House Republicans will finally get a chance to press FBI Director Chris Wray for answers they’ve spent months seeking.
Wray’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday will mark his first appearance at a public hearing since former special counsel John Durham released findings of widespread FBI misconduct in the Russia investigation. It’ll also be his first since multiple whistleblowers from the IRS and FBI have come forward with descriptions of the preferential treatment offered to Hunter Biden.
INSIDE THE PENTAGON OFFICE LEADING UFO INVESTIGATIONS
Wray’s FBI has come under fire for everything from political probes to religious liberty infringements.
Facing scrutiny from GOP lawmakers that has included calls for his removal, Wray will come under enormous pressure to answer questions substantively, particularly after months during which the bureau has done little to address concerns about its work.
Here are some of the questions Wray is likely to face.
Why did the FBI withhold the FD-1023 from Congress?
House Republicans spent weeks battling with the FBI to gain access to a document that a whistleblower said contained allegations against the Biden family.
The document, known as an FD-1023, memorialized information provided by an FBI source that alleged President Joe Biden, while serving as vice president, received a $5 million bribe from a foreign national in exchange for favorable policy decisions.
The FBI initially denied that the document existed. Wray eventually relented and allowed lawmakers to view a redacted version of the form, but not before House Republicans threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress.
Why the FBI took so many steps to conceal the fact that it had documentation of the allegation, as well as whether agents took any steps to investigate it, is likely to be one of the questions facing Wray.
Why did the FBI’s Washington field office conduct the raid of Mar-a-Lago, in a break from standard practice?
A former top FBI official told the House Judiciary Committee last month that FBI agents clashed with Justice Department officials ahead of the raid of former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago.
Steven D’Antuono, then the assistant director in charge at the FBI’s Washington field office, said he disagreed with the Justice Department’s decision to forge ahead with an unannounced raid rather than seek the cooperation of Trump’s lawyers, who had to date been working with the Justice Department on the return of classified information.
D’Antuono cited other regularities, including the insistence that the Washington field office execute the raid rather than the Miami field office, which should have had jurisdiction over the Palm Beach, Florida, operation.
He said one of the main lessons the FBI should have learned from Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s ill-fated investigation of Trump for alleged Russian collusion, was the need to run sensitive political investigations out of relevant field offices rather than out of the potentially politicized Washington office.
Lawmakers on House Judiciary could ask Wray why the decision was made to bypass the Miami field office for the Mar-a-Lago raid in August 2022.
Why did the FBI limit the number of witnesses who IRS investigators could contact during the Hunter Biden investigation?
Gary Shapley, a 14-year veteran of the IRS who worked for years on the Hunter Biden investigation, told the House Ways and Means Committee that the FBI sought to cap the number of interviews investigators could conduct as they probed suspicious activity related to Hunter Biden’s finances.
“The FBI tried to dictate that we only do five of the planned interviews so FBI management could reevaluate if they wanted to continue assisting,” Shapley testified, referring to the FBI’s actions in September 2020. At the time, IRS investigators had spent months requesting to conduct at least 15 witness interviews in the Hunter Biden tax case.
Shapley also described what he saw as a specific conflict of interest regarding a key FBI agent on the case.
“I learned the FBI case agent in Delaware had only recently moved back to his hometown of Wilmington with his wife and family and was concerned about the consequences for him and his family if they conducted these sensitive interviews and executed a search warrant of the President Biden guest house,” Shapley said.
Republican lawmakers could press Wray on why so few witness interviews were conducted in the Hunter Biden tax case, as well as whether the bureau’s case agent in Delaware attempted to suppress the investigation in order to preserve his social standing in the town where Biden lived.
What has the FBI done to investigate attacks on anti-abortion centers and churches?
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) has criticized the FBI for its seemingly uneven allocation of resources for investigations into incidents at abortion clinics versus anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.
Catholic churches and anti-abortion facilities have faced rising attacks since the Supreme Court upended the federal right to an abortion in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision last year.
But some victims of the attacks have complained about a lack of interest from the FBI, and few perpetrators have been caught. The CEO of a crisis pregnancy center in Buffalo, New York, told the Washington Examiner last year that the FBI had effectively brushed off any efforts to investigate the firebombing of his facility, for example.
Meanwhile, an anti-abortion activist involved in a minor physical altercation while protesting abortions at an abortion clinic in 2021 was arrested by Wray’s FBI agents on serious federal charges, of which he was later acquitted.
And one FBI field office forced the bureau to backtrack after issuing an internal memo that proposed spying on conservative Catholic parishes to find evidence of extremism.
The differences between how aggressively the FBI has pursued other hate crime investigations and how little the bureau has prioritized attacks on Catholic and anti-abortion centers could arise during Wray’s appearance.
Are agents who worked on the Russia investigation still at the FBI?
Former special counsel John Durham released the findings of his multi-year investigation of the Russia inquiry in May, and his report was highly critical of the FBI.
Durham found that FBI officials at multiple levels of authority within the bureau had discarded protocols in a quest to go after Trump for political reasons ahead of the 2016 election, ignoring any evidence that contradicted their theories about Trump and Russia.
Whether any of the agents who participated in that botched investigation are working on the investigation of Trump’s classified document retention could be a key question for Wray, particularly given the criticism that the FBI has acted more aggressively than necessary in the classified document case as well.
How closely has the FBI worked with social media companies to censor speech?
After Elon Musk purchased Twitter and took over the company, he began opening up its files to independent journalists, revealing for the first time evidence that the FBI and other government agencies had worked with the social media platform to police content the government did not like.
Internal communications suggested the FBI at times listed specific posts that it wanted the social media company to remove.
Members of the House subcommittee focused on the weaponization of government held one of its earliest hearings on the revelations contained in the Twitter files, and House Judiciary Committee members could take the opportunity on Wednesday to press Wray about how closely the bureau has worked with social media companies to censor content.
James Baker, a former top FBI lawyer, was also a top lawyer at Twitter until Musk fired him this year. Whether Baker played a role in smothering speech related to vaccines, the 2020 election, and more could be a focus of the hearing.
Has Merrick Garland ever asked you to stand down on an investigative step?
Attorney General Merrick Garland is above Wray in the organizational hierarchy of the Justice Department, and Garland has faced criticism for decisions that have seemed to benefit the Biden family and Biden’s political agenda.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Wray could be asked how frequently Garland has weighed in on investigative decisions in the multiple sensitive political investigations under the FBI’s purview.
He could also be asked how frequently he’s discussed investigative decisions with Garland.
