016."

Jurecic continues, "In the first Trump Administration, such a blatant use of the FBI for political ends would have been an unthinkable breach of law-enforcement independence. But the FBI's new leadership has been pushing out many of those who might object. So many people have been driven away, in fact, that after his departure, Feinberg found himself adopted by what he calls an 'exile community' of former Justice Department and FBI officials working to help one another adjust to post-government life."

During his interview with Jurecic, the conservative Feinberg — who was active in the Federalist Society in the past — was highly critical of Trump's politicization of the FBI as well as the way U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with the FBI's help, is handling deportations. And thinks that wearing masks is a bad idea for ICE agents.

Feinberg told Jurecic, "I was absolutely furious. We live in a democracy. We are an organization that serves the public. We do not hide from our actions."

*Quinta Jurecic's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).

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jan 6 qanon see q 4 for anno

washington (CNN)Foreign adversaries like Russia and China "weaponized" QAnon messaging to sow further discord among the American population in the months leading up to, and following, the January 6 attack, according to a new report released Monday that details how these countries are not only utilizing the same false narratives to peddle disinformation on social media, but also fueling a conspiracy theory that could incite more violence by domestic extremists.

The findings, which are detailed in a report produced by the Soufan Center, suggest "that foreign states are utilizing the QAnon conspiracy theory to sow societal discord and even compromise legitimate political processes," the independent non-profit group, which is focused on global security, said in a press release.

'An existential threat': The Republicans calling for their party to reject QAnon conspiracy theories

US officials are keenly aware that state-backed actors from countries like Russia have been amplifying QAnon messaging and federal agencies are investigating that foreign nexus as part of a broader effort to address the threat posed by domestic extremists in the wake of January 6, multiple sources told CNN.

FBI Director Christopher Wrayreiterated last week that the bureau is not looking into the QAnon movement "in its own right" but tracking how foreign actors are amplifying the conspiracy theory is one of the few areas US officials have been able to explore in an otherwise limited investigative effort.

Sources previously told CNN Russia has been pushing QAnon narratives as part of its long-standing disinformation campaign targeting the US, but Monday's report reveals new evidence that China, Iran and Saudi Arabia have also engaged in similar activity as recently as this year.

"Our data collection and analysis has demonstrated that QAnon has been weaponized by America's adversaries," according to Zach Schwitzky, founder of a research company that partnered with the Soufan Center to produce the report. "Actors from Russia, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have all entered the fray amplifying QAnon messaging, most likely as a means to sow further discord and division among the American population."

The findings were first reported by Yahoo News.

China emerges as top foreign QAnon promoter

While the QAnon movement is widely believed to have originated within the US, the report notes that these foreign actors were incredibly active in pushing the conspiracy theory in late 2020 and during the first two months of this year.

"In both 2020 and for the first two months of 2021, almost one-fifth of all QAnon posts on Facebook originated from administrators overseas," the report states.

While the report found that Russian actors were behind the majority of this activity last year, it says China emerged as "the primary foreign actor touting QAnon-narratives online" in 2021, timing that coincides with Beijing's ramp up of disinformation efforts targeting the US more broadly.

FBI Director Wray knocks down conspiracy theory that January 6 rioters were 'fake Trump protesters'

"Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran also contribute to amplifying the QAnon conspiracy theory online to reach a broader audience," the report adds. "Such activity blurs the line between domestic and foreign disinformation, representing a significant challenge for the U.S. government and international action."

That problem is compounded by the fact that QAnon "has the potential to incite more acts of violence in the foreseeable future," according to the report, an assessment that echoes concerns raised by officials from various federal agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and elements of the intelligence community.

Those fears are directly linked to how the QAnon conspiracy theory "generates a process of radicalization and violence similar to that fueling other violent extremist movements, including the so-called Islamic State," the report states.

There is a "cognitive opening among the US population that can be manipulated by violent extremist groups and recruiters in support of the QAnon movement," it adds, noting that foreign actors are also seeking to capitalize on this vulnerability as well.

"These findings suggests the QAnon conspiracy theory has the potential to serve as a force multiplier for domestic violent extremism (DVE), including racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists (REMVEs) who are already seeking to recruit them into their ranks," it says.

A complicated challenge

Frequently described as a virtual cult, QAnon is a sprawling far-right conspiracy theory that promotes the absurd and false claim that former President Donald Trump has been locked in a battle against a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles made up of prominent Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities.

Members of the violent pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol had ties to QAnon, and the conspiracy theory has made its way from online message boards into the political mainstream in recent years.

'QAnon shaman' must remain in jail, judge rules

A DHS spokesperson previously told CNN that the department is working with its federal partners and those in the private sector "to combat the spread of conspiracy theories and other false narratives on social media and other online platforms that can radicalize people to violence and fuel domestic violent extremism."

During her confirmation hearing in January, President Joe Biden's Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, also committed to investigating any foreign connections to QAnon, though acknowledged that DHS and FBI are in the lead on such issues.

But Wray's testimony last week before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees underscore how the FBI is largely restrained in its ability to investigate elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory despite acknowledging it poses a national security threat.

"Like a lot of other conspiracy theories, the effects of Covid, anxiety social, social isolation, financial hardship ... all exacerbate people's vulnerability to those theories, and we are concerned about the potential that those things can lead to violence, and where it is an inspiration for federal crime, we're going to aggressively pursue it," he told House lawmakers during last week's world wide threats hearing.

FBI director says bureau is not investigating QAnon conspiracy 'in its own right'

Wray also noted that the FBI has arrested "at least five self-identified QAnon adherents related to the January 6 attacks specifically," acknowledging a clear link between the conspiracy theory and the insurrection.

Monday's report also notes that as of February 8, "at least 27 individuals who participated in the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 were affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy."

But while court documents clearly indicate that QAnon has fueled beliefs of defendants who took part in the insurrection, whether the conspiracy theory's origins merit criminal investigation has proved to be a difficult jump to make, and there is no indication to date that law enforcement officials are working to determine the identity of the person behind the original message or other similar anonymous social media posts that have emerged in recent years.

Federal officials have routinely said that social media companies must take on a larger role in combating the spread of online conspiracy theories like QAnon, a view that is echoed in Monday's report.

"As occurred with al-Qaeda and Islamic State propaganda, algorithms employed by social media companies to generate continued engagement with platforms are partly responsible for radicalizing individuals to support QAnon," it says. "The findings of this report make clear, it is imperative to protect freedom of speech, but social media companies also need to re-examine their de-platforming approaches, design of algorithms, and the prevalence of disinformation on their platforms."---

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alternet-logo

US extremists are rattled by new sanctions against global terrorism group

How scammers use psychology to create some of the most convincing internet cons

Jordan Green January 15, 2025

The State Department has applied the “specially designated global terrorist” designation to the Terrorgram Collective in a groundbreaking move that for the first time sanctions a transnational white supremacist terrorist group with a significant presence in the United States.

The announcement on Monday — one week before President Biden leaves office — justified the designation based on the group “posing a significant risk of committing, or having participated in training to commit acts of terrorism, that threaten the security of United States nationals or national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Terrorgram is an amalgam of the words “terror” and “Telegram,” the latter of which is a social media platform used by members to distribute propaganda.

“This is the first time you’ve seen a white supremacist group that had members or supporters in the U.S. receive the designation,” Seamus Hughes, a researcher at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska, told Raw Story.

Two of the group’s leaders, Dallas Erin Humber of California and Matthew Robert Allison of Idaho, were indicted last year on charges that included conspiracy, solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of the murder of federal officials, and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists. Two other individuals, Brandon Russell — founder of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division — and Andrew Takhistov, who each face federal charges related to plots to attack the power grid, are also linked to Terrorgram.

The indictment against Humber and Allison describes Terrorgram as “a network of channels, group chats, and users on Telegram that promote white supremacists accelerationism: an ideology centered on the belief that the white race is superior; that society is irreparably corrupt and cannot be saved by political action; and that violence and terrorism is necessary to ignite a race war and ‘accelerate’ the collapse of the government and the rise of a white ethnostate.”

Terrorgram is not the first transnational white supremacist terrorist group to be sanctioned by the State Department. In 2020, under the first Trump administration, the State Department applied the “specially designated global terrorist” identification to the Russian Imperial Movement, which was implicated in a series of bombings in 2016 and 2017 that targeted refugee shelters in Sweden. Nordic Resistance Movement, a group founded in Sweden, was added to the list last June.

The specific bans designated groups and individuals from holding property and financial interests in the United States, while also prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in financial transactions with them.

Following the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the Russian Imperial Movement invited the organizers to visit its paramilitary training camps in St. Petersburg, according to Nathan Sales, a former Trump administration State Department counterterrorism official who testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Sales said there is no evidence that the Charlottesville organizers accepted the invitation, but the following month, Russian Imperial Movement leaders traveled to the United States to network with white supremacists, and one posed for a photo with the group’s flag in front of the White House.

“What is most interesting for me is this represents the first time when a designation would have ramifications for U.S. prosecutors,” Hughes said. “There’s not a cadre of Russian Imperial Movement adherents in the U.S., whereas there is a good number of individuals that were drawn to Terrorgram in the U.S.”

Hughes said the designation will give prosecutors the ability to request terrorism enhancements during sentencing.

“It helps for them to tell the story to a jury that this is not just a bunch of angry people online, but an actual terrorist group,” he added.

The designation is also likely to make social media companies more reluctant to allow members and associates to organize on their platforms.

“Because tech companies can face legal risks if they provide services to designated groups or individuals, sanctions can prompt them to sever ties with those listed as terrorists,” Sales testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee back in 2022.

The announcement about the State Department sanction against Terrorgram is already causing ripples of unease across Telegram.

Reacting to the announcement on Monday, a neo-Nazi channel that advertises itself as a source of “tradecraft to evade authorities online,” posted: “We all know we are operating on borrowed time here on Telegram. It is unfortunate, as it is a hell of an app.”

The post went on to say that users should not trust Pavel Durov, the Russian founder and CEO of Telegram, to protect their data.

“We don’t want any of our admins or subscribers to wind up in federal prison over ironically being part of a ‘terror group,’” the post continued. “With no publicly available criteria to determine guilt or association, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It doesn’t make sense to maintain a presence where the enemy has the advantage.”

Prior to the arrests of two American leaders last September, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced charges against two unnamed Ontario men “alleged to have participated in the creation of Terrorgram Collective manifestos and Atomwaffen Division recruiting videos.”

The Canadian arrests in December 2023 followed an 18-month investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That timeframe puts the launch of the investigation roughly in June 2021, the time of the first Terrorgram publication Militant Accelerationism, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center investigation.

Federal prosecutors allege that Humber and Allison joined Terrorgram in 2019, and became leaders of the group in the summer of 2022, “after one previous leader was arrested and charged with terrorism offenses and another became aware that he was the subject of a terrorism related investigation.”

Following Humber and Allison’s arrests, three foreign nationals appear to have taken over leadership of Terrorgram. The State Department designation identifies Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira of Brazil, Noah Licul of Croatia and Hendrik Walh-Muller of South Africa as “leaders of the Terrorgram Collective” and “specially designated global terrorists.”

Terrorgram is linked to two other federal prosecutions in the United States beyond Humber and Allison. Russell, the Atomwaffen founder, was arrested in February 2023 and charged alongside codefendant Sarah Beth Clendaniel in an alleged plot to carry out a coordinated attack on electrical substations designed to create a widespread power outage in Baltimore.

While Terrorgram is not directly mentioned in charging documents for the case, a review of Russell’s Telegram chats by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that he forwarded a Terrorgram document called Make It Count to another Telegram user.

Court filings by the government also allege that Russell told an FBI confidential human source that they should use Mylar balloons to short out a power transformer. That tactic is recommended in another Terrorgram publication The Hard Reset, which is described by the government as including “detailed information on how to attack a substation, including the use of Mylar balloons.”

The State Department announcement references a planned energy facility attack by Andrew Takhistov in New Jersey last summer without directly naming him.

Takhistov’s charging documents allege that he “claimed to have taken a role in the publication of” The Hard Reset and that he sent a PDF of the document to an FBI undercover employee. Takhistov allegedly praised The Hard Reset as “the only thing you need” to plan a white supremacist terror attack.

Takhistov was active in the Terrorgram group chats, and Humber posted an Audiobook promoting white supremacist murder in January 2024 in response to a request from Takhistov, according to government court filings. Later, according to the government, Takhistov thanked a Terrorgram chat administrator for posting a video “with instructions for using Mylar balloons to commit an attack on an energy facility.”

Lawyers for Takhistov and Russell could not be reached for comment for this story prior to publication.

The State Department announcement listing Terrorgram as a terrorist entity cited the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, released in June 2021. The framework highlighted the government’s efforts to assess whether foreign entities could meet the criteria for the “specially designated global terrorist” designation.

“These designations are part of a broader U.S. government effort to address the transnational dimensions of the threat posed by [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist] actors and reflect the Biden-Harris administration’s continued commitment to countering domestic terrorism, which includes REMVE and white identity terrorism,” the State Department said.

The emphasis on tackling white supremacist terrorism under the Biden administration has been embraced by an array of agencies in addition to State, including Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI.

The commitment across the federal government to combating white supremacist terrorism under Biden’s leadership built on a growing consensus within the agencies that took hold during the first Trump administration. It remains unclear whether the second Trump administration will maintain the same course.

“In fact, we viewed it as such a critical threat that back in June of 2019, under my leadership, we elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority, on the same level with ISIS and homegrown violent extremists, where it remains to this day,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2021.

Wray was appointed to lead the FBI by Trump in 2017.

Kash Patel, who has been named by Trump to replace Wray in the incoming administration, has expressed skepticism towards the government’s focus on “domestic terrorism.”

“Whistleblowers have revealed in multiple ways how the Deep State is continuing to weaponize the power of the state against internal dissidents,” he wrote in his book Government Gangsters. “To pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data on domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”

Asked for clarification on Patel’s views, a Trump transition spokesperson previously pledged to Raw Story that Patel will “protect Americans from terrorism as the agency’s director.”

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'Obeying in advance': Wray accused of 'making things easy for Trump' by abruptly resigning

KAVANAUGH FAIL

an 10 24 badash

A years-long investigation by a top Senate Democrat of the FBI’s 2018 supplemental background investigation into multiple allegations of sexual misconduct by Brett Kavanaugh, in the middle of his confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, finds the Trump White House and then-President Donald Trump himself engaged in a “sham” process to ensure the nominee was placed on the nation’s highest court.

“New report details how the Trump White House restricted FBI investigators and lied to the American people about the investigation and tip line. Six-year-long Senate inquiry was hampered by repeated executive branch obstruction,” reads the introduction to the 32-page report by U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts and one of the leading advocates for Supreme Court reform.

“In 2018, I pledged to Christine Blasey Ford that I’d keep digging, for however long it took, and not give up or move on from the Trump White House’s shameful confirmation process for Justice Kavanaugh,” Senator Whitehouse says. “A full, proper investigation is the bare minimum that victims who come forward – like Dr. Ford and Deborah Ramirez – deserve. This report shows that the supplemental background investigation was a sham, controlled by the Trump White House, to give political cover to Senate Republicans and put Justice Kavanaugh back on the political track to confirmation.”

Dr. Ford was Kanvanaugh’s main accuser. She had confidentially told her Congresswoman, U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and later, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who was the Ranking Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, that in high school Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. A lie detector test administered by a former FBI agent found Dr. Ford to be truthful.

Senator Whitehouse’s report finds:

“The FBI’s supplemental background investigation concluded on October 4. Despite credible allegations from two different women, hundreds of witness leads and tips the FBI received, and the high stakes of a life-tenured Supreme Court nomination, the FBI ultimately interviewed only ten people.”

“The supplemental background investigation was completely controlled by the Trump White House. The FBI was never given ‘free rein’ to conduct a thorough, complete investigation. Statements to the contrary from former President Trump and White House and Department of Justice officials were false.”

“The investigation was directed by the Trump White House to pursue only first-hand evidence and not corroborating evidence. Senate Republicans then cited the absence of corroborating evidence to justify confirming Kavanaugh.”

Pointing to this “absence of corroborating evidence,” The Washington Post reports it “was cited by senators as they narrowly voted to confirm Kavanaugh, marking a major triumph for the conservative movement and locking in a right-leaning majority that would later overturn the constitutional right to abortion.”

But among the most-damning facts Senator Whitehouse’s report reveals is the “FBI’s public ‘tip line’ investigation was a fake. No tip was ever investigated; Kavanaugh-related tips were delivered straight to the Trump White House without FBI investigation. Indeed, the Trump White House could have used tip line information to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory evidence.”

That fact was confirmed and made public in 2022 during sworn Senate testimony by FBI Director Chris Wray to Senator Whitehouse, on which NCRM reported at the time (video below).

“So when it comes to the tip line, we wanted to make sure that the White House had all the information we had, so when the hundreds of calls started coming in, we gathered those up, reviewed them and provided them to the White House —” Director Wray said.

“Without investigation,” Sen. Whitehouse interjected.

“We reviewed them and then provided them —” Wray replied.

“You reviewed them for purposes of separating from tipline traffic, but did not further investigate the ones that related to Kavanaugh, correct?” Sen. Whitehouse asked.

“Uh, correct,” Wray responded.

Professor of law, MSNBC/NBC News legal analyst, and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance responded to news of Tuesday’s report: “A different FBI Director might have resigned in protest: The report found messages to the FBI tip line regarding Kavanaugh were forwarded to the WH & never probed.”

The Post notes that at the time, Trump “vowed that the FBI would have ‘free rein’ to vet the claims. Trump said the FBI was ‘talking to everybody’ and added on social media: ‘I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion.'”

That apparently was a lie.

The Post reports, “the White House never authorized the agency to independently probe the sexual misconduct allegations.”

In fact, the FBI never interviewed Dr. Ford or Brett Kavanaugh, who at the time of his nomination to the Supreme Court was a federal appeals court judge, as part of its supplemental investigation.

Sen. Whitehouse’s report also reveals there did not seem to be anyone at the FBI actually working on the investigation.

“Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee also individually contacted the FBI to provide names of people with potentially corroborating or otherwise relevant information who had reached out after trying—but failing—to get in touch with FBI investigators. Some of these individuals, including Max Stier, a college classmate of Kavanaugh’s, contacted Senator Coons after they had ‘difficulty reaching anyone’ at the FBI who would ‘collect their information.’ Senator Coons wrote directly to Director Wray to request ‘appropriate follow up’ with Stier in particular. Ultimately, many people were referred or resorted to the agency’s online and telephonic ‘tip line,’ which did not result in any follow-up from the FBI.”

After Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing but before the vote that would end up placing him on the Supreme Court, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported, “Kavanaugh may have lied to the Senate, pretty extensively, in order to obtain the currency that he already has on a federal appeals court.”

===

an 11 23

conspiracy theorists have a long history of using terms like "inside job" and "false flag" to describe tragic events, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre of 2012 (which Infowars' Alex Jones claimed was really a conspiracy against gunowners). The January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building has been a major focus of conspiracy theorists as well —including Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana), who claimed, without evidence, that the FBI helped engineer that attack during a House Homeland Security Committee meeting on Wednesday, November 15.

Questioning FBI Director Christopher Wray, the far-right MAGA congressman claimed there is a "tremendous amount of evidence" of FBI involvement. And Higgins pushed Wray for details on the FBI's "confidential human sources at the Stop the Steal rally on January 6 here in D.C."

Wray told Higgins, "If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and/or agents, the answer is emphatically not."

Higgins, however, continue to push the conspiracy theory that FBI agents encouraged the January 6, 2021 attack. And he claimed that "ghost busses" full of FBI informants went to Washington, D.C. that day to cause problems.

When Wray said he was unfamiliar with the term "ghost busses," Higgins replied, "It's a vehicle that's used for secret purposes."

The MAGA congressman told the Homeland Security Committee, "This is a very significant hearing, Mr. Chairman. And these busses are nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters deployed onto our Capitol on January 6. And your day is coming, Mr. Wray."

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Bannon’s “War Room” is the media home of Project 2025 and Trump’s retribution plans

Bannon’s show is a staging ground for Trump’s plans to gut the civil service and normalize deploying the military against civilians

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES

PUBLISHED 11/09/23

The podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is the media home of a sprawling right-wing effort, known as Project 2025, that’s designed to prepare policy papers and staffing assignments should a Republican win the presidency in next year’s election.

Bannon’s show, War Room, is a hub of election denialism, anti-immigrant bigotry, and promises to carry out retribution against insufficiently loyal Republicans — all hallmarks of former President Donald Trump’s first term in office and his campaign to retake the White House. Although Bannon has at times found himself isolated from Trump, he is once again “one of Trump’s most important advisers,” according to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.

As a leading advocate for the MAGA wing of the conservative movement, Bannon has been a champion of Project 2025, organized by the increasingly far-right think tank The Heritage Foundation. The initiative has brought together more than 80 groups to provide hard-right personnel and white paper proposals for Trump — or another Republican administration — should he win next November.

According to The Washington Post, Trump and his allies at Project 2025 “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”

From his perch at War Room, Bannon has sought to normalize all of those ideas: deploying the military against protesters, weaponizing the Department of Justice against critics, and replacing the federal civil service with loyalist reactionaries.

Jeffrey Clark, who Trump attempted to install as acting attorney general in January 2021, has been on War Room several times this year and is also reportedly “leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025,” according to the Post. A Heritage spokesperson told the Post that “there are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”

Heritage’s denial notwithstanding, Clark — who is widely believed to be an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment against Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election — has a record of supporting the use of the military to quash dissent. In July, Clark appeared on War Room to explain how he had advocated for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the July 3, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“I was actually summoned up to a meeting, you know, to discuss how to proceed in terms of that — what I would call an insurrection, because it was happening night after night,” Clark recalled to Bannon.

“Remember that [former Attorney General William] Barr is the one who had participated, when he was attorney general, in using the Insurrection Act against the L.A. riots, after the Rodney King case,” Clark said. “Why wasn’t that same aggressiveness used against the riots that were all across the country in the summer of 2020?”

Referring to a memo he’d written to Barr that included “some very creative ideas about how to enforce the law against those rioters,” Clark added, “If you want to see the legal advice I gave, it’s all blacked out,” strongly suggesting he’d supported deploying the military against civilian protesters.

The next month, Smith indicted Trump for his actions to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Clark was reportedly referred to in the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirator 4,” and is alleged to have suggested Trump use the military against civilians. On January 3, 2021, White House Council Patrick Philbin told Clark — who had just accepted the job of acting attorney general — that if the Trump-Clark coup plans went forward, “there would be riots in every major city in the United States."

“Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark responded.

In the Bannon interview from July, Clark also rejected the conventional wisdom that the Department of Justice is — or should be — independent from political pressure from the White House. In Clark’s telling, the DOJ shouldn’t be walled off, as it has been by most presidents following Richard Nixon’s targeting of his enemies during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the July 3, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Past administrations put in “post-Watergate ‘norms’ that say the president actually can’t make decisions about law enforcement,” Clark said. “It’s ridiculous, it’s unconstitutional, and the reason why they’re having a meltdown, Steve, is that the queen position in the administrative state is the Justice Department.”

“To say that the Justice Department is not independent is sort of the ultimate heresy,” Clark added. “This is all just post-Watergate ‘norms.’ Who cares about post-Watergate norms?”

Clark is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank run by Christian nationalist Russ Vought — another major player in Project 2025 and frequent War Room guest. Vought wrote the second chapter of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a combination manifesto and outline detailing how the coalition would approach the next Republican administration. In his chapter, Vought levies a broad critique of career staffers at executive branch departments and agencies, writing that “many agencies are not only too big and powerful, but also increasingly weaponized against the public and a President who is elected by the people and empowered by the Constitution to govern.”

Vought’s argument flows directly from Bannon’s long-running goal of a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In an interview on War Room, Vought advocated for a change to budgeting rules that would allow Congress to target individual government workers, potentially canceling their funding, slashing their salary, or even firing them. He’s also a proponent of using so-called “Schedule F” to reclassify federal employees as at-will workers, an open attack on public unions and career staffers.”

Vought is especially interested in remaking the DOJ into a more explicitly reactionary institution, and his think tank has been clear that its goal is to unleash the FBI against its political enemies. As he told the Post: “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

On November 6, Bannon floated a name for attorney general who would fit the bill: “Jeff Clark, you're on the short list of being attorney general for Trump, and I mean the very short list.” Bannon pitched Clark for the role at least once earlier this year and has suggested disgraced former national security advisor and QAnon adherent Michael Flynn serve as secretary of defense.

Bannon isn’t just engaging in a fantasy football-style draft though — he has interviewed Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, several times this year. Although that’s a long way from installing Flynn as secretary of defense, it’s a sign that Bannon’s personnel preferences shouldn’t be dismissed simply as the rantings of a crank.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the June 16, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“Let me just say to the [War Room] posse: The posse has landed at Heritage, and, you know, I really respect what your program does,” Dans gushed during an appearance in June. “I’ve been a devotee since 2020.”

Dans added, with a hat tip to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “He brought me in in April. I started playing the War Room in May. We learned the word ‘based,’ and it's been spreading around the building. But we’re really taking over and infusing America First throughout the whole movement.”

Dans was back on the show in September with a promise to decimate the federal civil service by firing thousands of workers. “With 2025, we’re going to flood the zone,” Dans said, “It’s going to be more than 3,000 people.”

“Schedule F is one of our tools, but really the proposition of Schedule F is just saying: Look, when you come into the office, federal worker, each morning, and you’re in charge of policy, you’re not guaranteed your job when you walk out that afternoon,” Dans continued, “You have to perform. You’re going to become an at-will employee like the rest of us in real life, you know? Let’s make it look a lot more like America."

“Amen,” Bannon repeated as Dans spoke.

According to the Post, one of the top goals of another Trump administration and Project 2025 is investigating “onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former Attorney General William P. Barr.” War Room frequently indulges in these impulses.

On June 12, Bannon baselessly argued that FBI director Christopher Wray and former Attorney General Bill Barr had suppressed evidence that proved Joe Biden and his family had committed financial crimes, thereby installing him in the presidency as the result of an illegitimate election.

“You are freaking guilty of treason,” Bannon said, addressing an imaginary Barr.

Back in January, former Trump advisor and right-wing pundit Sebastian Gorka went after Kelly on War Room. “You are an insult to Quantico,” Gorka said, referring to the Marine base. “You were never a Marine.”

“Go to hell, John Kelly,” he concluded.

“Wow,” Bannon responded.

---

no lnx

usatoday

FBI Director Christopher Wray tangles with House GOP in tense hearing. What you missed

Democrats argued Republicans were defending Donald Trump after an FBI search led to federal charges.

Bart Jansen

USA TODAY

Wray highlighted thousands of investigations into Chinese attempts to steal U.S. secrets.

Wray also focused on fighting violent crime and drug trafficking.

Republicans and Democrats warned they might not reauthorize a surveillance law because of concerns about illegitimate FBI queries.

WASHINGTON – FBI Director Christopher Wray defended the agency Wednesday against House Republicans who argued it suppressed conservative posts on social media and for running what they called illegal searches about U.S. citizens under a foreign surveillance law.

The hearing became the latest flashpoint for the FBI, which Republicans criticized for investigating participants at school board meetings and censoring social media posts. Democrats accused Republicans of trying to protect former President Donald Trump, who faces federal charges related to possession of national security documents after an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago 18 months after he left the White House. The White House says Republicans are attacking law enforcement.

In his opening salvo, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, cited a federal court decision in Louisiana DOUGHTY eight days earlier that found the government suppressed First Amendment rights of people posting on social media posts about the COVID-19 pandemic vaccines and mask requirements under a policy the ruling compared to an “Orwellian ministry of truth.”

The ruling found the FBI failed to alert social media companies that a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was real rather than Russian disinformation days before the 2020 presidential election. Jordan and Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., said that deprived millions of voters of information before the election.

“When the court said the FBI misled, that’s a nice way of saying they lied,” Jordan said.

Wray said he has reviewed the decision and the FBI would comply with the court’s prohibition against influencing social media companies. But he declined to comment further, he said, because the case is subject to further litigation.

“Our focus is on malign, foreign disinformation – that is, foreign malign information, that is foreign hostile actors who engage in covert actions to confuse our social media platforms,” Wray said. “The FBI is not in the business of moderating content or causing any social media company to suppress or censor.”

Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI, testifies in front of the House Judiciary Committee in Washington on July 12, 2023.

GOP vows to oppose extension of intelligence surveillance policy

Jordan said Republicans and possibly Democrats would oppose the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is scheduled to expire at the end of the year, because of 204,000 episodes of “illegal scrutiny” of U.S. citizens.

"The FBI has broken so bad that people can go and engage in queries that when you come before the Congress to answer questions, you're blissfully ignorant," Gaetz said. "The court has smacked you down, ruling FBI personnel apparently conducted queries for improper personal reasons."

Wray said staffers had been disciplined for improper queries, but he couldn't go into details.

Wray’s prepared statement said he is concerned about “profound risks” with proposals to require either a search warrant or court order before conducting a “U.S. person query” under Section 702 of the act. Wray said such a change would become a ban because applications either wouldn’t meet court standards or would take too long.

“That would be a body blow to the FBI, which relies on this longstanding, lawful capability to rapidly uncover previously hidden threats and connections, and to take swift steps to protect the homeland when needed,” Wray said.

Democrats have also questioned extending Section 702 without changes, said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. “The committee will need to look into warrant requirements," Lofgren said.

“We have bipartisan support around the concerns we have about FISA reauthorization, and unless we really understand what measures the FBI is taking to ensure that people’s privacy is protected, I think it’s going to be a very difficult reauthorization process,” added Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.

Wray agrees with Durham report on FBI missteps in Russia investigation

Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI, testifies in front of the House Judiciary Committee in Washington on Wednesday, July 12, 2023.

A rare point of agreement arose in a discussion of former special counsel John Durham’s report on the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which was called Crossfire Hurricane.

Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., questioned why the FBI failed to consider information beneficial to suspects during Crossfire Hurricane. Cline also questioned whether the FBI abused its authority under the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

“The American people are outraged” about agents who undermined the FBI’s reputation, Cline said.

The FBI adopted dozens of changes after a scathing inspector general’s report about Crossfire Hurricane, which occurred before Wray became director in August 2017. Durham didn't recommend additional wholesale changes.

“Certainly there were violations that were totally unacceptable and in my view cannot be allowed to happen again,” Wray said.

Cline also criticized the FBI’s warrantless queries on 3.4 million Americans in 2021 and 200,000 last year.

“It looks like a framework that enables the FBI to spy on countless Americans,” Cline said.

Wray: Accusation he's against conservatives is 'insane'

Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., called the Durham report and Russia investigation evidence of an unfair justice system and asked Wray how he would reform law enforcement.

“The American people fully understand that there is a two-tiered justice system that has been weaponized to persecute people based on their political beliefs and that you have personally worked to weaponize the FBI against conservatives,” Hageman said.

Wray disagreed with her description, but said the FBI already adopted changes such as a new leadership team and by removing people from the chain of command.

“The idea that I am biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me given my own personal background,” Wray said.

Jordan proposes to reduce FBI funding

Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI, testifies in front of the House Judiciary Committee in Washington on Wednesday, July 12, 2023.

On Tuesday, Jordan recommended slashing the agency’s funding, including money for a proposed new headquarters building in the D.C. region. He also proposed to thwart Biden administration immigration policies, gun regulations and what he called abusive law enforcement. Any spending changes would eventually be negotiated with Senate Democrats.

“The Committee and Select Subcommittee have received startling testimony about egregious abuses, misallocation of federal law-enforcement resources, and misconduct within the leadership ranks of the FBI,” Jordan said in a letter to Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger, R-Texas.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., noted that some Republican House members have called for defunding and dismantling the FBI. Lieu asked Wray what that would mean.

“We would have hundreds more violent criminals out on the street, dozens more violent gangs terrorizing communities, hundreds more child predators on the loose, hundreds more kids left at those predators’ mercy instead of being rescued, scores of threats from the Chinese community party being left unaddressed,” Wray said.

White House: House GOP attacking law enforcement

White House spokesman Ian Sams said “extreme House Republicans" have decided to attack law enforcement rather than support the FBI.

“Instead of attacking federal law enforcement for political purposes, House Republicans should join President Biden to stand up for law enforcement and put the rule of law and the safety and security of the American people ahead of themselves.”

Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) prepares to gavel in the committee before Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI, testifies in front of the House Judiciary Committee in Washington on Wednesday, July 12, 2023

The top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, accused Republicans of trying to protect Trump for his campaign in 2024 and called the hearing "little more than performance art.”

House Republicans questioned Wray's priorities in investigating the Biden administration.

Gaetz asked Wray point blank whether he was protecting the Bidens, which Wray denied. "Absolutely not," said Wray, who was appointed by Trump.

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/12/fbi-director-christopher-wray-testifies-house-judiciary-committee

GUK NO LNX FEW

House Republicans grill FBI director as Democrats deride attacks on agency

Hearing comes as Republicans have accused FBI and DoJ of political bias in investigations of Trump and Biden’s son

US politics – live updates

Joan E Greve in Washington

@joanegreve

Wed 12 Jul 2023

House Republicans grilled the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Wray, at a frequently contentious committee hearing on Wednesday. While Republicans accused the FBI of political bias in its handling of investigations into Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, Democrats derided the attacks on the bureau as a smokescreen driven by conspiracy theories.

The Republican chair of the House judiciary committee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, kicked off the hearing with a litany of complaints about the FBI’s alleged targeting of rightwing leaders and activists, lamenting the supposed “double standard that exists now in our justice system”. Jordan suggested that the allegedly misguided leadership of Wray, a Trump appointee, could jeopardize government funding for the FBI’s planned new headquarters.

Some members of the House Freedom Caucus holding a press conference on Capitol Hill in 2021.

Former House Republicans and DoJ veterans lambast efforts to curb FBI and justice department

“I hope [Democrats] will work with us in the appropriations process to stop the weaponization of the government against the American people,” Jordan said in his opening statement.

The top Democrat on the committee, Representative Jerry Nadler of New York, countered Jordan’s allegations by accusing Republicans of acting as Trump’s attack dog at the expense of Americans’ safety. Last month, Trump was indicted on 37 federal counts, including 31 violations of the Espionage Act, over allegations that he intentionally withheld classified documents from federal authorities.

“Republicans may want to downplay Trump’s behavior and blame the FBI for his downfall. But no matter what they say, Trump risked the safety and security of the United States to remove those documents from the White House, then lied to the government instead of returning them,” Nadler said. “Donald Trump must be held accountable, and attempts to shield him from the consequences of his own actions are both transparent and despicable.”

A White House spokesperson, Ian Sams, echoed that sentiment. “Extreme House Republicans have decided that the only law enforcement they like is law enforcement that suits their own partisan political agenda,” he said. “Instead of backing the blue, they’re attacking the blue – going after the FBI, federal prosecutors and other law enforcement professionals with political stunts to try to get themselves attention on the far right.”

Several progressives on the committee noted their own concerns about the FBI’s methods of surveillance and data collection, particularly of Black Lives Matter protesters, and they assailed Republicans for focusing so much of their energy on defending Trump rather than on fortifying Americans’ civil liberties.

“These are the real oversight issues. They matter to my district, where there is real and justified skepticism of whether the civil rights of Black and brown people are adequately protected,” said RepresentativeCori Bush, a Democrat of Missouri. “What my district is not concerned about is the Republican conspiracy theories and selective targeting of law enforcement agencies who try to hold their twice-impeached, twice-indicted cult leader Donald Trump accountable.”

As House Democrats emphasized the need to hold Trump accountable, Republicans’ questioning of Wray repeatedly turned to Hunter Biden. The president’s son reached a deal with federal prosecutors last month to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges while entering a pre-trial diversion agreement on a separate felony gun charge. The deal, which will result in the dismissal of the gun charge if Hunter Biden meets certain conditions, will allow the president’s son to avoid jail time.

Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican of Florida, asked Wray whether he was “protecting the Bidens” from criminal liability. “Absolutely not,” Wray replied. “The FBI does not, has no interest in protecting anyone politically.”

Representative Chip Roy, a Republican of Texas, later derided the FBI as “tyrannical” over the 2020 arrest of anti-abortion activist Mark Houck, claiming the bureau’s agents “stormed” Houck’s house.

“I could not disagree more with your description of the FBI as tyrannical,” Wray said. “They did not storm his house. They came to his door. They knocked on his door and identified themselves. They asked him to exit. He did without incident.”

Wray’s status as a registered Republican who was appointed by Trump and served in the George W Bush administration did not prevent committee members from painting the FBI as an unjust agency on a crusade against rightwing priorities.

“The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” Wray told the committee.

Although much of the hearing focused on the investigations into Trump and Hunter Biden, Wray made a point to remind lawmakers of the FBI’s extensive efforts to combat violent crime and drug trafficking. Those efforts could be curtailed by the FBI funding cuts threatened by some House Republicans, Democrats warned.

“The work the men and women of the FBI do to protect the American people goes way beyond the one or two investigations that seem to capture all the headlines,” Wray said.

Wray himself has been the subject of many headlines in recent months. In May, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, introduced articles of impeachment against Wray because of his handling of the Hunter Biden investigation, among other matters.

Wray has also recently found himself in the crosshairs of Representative James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee. Last month, Comer threatened to hold Wray in contempt of Congress over his refusal to allow the committee to review a document outlining unsubstantiated bribery allegations against Joe Biden and his son. The contempt vote was ultimately called off after Wray agreed to allow committee members to review a redacted version of the document.

The Wednesday hearing underscored that Wray’s troubles are not going away anytime soon.

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msn spreads

Washington Examiner

Rep. Chip Roy spars with FBI Director Wray over 'storming' anti-abortion advocate's house

Story by Heather Hunter

Rep. Chip Roy spars with FBI Director Wray over 'storming' anti-abortion advocate's house

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray in the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday over his bureau's targeting anti-abortion activist Mark Houck in a raid on his home.

“How on earth did Mark Houck end up having the FBI send several armed agents along with local authorities to arrest him at gunpoint?” Roy asked. “Did you approve of that?”

WALL OF WASTE: CAN TRUMP'S SIGNATURE BORDER ISSUE DELIVER HIM A SECOND TERM?

Wray insisted that decisions about "the manner of arrests are not something that the FBI director approves" and was conducted in the FBI's Philadelphia division.

"Do you approve of the raid now in retrospect? Do you think it was appropriate?" the Texas congressman asked.

Wray paused and didn't answer.

Related video: FBI Director Wray faces criticism from House Republicans during testimony (MSNBC)

you see there taking questions on all kinds of topics

MSNBC

FBI Director Wray faces criticism from House Republicans during testimony

it's called the rule of law': Legal experts laud judge's ruling allowing deposition of Donald Trump

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

February 23, 2023

A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump, the ex-president, and FBI Director Chris Wray can both be deposed in sworn testimony in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former senior FBI official Peter Strzok...

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8 22 an

FBI Director Chris Wray admitted in a Senate hearing on Thursday that the FBI forwarded to the White House the hundreds of tips it received about Brett Kavanaugh in the fall of 2018, during his Supreme Court confirmation process, but did not first investigate those tips. Kavanaugh had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by three women, and those accusations threatened to derail his confirmation.

The revelation came as the FBI Director was questioned by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse during a Judiciary Committee hearing, and was forced to admit that the Democratic Senator from Rhode Island was “correct” when he said the FBI “did not further investigate” the tips it received “that related to Kavanaugh” and were forwarded to the White House.

After multiple women accused then-Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct during his confirmation process the Judiciary Committee agreed to temporarily halt its confirmation hearings until a supplemental FBI background investigation could be conducted.

On Thursday Senator Whitehouse asked Wray, “is it true that after Kavanaugh-related tips were separated from other tips, they were forwarded to White House counsel without investigation?”

Wray appeared to try to circumvent the direct question.

“I apologize in advance that it’s been frustrating for you,” Wray began. “We’ve tried to be clear about our process,” he claimed.

Sen. Whitehouse interjected, asking him to just “answer the question.”

“So when it comes to the tip line, we wanted to make sure the White House had all the information we had, so when the hundreds of calls started coming it, we gathered those up, reviewed them and provided them to the White House,” Wray explained before Whitehouse interrupted.

“Without investigation?” he asked, to clarify.

“We reviewed them and then provided them to the White House,” Wray said.

There is no indication the White House was equipped or prepared to investigate the hundreds of tips, something the American public was told the FBI would be doing.

“You reviewed them for the purposes of separating from tip line traffic but did not further investigate the ones that related to Kavanaugh, correct?” Whitehouse asked.

“Correct,” Wray confirmed.

Wray also confirmed, as Whitehouse said, that “the FBI took direction from the White House as to whom the FBI would question.”

“So it is true,” Wray admitted.

There was no confirmation from Wray that any of the tips were investigated.

Reporting on the exchange between Wray and Whitehouse, Esquire’s Charles Pierce wrote, “the second background investigation into Kavanaugh was a White House-directed bag job of no value whatsoever.”

Snopes on Thursday also confirmed that the “administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump directed the one-week, follow-up background investigation of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, according to sworn testimony from U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray.”

The Trump White House, Wray suggested, was in charge of deciding which tips about its own Supreme Court justice nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, the Bureau would be allowed to investigate.

Senator Whitehouse on Twitter later Thursday announced: “Wray confirms: Kavanaugh tips from tip line were sent to Trump White House without investigation; and Trump White House directed what witnesses FBI would interview.”

“The White House has found no corroboration of the allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after examining interview reports from the FBI’s latest probe into the judge’s background,” The Wall Street Journal reported on October 4, 2018.

That report then went to the Senate Judiciary Committee members, who in an 11-10 vote, elected to support the nomination and send it to the full Senate for a vote.

Kavanaugh was confirmed on October 6, 2018, by a 50-48 vote.

There its no indication, based on Director Wray’s remarks Thursday, that the hundreds of tips it received were fully investigated, and there was no discussion of how many, if any, interviews based on those tips were conducted for the supplemental background investigation report on which Kavanaugh’s confirmation was, in part, based.

Watch below or at this link:

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an 11 21

A new report from the Washington Post published on Sunday detailed a deep dive into the extensive warnings the federal government received of potential violence and efforts to interfere with Congress's counting of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6. Despite this ample foreshadowing, the administration and law enforcement agencies were still unable or unwilling to prepare adequate defenses to keep the mob from storming the Capitol that day.

The FBI, in particular, comes off looking inept — if not driven by politically inspired cowardice or indifference.

"The FBI received numerous warnings about Jan. 6 but felt many of the threatening statements were 'aspirational' and could not be pursued," the report found. "In one tip on Dec. 20, a caller told the bureau that Trump supporters were making plans online for violence against lawmakers in Washington,including a threat against Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). The agency concluded the information did not merit further investigation and closed the case within 48 hours."

Donell Harvin, the head of intelligence at the homeland security office in Washington, D.C., did raise the alarm, according to the report. It explained how he "organized an unusual call for all of the nation's regional homeland security offices" — a call joined by hundreds of officials sharing their concerns. They were reportedly warning of an attack on Jan. 6 at 1 p.m. at the U.S. Capitol, just when the insurrection occurred. The planning was happening all over social media, after all — inspired by then-President Donald Trump's own tweets and rhetoric. Harvin reached out to the FBI and other agencies to warn them of what was coming, the report found.

He feared a "mass casualty event," according to the Post.

"While the public may have been surprised by what happened on Jan. 6, the makings of the insurrection had been spotted at every level, from one side of the country to the other," it said. "The red flags were everywhere."

Despite specific warnings of the exact nature of the attack that was coming — the planning of which would certainly be illegal — it appears the FBI limited itself for fear of infringing on First Amendment-protected activity. The Post also suggested that FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was often under fire from Trump, feared angering the man who appointed him by speaking out about the potential for violence.

"The FBI chief wasn't looking for any more confrontations with the president," the Post found, citing current and former law enforcement officials.

Wray remains in his position to this day.

Meanwhile, the Post reported, the Department of Homeland Security did not put out a security bulletin to alert other agencies of the dangers, despite receiving, "sobering assessments of the risk of possible violence on Jan. 6, including that federal buildings could be targeted by protesters."

As has previously been reported, officials in the U.S. Capitol Police were aware of at least some of the danger posed by Trump supporters still angry about the election in the run-up to Jan. 6. These warnings, however, didn't make it to Chief Steven Sund, and he failed to effectively coordinate with the National Guard to get protection for the Capitol. The Capitol Police itself was woefully under-prepared for the assault, as has been widely reported. Sund resigned following the attack, one of the few officials to face real accountability for the failures that led up to that day.

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===

deep state BS recycle eternally vuln?

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) is the latest Republican lawmaker to promote a dangerous conspiracy theory about the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) being involved in the Capitol insurrection.

Biggs echoed the conspiracy that Fox News' Tucker Carlson began pushing last week. At the time, Carlson described members of the FBI as "unindicted co-conspirators," and suggested that some of the rioters could have been working with the federal agency.

Biggs expressed concern over FBI Director Christopher Wray's failure to acknowledge speculation around the FBI's alleged involvement in the Capitol riots. The Republican lawmaker also demanded more insight on the FBI's possible role in the deadly series of events that transpired, according to AZ Central.

On Tuesday, Biggs conducted a radio interview with conservative radio commentator Charlie Kirk where he further discussed the FBI conspiracy theory.

"It truly demands answers," Biggs told Kirk. "It is actually very troublesome to hear what's out there and we need to get to the bottom of that."

He added, "I want to know if there were 20 FBI agents, and they were not there for security for the president, why were they in that crowd?"

At one point, Biggs also attempted to blame the FBI for its so-called failure to stop what transpired.

"There's always been allegations of the media being in there, right?" Biggs continued. "We've seen some evidence of that. But if you have law enforcement that's there that could have stopped, thwarted, whatever, and they didn't? That's a problem. But moreover, Charlie, I mean, think about this: The FBI director said that the vast majority of people there were peaceful — peaceful protesters. They were rowdy, but they were peaceful. Were they infiltrating a peaceful protest? To what end would that be?"

Although Biggs is now calling for further investigation into the Capitol riots, he, like the vast majority of House Republicans, voted against the formation of the Jan. 6 commission to thoroughly investigate the attack.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Bannon faces massive backlash after saying :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{Trump should behead Fauci and the FBI director

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also PO'd at barr

trump plans to fire Gina Haspel, Christopher Wray and Mark Esper immediately if reelected: report

Alex Henderson

October 26, 2020

Although former Vice President Joe Biden has a variety of possible paths to victory on Election Day, President Donald Trump might pull off a narrow Electoral College victory if he performs well in enough swing states — and if Trump does win a second term, according to

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is he ideol entre, pol op? grifter? all? everyone just freelances in their niche and when they score/do some damage to someone's rep, they get paid?! rewarded by clicks? ctt gig? book deal, fox appearance?

is Christie a weak squish target b/c he did not bounce back from covid and told ppl to wear masks?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/steve-bannons-darkest-plot-yet-is-starting-to-implode

alexh

During the final days of President Donald Trump's reelection campaign, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been desperately fighting to remain relevant in Trumpworld. Bannon's ideas for getting Trump reelected range from firing FBI Director Christopher Wray to smearing former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden. And in his desperation, Bannon has even been attacking major Trump allies like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Attorney General William Barr and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Vice's Emanuel Maiberg is reporting that "a series of videos and photos which appear to show Hunter Biden having sex are going viral on a Chinese-language news and video sharing website" co-founded by Bannon. Maiberg notes that "the videos are often narrated by users in English with a Chinese accent, and claim that the explicit photos and videos of Hunter Biden are proof that he's compromised by the Chinese government."

So far, however, efforts by Bannon and Giuliani to smear Hunter Biden haven't made a difference in the presidential election. And even the far-right Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told Axios' Jonathan Swan that the e-mails and videos on a hard drive allegedly belonging to the former vice president's son aren't having an impact. Cruz told Swan, "I don't think it moves a single voter."

Reporter Madeline Peltz describes Bannon's recent attacks on fellow Trump supporters in an article published by Media Matters this week.

"Poor Steve Bannon," Peltz writes. "As the Hunter Biden hard drive story is lowered into the grave of failed October surprises, he's run out of options to insert his 'influence' into the election media cycle. Having failed to recreate his media manipulation successes of 2016, the former White House chief strategist is melting down and attacking his would-be allies."

Peltz notes how obsessed Bannon has been with getting Wray fired as FBI director.On October 25 in Axios, Swan and his colleague Alayna Treene reported that Trump, according to sources, plans to fire Wray as well as CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper if he is reelected. But as Bannon sees it, Trumpworld isn't going after Wray aggressively enough — and he wants to see Wray fired right away, not after the election.

"In the past few days," according to Pentz, Bannon has "lambasted Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Attorney General William Barr and even Donald Trump himself — calling them 'weak' for not pushing for, or bringing about, the immediate firing of FBI Director Christopher Wray."

Trump has clearly been increasing angry with Wray in recent months, stemming from disagreements over multiple issues. Most notably, Trump is outraged that Wray hasn't gone after the president's political enemies, has emphasized the serious threats of right-wing violence and white supremacy, diminished the significance of antifa and left-wing violence, and failed to provide support for Republicans' attacks on the integrity of mail-in voting.

The contents of a hard drive that supposedly belonged to Hunter Biden were first reported by the New York Post, and Bannon and Giuliani collaborated on that story. But Bannon, according to Peltz, has lashed out at Giuliani for not being hard enough on Wray.

"On October 29," Peltz reports, "Bannon attacked Giuliani even though they've been working together to launder the bogus story that first appeared in the New York Post, calling him 'one of the weak guys around' Trump."

In a transcript of that October 29 conversation, according to Peltz, Bannon declared, "Wray must be fired this morning" — and Giuliani agreed with firing Wray, but not until after the election. Bannon, in response, told Giuliani, "You're one of the weak guys around him. You're getting weak on me, Rudy. No, you're weak. You sort of sound like Chris; you spent too much time with Chris Christie. You're getting weak."

Bannon also slammed Barr as "another weak link in this chain."

In an October 29 broadcast of "War Room," Bannon ranted against Wray as well as Trump allies who he believes haven't done enough to get him fired.

"Fire him today," Bannon declared. "Do not wait. You show weakness — the president is showing weakness by waiting. There's not one person in this country, not one voter that will not vote for you by firing Wray. And don't let theweakpeople around you convince you of that.Be strong, be who you are, be what your presidency is about."

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-did-it-again-the-same-blackmail-scheme-that-got-him-impeached/

Back thousands of years ago, in February of 2020,Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a "moderate" Republican, justified her vote to acquitDonald Trump at his impeachment trial — despite the mountains of evidence of guilt — by claiming that Trump had learned his lesson.

"I believe that the president has learned from this case," Collins told CBS news anchor Norah O'Donnell at the time. "The president has been impeached — that's a pretty big lesson."

That excuse was preposterous at the time, making it sound like Trump was a child who had his hand in the cookie jar, not a 73-year-old man caught abusing his powers of office to blackmail the Ukrainian president into propping up conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. But it was also hilariously predictable that Trump, who is incapable of learning or growing as a person, would absorb any moral lessons from being impeached.

Trump didn't learn anything. In fact, he's only escalated the very same botched conspiracy that got him impeached, only this time around he's abusing his power on the home front, instead of in a distant nation most Americans couldn't find on a map.

Truth told, Trump demonstrated his failure to learn within days of his acquittal, first by bragging about it and then pivoting to lying about the Democrats. Since then, he's gone right back to abusing his power to fabricate lies about his opponent. He and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — along with Giuliani's buddy Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator with ties to Russian intelligence — eventually returned to the very scheme that got Trump impeached in the first place: am attempt to counterfeit evidence that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, had somehow dragged his father into a corrupt scheme. It's a claim with literally no evidence to support it, no matter how much Trump and Giuliani repeat the accusation.

On Wednesday evening, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump has threatened to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray — who, lest we forget, was appointed by Trump after the firing of James Comey — unless Wray announces a phony investigation into Biden that Trump can use as last-minute ammunition in the presidential campaign.

"Trump wants official action similar to the announcement made 11 days before the last presidential election by then-FBI Director James B. Comey," Barrett and Dawsey write, referring to Comey's infamous announcement that "he had reopened an investigation into [Hillary] Clinton's use of a private email serverwhile she was secretary of state after potential new evidence had been discovered."

That investigation resulted in no damning information about Clinton, which was entirely predictable. Clinton had been thoroughly investigated for years without a speck of meaningful dirt turned up on her. But that announcement did help turn an election Clinton should have won to Trump's favor: It caused a surge of undecided votersto break for Trump at the last minute, allowing him to win several important swing states by razor-thin margins.

So there's one thing Trump was capable of learning: The value of fake scandals to distract from serious issues, such as his own corruption and incompetence. And he's hoping for a repeat, which is why he's pressuring Wray to pull a Comey against Biden.

But in doing so — and in "considering" whether to fire Wray if he doesn't — Trump is doing the exact same thing that got him impeached: Pressuring a government official to announce a phony investigation into his opponent, and threatening to use the powers of his office to punish that person if they don't comply. This time Trump is targeting a Senate-confirmed official who leads a federal law enforcement agency rather than a foreign leader.

For those who have grown hazy on the details of Trump's impeachment — which is understandable, since there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of Trump-caused crises since then — a quick recap: In the summer of 2019, Trump called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and told him that the U.S. would withhold military aid (which had been authorized by Congress) unless Zelensky did Trump "a favor." That favor was to announce an "investigation" into Biden aimed at propping up the convoluted conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden, a Ukrainian gas company and a fired Ukrainian prosecutor that Giuliani and Trump were trying to push into the mainstream media.

Zelensky clearly felt uneasy participating in a scheme to smear an innocent man's reputation, but Ukraine desperately needed the military aid to fight Russian aggression. Luckily for Zelensky, he was spared from this blackmail scheme by a whistleblower and Trump's eventual impeachment for abusing his office.

Now Trump is doing to Wray what he did to Zelensky. The only difference is that Trump's leverage in this case is limited: He can dismiss the FBI director at any time, having already done so once, but that's about it. With Zelensky, Trump's threats carried a lot more weight.

Either way, the basic story is the same: Trump is demanding that a government official abuse his powers and launch a completely phony investigation based on made-up charges, for Trump's political benefit. In fact, Trump has reportedly made similar threats about Attorney General Bill Barr, because the Justice Department's bogus special-counsel investigation of the Russia investigation evidently hasn't turned up anything Trump can use to bolster his conspiracy theories about the Democrats. (If Barr, the most dogged and ruthless of Trump's sycophants, is in trouble, things in the White House are getting really bad.)

There's a word for all this: Blackmail.

Unfortunately, the media coverage about the attacks on Wray (and on Barr) or about the latest ridiculous wrinkles in Rudy Giuliani's harebrained schemes all too often fails to provide the necessary context. It doesn't remind readers that none of this is new, and that in fact all these developments are part of the same conspiracy that got Trump impeached. The Washington Post article on the threats against Wray fails to use the word "impeachment" or to mention that Trump is treating Wray exactly as he treated Zelensky. And although mainstream media has emphasized the most important aspects of Giuliani's efforts to smear Biden — that Giuliani is not credible and is believed by U.S. intelligence to be spreading Russian disinformation — most articles don't explain that Giuliani is still working the same plot that got his celebrity client (quite likely his only client) impeached.

It's as if G. Gordon Liddy kept burglarizing various Democratic offices after the Watergate break-in, but the reporting on his later crimes failed to mention the first one.Our national situation is an ongoing catastrophe, no doubt. But is it really too much to expect journalists to explain that Trump keeps on doing the very thing he was impeached for doing?

Either way, the situation shows that Trump, despite all his chaotic crazy-uncle ranting, doesn't actually have a lot of tricks in his bag. The only thing he knows how to do is cheat — and the only way he knows how to cheat is by threatening and blackmailing other people to do the work for him. Without that, he's got nothing.

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an 1020 odd not a presser w/ ratcliffe proud b email

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-mulls-over-firing-fbi-director-after-election-as-his-patience-wanes-with-barr-wray/

1020 an

Trump’s inner circle ‘furious’ with FBI’s Wray for undercutting Biden smear: report

===

9/24/20

trump’s own FBI director just shot down his bogus theories about mass voter fraud

Alex Henderson

While Democrats are encouraging voting by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump continues to attack the process and vehemently insists, without evidence, that mail-in voting encourages voter…

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an 920

White House preparing shortlist to replace FBI Director Wray after he testified on Russian election interference: report

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 20, 2020

The White House is preparing a list of names for President Donald Trump to use as it prepares to replace FBI Director Christopher Wray, just one day after he testified before Congress…

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/democrats-warn-the-fbi-that-a-gop-senator-is-laundering-a-foreign-operation-to-attack-biden-report/

On Monday, Politico reported that Democratic congressional leaders have sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding a briefing on foreign efforts to target members of Congress as part of an influence campaign.

“Among the Democrats’ concerns is that a Senate investigation being led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has become a vehicle for ‘laundering’ a foreign influence campaign to damage Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the demand,” reported Natasha Bertrand. “Though the letter did not mention the Johnson investigation, it included a classified addendum that the two sources say identified the probe as one of the sources of their concern.”

The letter was signed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA).

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, opened the investigation ostensibly to audit the origins of the Russia investigation in the previous administration. But even some Republicans have raised concerns that the overly political nature of the probe will backfire on them.

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barr trump need bogeyman/threat to justify cop violence

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-barr-and-trump-desperately-want-to-blame-antifa-for-violence-but-theyre-coming-up-dry-so-far/

no lnx alex h

President Donald Trump has turned his wrath on Antifa during the George Floyd protests, demanding Antifa be labeled a terrorist organization and accusing the movement of committing acts of violence at demonstrations. But journalists William Bredderman and Spencer Ackerman, in the Daily Beast, threw cold this week on efforts to blame the leftist group.

They found that “none of the 22 criminal complaints representing the first wave of protest charges mention Antifa in any way.”

Calling Antifa a “terrorist organization” is problematic in more than one respect. First, Antifa doesn’t begin to fit the traditional definition of terrorism and doesn’t target innocent bystanders the way that actual terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan have done. Second, Antifa isn’t an organization, but a decentralized movement and collection of tactics.

Bredderman and Ackerman discuss the ideologies of defendants in the protest cases, noting that they range from “anarchism” to the far-right Boogaloo movement — and that none of the charges mention anti-fascism (which is what Antifa stands for). According to retired FBI special agent Mike German, “What it definitely demonstrates is that anti-fascism is not a driving force in the current protest violence.”

Nonetheless, Attorney General William Barr has joined Trump in blaming Antifa for violence at demonstrations. At a press conference on Thursday, Barr told reporters, “We have evidence that Antifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions, have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity.”

Bredderman and Ackerman note some reasons why Trump and Barr’s claims about Antifa are so misleading.

“Despite Trump’s rhetoric about designating Antifa a terrorist organization, Antifa is an ethic rather than an actual group — and even if it were a group, there is no domestic terrorism statute for designating a non-foreign entity as a banned terrorist organization,” Bredderman and Ackerman note. “That’s not stopped a chorus of right-wing voices from fantasizing about state violence against ant-fascist Americans.”

For example, the Beast journalists point out, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted, “Let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.”

Tom Cotton

@TomCottonAR

US Senate candidate, AR

Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.

If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.

We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.

137K

6:29 AM - Jun 1, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

69.9K people are talking about this

Far-right fear-mongering around Antifa is nothing new.In November 2017, FBI Director Christopher Wray was asked if the FBI was doing anything to counteract Antifa; Wray responded, “We’re not investigating Antifa as Antifa – that’s an ideology, and we don’t investigate ideologies.”

According to German, Trump and Barr are badly misinformed where Antifa is concerned.

“Typically, when we’re talking about Antifa — which doesn’t exist as a group in the way the president imagines — it would make it difficult to associate somebody with a group that doesn’t exist as an organization,” German explained. “They’re imagining something that isn’t real.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/right-wing-media-demand-trump-fire-fbi-director-christopher-wray

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/senate-republicans-defend-fbi-director-wray-against-trumps-angry-attacks-i-think-hes-excellent/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trumps-fbi-director-sharply-breaks-with-the-president-as-new-fissures-erupt-in-the-justice-department

no lnx

Trump’s FBI director sharply breaks with the president as new fissures erupt in the Justice Department

Written by Cody Fenwick December 10, 2019

FBI Director Christopher Wray — who was installed in his position after President Donald Trump fired James Comey, the event that launched Robert Mueller’s investigation — sharply broke with the White House and Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday over the new inspector general report.

Michael Horowitz, the IG for the Department of Justice, released the conclusions of his investigation into the opening of the 2016 investigation of the Trump campaign and its ties to Russia, which eventually became the Mueller probe. Horowitz found many errors and questionable decisions by people working on the case, but he fundamentally determined that it was adequately predicated and that it was not started based on political motivations or because of bias.

The idea that the whole thing was a witch hunt to get Trump — or even “treason,” in the president’s words — has been aggressively pushed by the White House and its defenders, Barr, too, has pushed this line, even if he uses less provocative language. And on Monday, Barr announced that he disagreed with Horowtiz’s conclusion that opening the investigation was justified. Even more startling was that U.S. Attorney John Durham, who Barr has tasked with conducting a criminal investigation of the origins of the Russia probe, announced that his investigation gave him reason to disagree with Horowitz’s conclusions — an announcement that is highly irregular and suspicious in the middle of an investigation.

Wray, on the other hand, backed up Horowitz in an interview and defended the bureau.

Asked what the biggest takeaway from the report was, Wray said: “The inspector general did not find political bias or improper motivations impacting the opening of the investigation or the decision to use certain investigative tools during the investigations … including FISA.”

He emphasized, in stark contrast to Barr and Durham, that the FBI “fully accept[s]” the results of the IG’s report.

Wray acknowledged, though, that Horowitz found many ways in which FBI staff “fell short of the standard of conduct and performance that we, and that I as director, expect from our employees.” He also ordered “over 40 corrective actions to” address the problems uncovered.

So the IG report has apparently split key officials in the Justice Department — Wray and Horowitz coming out against the president’s conspiracy theories, and Barr and Durham supporting them.

Betsy Woodruff, a Daily Beast journalist, reported last week when news broke that Barr was going to dissent from Horowitz’s conclusions that the attorney general “caused a lot of concern” for officials within the Justice Department.

“The notion that Bill Barr would believe there may not have been proper predication — which is legalese ‘a good enough reason’ — to start the Russia investigation is something that’s really disturbing to Justice Department prosecutors because they make decisions every day about what they need to know in order to get a criminal investigation started,” she said, citing an anonymous current official. “And it’s obvious to basically all of them that the FBI’s intercepts of Russian spies reaching out to Carter Page, who had advised the Trump campaign was the proper-est predication you could get!”

She also said her source claimed there’s a “yearning” in the department for the era of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions because political interference has spun out of control under Barr.

Wray himself has previously split with the president and the attorney general before, criticizing the attacks on the Mueller investigation and disputing Barr’s claim that the Trump campaign was “spied” on. But despite predictions that Wray might be risking his job then, he has persisted. It’s not clear if he’s endangering his position now.

The fact that Trump seems to have a solid grip on Barr and Durham, though, remains deeply worrying regardless of what happens to Barr — indicating that the Justice Department is now corrupted with exactly the improper political influence that the president claims was turned against him in 2016.

Watch the clip of Wray below:

BREAKING: FBI Dir. Chris Wray “The inspector general did not find political bias or improper motivations impacting the opening” of Russia probe, “or the decision to use certain investigative tools.”@PierreTABC: “Included FISA?”

Wray: “Including FISA.” https://t.co/Xl47zHIj6X pic.twitter.com/tKxYqXbvTU

— ABC News (@ABC) December 9, 2019

Cody Fenwick is a senior editor at AlterNet. He writes about politics, media and science. Follow him on Twitter @codytfenwick.

---

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/trumps-fbi-director-pick-made-his-living-defending-shady-businessmen-just

...Wray, earned $9.2 million last year representing Credit Suisse (see below regarding laundering terrorist money), Wells Fargo and Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor. Reuters obtained Wray’s disclosure. Wray is expected to get even more money when he cashes in his partnership interest in King & Spaulding, the Atlanta-based law firm where he has devoted most of his career to representing top drawer white collar criminal suspects and defendants, not pursuing them.

Questions Senators Should Ask

Issues that we think our Senators should examine include:

Wray’s Russian client conflicts deserve scrutiny considering Trump’s own Russian connections. As a lawyer at King & Spaulding, the giant Atlanta-based law firm that has been Wray’s home base since the 1990s, he represented Russian companies Gazprom and Rosneft. The Guardian discovered that in January Wray deleted a Russia-related line from his King & Spaulding website bio. The deleted language stated that Wray had represented unnamed American “energy company executive in a criminal investigation by Russian authorities.” Why did Wray remove that line?
Wray’s long-standing defense work for big-ticket white collar criminals,banksters and fraudsters, especially during the period from 2005 to 2017 after he left the Justice Department and rejoined King & Spaulding. Virtually every Justice Department criminal lawyer who moves in and out of the private sector is vulnerable to this “revolving door” criticism. Wray’s choice of clients, however, is especially troubling.
Wray’s representation of Credit Suisse in money laundering involving Iran, a major sponsor of terrorist organizations.
What was his role in approving the Bush-era rules for interrogating so-called “non-combatants” and the gathering of metadata on domestic communications by the National Security Agency?
Wray’s involvement in the legal vetting and management of Bush-era interrogation and imprisonment programs while he was a senior Justice Department official from May 2001 to February 2005, especially after he became acting Assistant Attorney General in February 2003, in charge of the Criminal Division.
Wray’s “less-than-truthful” answers—according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)—to the Senate Judiciary’s questions back in 2004? These include questions about the murder of a detainee held by the Central Intelligence Agency. Wray testified that he learned of this from news reports, but documents show he was officially informed long before the news broke.
What of his role as one of those overseeing the Enron Task Force, which has been criticized for prosecutorial excesses, resulting in premature “victories” that were reversed on appeal.
What of Wray’s role in Bridgegate, in which Wray was a defense attorney and “chief custodian of missing cell phones” for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whose administration closed George Washington Bridge traffic lanes to punish a mayor who did not support Christie’s election to a second term. Wray’s relationship Christie dates to the early 2000s, when Christie got himself appointed US attorney by becoming a big bundler of campaign contributions for George W. Bush in New Jersey.
...

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/us/politics/christopher-wray-fbi-director.html?_r=0

Trump on Wednesday announced that he had selected Christopher A. Wray to be his F.B.I. director, turning to a former federal prosecutor who recently defended Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in the so-called Bridgegate scandal to lead an agency under a harsh political spotlight.

The president revealed his decision in an early-morning tweet without alerting members of Congress in advance. It came on the eve of a blockbuster congressional hearing scheduled for Thursday in which James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he ousted abruptly last month, was to testify about what he interpreted as improper attempts by Mr. Trump to pressure him.

Hours after the Twitter post, the White House followed up with an official statement in which Mr. Trump called Mr. Wray “an impeccably qualified individual,” citing his role in major fraud investigations and antiterrorism efforts at the Justice Department after the 9/11 attacks.

“I know that he will again serve his country as a fierce guardian of the law and model of integrity once the Senate confirms him to lead the F.B.I.,” Mr. Trump said in the statement.

Continue reading the main story

Continue reading the main storThe selection may have been an attempt to inject credibility into an investigation of his campaign’s possible ties with Russia, one that has been rocked by accusations of presidential tampering.

Mr. Wray is a safe, mainstream pick from a president who at one point was considering politicians for a job that has historically been kept outside of partisanship. A former assistant attorney general overseeing the Justice Department’s criminal division under President George W. Bush, Mr. Wray is likely to allay the fears of F.B.I. agents who worried that Mr. Trump would try to weaken or politicize the F.B.I.

“Christopher Wray knows the Justice Department, is not a politician, and has a background in federal law enforcement,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement, calling those his “minimum qualifications” for the next agency director. “Above all, he will need to show his commitment to protecting the bureau’s independence. That independence is more important than ever given the inevitable conflicts with the interests of the man who sits in the Oval Office.”

Those concerns were only stoked on Wednesday with the release of prepared testimony by Mr. Comey in which he recounted how Mr. Trump at one point asked him to shut down the bureau’s investigation of Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser, whose ties with Russia are under investigation. Mr. Comey also said that the president had repeatedly pressed for him to say publicly that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation.

“In light of the president’s constant efforts to block the truth,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, “the nomination of Christopher Wray should be subject to the utmost scrutiny.”

Some civil liberties organizations expressed deep reservations about Mr. Wray, a litigation partner at King & Spalding, a law firm that advises Mr. Trump’s family real estate empire.

“Christopher Wray’s firm’s legal work for the Trump family, his history of partisan activity, as well as his history of defending Trump’s transition director during a criminal scandal makes us question his ability to lead the F.B.I. with the independence, evenhanded judgment, and commitment to the rule of law that the agency deserves,” said Faiz Shakir, the national political director of the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to Mr. Christie and the Bridgegate case.

Mr. Shakir said Mr. Wray would also have to “come clean about his role” in legal justifications for the use of torture during the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks....

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wray fbi

Foolish’ GOP congressman gets called out during House hearing for his threat to ‘drop’ protesters

Jesse Watters: “The Democrat reaction to January 6 was worse than January 6”

China emerges as top foreign QAnon promoter

A complicated challenge

Bannon’s “War Room” is the media home of Project 2025 and Trump’s retribution plans

it's called the rule of law': Legal experts laud judge's ruling allowing deposition of Donald Trump

Bannon faces massive backlash after saying :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{Trump should behead Fauci and the FBI director​​​

trump plans to fire Gina Haspel, Christopher Wray and Mark Esper immediately if reelected: report

Trump’s inner circle ‘furious’ with FBI’s Wray for undercutting Biden smear: report

trump’s own FBI director just shot down his bogus theories about mass voter fraud

White House preparing shortlist to replace FBI Director Wray after he testified on Russian election interference: report

Bannon faces massive backlash after saying :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{Trump should behead Fauci and the FBI director