WASHINGTON Director defends FBI against tweet attacks
WASHINGTON — Countering strident attacks on his agency from the president who appointed him, FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday defended the tens of thousands of people who work with him and declared, “There is no finer institution, and no finer people, than the men and women who work there and are its very beating heart.”
Wray provided his first public defense of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency to the House Judiciary Committee since a weekend of Twitter attacks by President Trump, who called the FBI a biased institution whose reputation is “in Tatters — worst in History!” and urged Wray to “clean house.”
The outburst from the president followed a guilty plea from his former national security adviser for lying to the FBI and the revelation that an agent had been removed from a special team investigating the Trump campaign because of text messages seen as potentially antiTrump.
Wray, who served as a top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush and was nominated as FBI director by Trump, has faced Republican criticism over perceived political bias in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of possible Trump campaign ties to Russia during the 2016 presidential election and in the handling a year earlier of an FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server that ended without criminal charges.
Wray sought to fend off the attacks on the agency by expressing pride in the agents, analysts and other personnel who he said were working to protect Americans. But he also conceded that agents do make mistakes and said there are processes in place to hold them accountable.
“There is no shortage of opinions out there, but what I can tell you is that the FBI that I see is tens of thousands of agents and analysts and staff working their tails off to keep Americans safe,” Wray said of the agency he has led for just four months. “The FBI that I see is tens of thousands of brave men and women working as hard as they can to keep people they will never know safe from harm.”
The White House on Thursday tried to soften Trump’s message, denying that there was any discrepancy between his comments and those of the FBI director. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump agrees field agents are “appreciated and respected,” but said the president’s “issues are with the political leaders in the FBI under former director Comey, particularly those that played politics with the Hillary Clinton email probe.”