FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday. Republican representatives did not distinguish themselves in their ability to wring the truth from Wray in their allotted five minutes. Indeed, they were more or less pitiful. Had they been allotted more time, however, they would still have found themselves up against a hard case. Wray is incorrigible.
We know that the FBI was instrumental to the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden and his curious laptop in advance of the 2020 election. According to Wray, however, the FBI only shared concerns with social media concerning “foreign disinformation.” One wonders how they got it so wrong in that case when they had been sitting on the laptop for a year.
In any event, laptop chronicler Miranda Devine also observed the hearing and suffered along with me. She writes in her New York Post column today:
When confronted about the FBI’s collusion with social-media companies to censor Americans, as laid out in the landmark free-speech case Missouri v Biden, Wray feigned ignorance.
“The FBI is not in the business of moderating content or causing any social-media company to suppress or censor,” Wray said when Wyoming Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman accused the FBI of using “a surrogate to do your dirty work,” in circumventing the First Amendment.
It should be shocking to see the Director of the FBI testify falsely on matters of public record. Yet we have the ineradicable example of James Comey as a standard by which to assess Wray. Comey lied voluminously and it’s not exactly ancient history. When it comes to lying with a straight face, Comey is the coal standard. Comey lied less obviously than Wray. In retrospect, we know that Comey was as dirty a cop as ever led the FBI. He is also possessed of a towering self-regard. Wray has a different kind of act with respect to which he put on a masterclass yesterday, as Devine observes, but he also lied like Comey.
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