His smirk might have dialed down a fraction, but Chris Wray’s performance on Capitol Hill Wednesday shows that he is the champion of all stonewallers.
When finally he is kicked out of the FBI Gulfstream, he could have a lucrative new career training other agency heads on how not to comply with congressional oversight.
There were plenty of reasons for him to offer a mea culpa for FBI abuses of power on his watch, but all we got was the usual trademark Wraysims for avoiding answering questions: “Ongoing investigation,” “I’m not sure that is a correct characterization,” “I can’t comment on personnel matters,” “We are working on an internal review,” “As I sit here right now I don’t have an answer,” “We will work collaboratively . . . consistent with our rules,” “I can’t speak to pending [fill in the blank].”
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.
Orwellian censorship
The July 4 ruling by US District Judge Terry Doughty said that the federal government had been acting like an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth” and called the FBI’s involvement in censorship “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”
When Hagman asked if the FBI was going to continue with regular meetings with social-media companies leading up to the 2024 election “to police election-related speech,” Wray denied that’s what the meetings were for.
But at least he said the confabs were on hold because of Judge Doughty’s injunction.
The FBI’s increasing censorship and abuse of its surveillance powers is behind its historic low trust rating with the public.
It’s why Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan wants to deny Wray $24 billion for a new headquarters and move the FBI out of the Swamp into an existing building in Huntsville, Ala.
It’s why Republicans are threatening not to reauthorize the warrantless surveillance program under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans.
Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, down from 3 million in 2021.
They included people near the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, people affiliated with BLM, and 19,000 donors associated with a congressional candidate.
‘Threat to Democracy’
While the unsatisfactory grilling of Wray continued in the Judiciary Committee, over on the other side of the building three senators were announcing legislation to ensure that the kind of collusion between the federal government and Big Tech can never happen again.
Sen. Eric Schmitt said what the Biden administration insulted the American people when it appealed the ruling.
They are saying “please let us to continue to censor Americans. It’s nuts.”
“The way to combat speech you don’t like is to engage in more speech, not to censor speech,” Schmitt said. Before being elected to the Senate, Schmitt was the attorney general in Missouri who launched the landmark free speech lawsuit Missouri v Biden.
Schmitt and his Republican colleagues J.D. Vance and Bill Hagerty held a press conference Wednesday afternoon laying out upcoming legislation to codify the injunction and apply future punishments on social-media companies that continue to act as publishers.
Schmitt described a “vast censorship enterprise, the scope of which we’ve never seen before in American history” and said Doughty’s injunction “symbolizes a rebirth of our fundamental freedom to speak our minds.”
The censorship struck at “the core of what it means to be an American.”
“The administration is the most powerful, broadest agency in the world and you combine with the biggest most powerful companies in the world, that is a direct threat to our democracy.
“The way to combat speech you don’t like is to engage in more speech, not to censor speech.”
The human cost
Whether it was the origins of COVID-19 or the efficacy of masks, lockdowns and the vaccine, Hunter Biden’s laptop or memes about Joe Biden, the White House and federal agencies like the FBI were coercing social-media companies to censor Americans.
Vance outlined the human cost of Big Tech censorship: “Millions of American schoolchildren were locked out of their schools in a way that harmed their socialization that increased depression among our young people and we weren’t having the proper debate about what we were doing to our kids because Big Tech was colluding with the federal government and making it impossible to have that debate.”
“What is the biggest threat to our democracy,” he asked.
“Is it the people of Ohio or Missouri or Tennessee voting for a president the mainstream media don’t like or is it technology companies with financial interests in communist China working with our own FBI to censor the American people?”
It is frightening that the government and the tech companies exerted so much power over us, but equally so is that the banal face of that censorship is a bureaucrat like Chris Wray who still doesn’t fathom what happened.