Few exiting officials merit fiercer censure than FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is resigning three years early. In an extraordinarily scathing letter, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) rightly provided it.
Wray has been a dissembler since he took over the bureau in 2017. He came into office promising transparency, candor, competence, depoliticization, and systemic reform. He has produced none of it, acting instead as an obfuscator and excuse-maker, as if his job is to be the FBI’s corner-cutting defense attorney. As this newspaper and its columnists have detailed repeatedly, Wray has shown that neither his word nor his judgment can be trusted.
On case after case and on institutional FBI culture more broadly, Wray has covered for the bureau rather than dutifully serving the public. On institutional matters, in 2022, it came to light that an internal audit three years earlier showed that FBI personnel broke the rules at least 747 times in only a year and a half in “high-profile” investigations involving politicians, news media, and religious groups, but Wray neither advised the public of those findings during the interim three years, nor made public amends, nor addressed the problems until more than a year after the audit was publicized.
Wray contemptuously brushed off concerns about the blatant mistreatment of a peaceful pro-life protester subjected to an armed raid at his home on a case that was bogus from the start. He lied to Congress about the extent of the FBI’s targeting of traditional Catholics for “threat mitigation” and prevaricated about the FBI investigating parent activists as domestic terrorists and about whether the FBI helped censor speech on social media platforms. He repeatedly resisted valid subpoenas for information on these and other cases.
Fortunately, Wray will have left his post before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated next month. Grassley, though, does not intend to let him slink away. In a blistering 11-page letter on Dec. 9, the senator used some of the examples above, and many others, to make sure the door hit Wray in the back on his way out.
Grassley is furious that Wray has “failed,” despite solemn promises when he was appointed, in his “fundamental duties” of “compliance with congressional oversight requests and the protection of whistleblowers.” Grassley has been Congress’s most stalwart advocate of government whistleblowers for decades, and his letter seethes when describing three specific examples of Wray’s failure to protect whistleblowers, along with several high-profile cases in which the director refused to provide records confirming that other whistleblowers had avoided retaliation.
Wray comes in for Grassley’s most vociferous criticism for thumbing his nose at congressional oversight. Grassley writes of “the FBI’s failure to provide basic information I requested more than two years ago related to the FBI’s ongoing mishandling of sexual harassment claims made by the FBI’s female employees.”
As Grassley wrote, “This is based on credible whistleblower disclosures alleging hundreds of FBI employees had retired or resigned to avoid accountability for sexual misconduct.” Grassley is right to characterize Wray’s noncompliance as outright “obstruction.”
Similarly, Grassley excoriated Wray for more than two years of failing to respond to “repeated requests” to provide information about Afghanistan evacuees who were not vetted before being allowed into the United States, including “at least 50” the FBI identified as “potentially significant security concerns.” These migrants could pose life-threatening dangers to large numbers of Americans, as was shown in October when the FBI apprehended one of them who had “planned an Election Day terrorist attack in the U.S. on behalf of the Islamic State.”
Grassley provides a litany of Wray’s failures, obstinacy, and obstruction in cases ranging from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information to the FBI’s repeated burying of credible allegations against President Joe Biden and from Biden’s strange cancellation of a successful anti-cartel program to “allegations that the Obama-Biden State Department obstructed” the arrests of criminals helping Iran’s nuclear programs.
Grassley is right to insist the record shows that Wray is a disgrace. He is lucky to escape formal sanction. No FBI director is entitled to his 10-year term if he does not do his job. A decade is a maximum allowable tenure, not an entitlement. The president has every right to replace him. In Wray’s wake, the FBI needs a serious disinfectant.
