FBI Director Christopher Wray said his agency had responded extensively to the criticisms found in the report of special counsel John Durham. Released last month, it led some outraged Republicans to call for the shutdown of the storied federal investigation agency.
Durham’s report, after years of investigation, called the FBI’s investigation of former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign “seriously deficient.”
Durham said the agency, in its operation, code-named “Crossfire Hurricane,” failed to uphold its “important mission of strict fidelity to the law.”
“We cooperated with that investigation,” Wray said on June 20 in Atlanta at an event hosted by the Atlanta Press Club and the Commerce Club.
“We assigned agents to help him do the investigation. And I will tell you that that report, much like the 2019 Inspector General report that covered essentially the same stuff, describes conduct that I consider totally unacceptable and unrepresentative of who we are as an institution.
“This is why we’ve made over 50 corrective actions and reforms, turned over the entire leadership team, and turned a new page. (We’ve) put in place all kinds of changes, policies, procedures, training, safeguards, approvals, I can go on and on, all of which ensure that if the same thing had happened today, it would not have happened.
“Those reforms would have prevented what happened back in 2015 and 2016,” said Wray, who was appointed FBI director by Trump in 2017.
The bureau also failed to examine its own databases, check with other intelligence agencies, interview essential witnesses, and did not use “any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluation raw intelligence,” the report states.
Had the FBI followed its own rules, the bureau’s agents would have discovered that neither the bureau nor the CIA had any evidence to show that candidate Donald Trump or anyone in his campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials at any time during the campaign, according to the report.
Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and a former federal prosecutor, said May 24 in announcing his candidacy that he plans to get rid of Wray, if elected, on “day one” of his administration.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has called for the FBI’s abolition, saying state and local police, the Department of Justice, and U.S. marshals provide adequate policing for the nation.
Congressional Republicans threatened to hold Wray in contempt early in June before he agreed to deliver to Congress documents on an agency-paid confidential informant.
Asked about the contempt issue and Greene’s filing articles of impeachment against him, Wray said, “I have enormous respect for Congressional oversight. And I think that’s an important part of our responsibilities as an agency which has vast powers.
“Having said that, I also have a duty to do things like protect confidential human sources, (and) to respect grand jury secrecy. And there are a host of other obligations that the FBI director and the FBI as an institution also have. And so the challenge is to try to find a way to do both.”
When the FBI undertook an investigation and conducted research and interviews with the survivors, the women often spoke with FBI male agents who had little to no training in interviewing victims of sex crimes. Victims were sometimes treated coldly and abruptly as they described to agents specifics of the most personal violation.
The scandal led to the Respect for Child Survivors Act, passed by Congress in December 2022 and signed by Biden. The bill, which enjoyed bipartisan support, sets standards for the FBI’s handling of child victim witnesses.
“When I learned what our folks had done, or more importantly, had failed to back in, I guess it was 2015 and 2016 when all this happened, I was horrified. I was furious,” Wray said.
“I will tell you that where we can control what happens, which is in things like disciplinary action, we took it. When it comes to prosecutorial decisions, charging decisions, who to charge, what to charge, whether to charge, prosecutors make those decisions, not the FBI director.”
Wray, who lives in the Atlanta area, spoke in front of a friendly crowd, mainly composed of business leaders, including partners of Wray’s former law firm, King and Spalding. The firm’s retired chairman, Walter Driver—also a past president of the U.S. Golf Association—in introducing Wray listed past and present King and Spalding partners who have gone on to high-ranking federal law enforcement positions.
The firm has a tradition of public service, he said, going back to its founding partner Alexander Campbell King, who served as solicitor general under Woodrow Wilson. Emory Marvin Underwood was assistant attorney general under Wilson.
Griffin Bell served as attorney general under fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter’s administration. Larry Thompson was deputy attorney general during the George W. Bush administration.
Sally Yates, who was present at Wray’s talk, was deputy attorney general during the Barack Obama administration and served as acting attorney general for ten days in the Trump administration before Trump fired her for insubordination.
Another firm partner, retired U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, long a dean of the national security establishment, had planned to attend Wray’s speech but was recovering from surgery, Driver said.
Wray served as assistant U.S. attorney for Georgia’s Northern District from 1997 to 2003 and as assistant attorney general under George W. Bush from 2003 to 2005. He worked at King and Spalding from 2005 to 2016.
Those from the crowd who had the opportunity to question Wray didn’t ask about the FBI’s treatment of January 6 defendants or of its own whistleblowers who have testified to Congress about irregularities they witnessed in the investigation of the riot at the U.S. Capitol. One whistleblower spoke of being requested to issue subpoenas without, he said, proper legal foundation. Another testified about objecting to SWAT teams being used to arrest nonviolent offenders, including older people.
Retired CNN President Tom Johnson, who emceed the event and asked some initial questions of Wray, instead asked Wray why it had taken the agency a year to begin investigating Trump himself. Wray defended the agency’s investigation into January 6.
“We have committed really unprecedented resources to investigating both the crimes that were committed on and in connection with January 6, and we’ve used just about I think, 55 of 56 field offices to do it,” Wray said. “We’ve made hundreds and hundreds of arrests. And I think the way we have approached all those investigations is the way I expect us to approach any significant investigation which is to dot every I and cross every T and that’s what I expect from our people.”
In his own prepared remarks, Wray focused on the FBI’s efforts in fighting crime. He detailed its success in cracking down on gang violence and drug trafficking, with large-scale busts in cities like Brunswick, Augusta, and Atlanta. The agency arrested more than 20,000 violent criminals in 2022, he said.
He warmed to the discussion of cybercrime, discussing new scams powered by artificial intelligence (AI), like virtual kidnapping, in which criminals pretending to be kidnappers make phone calls using the fabricated voices of the victims to call their families and demand ransom.
And he discussed the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses in that field to the United States. The government and the companies it controls “has a bigger hacking program than that of every other major nation,” he said.
