WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 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, \u201cThere is no finer institution, and no finer people, than the men and women who work there and are its very beating heart.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wray provided his first public defense of the nation\u2019s premier law enforcement agency since a weekend of Twitter attacks by President Donald Trump, who called the FBI a biased institution whose reputation is \u201cin Tatters \u2014 worst in History!\u201d and urged Wray to \u201cclean house.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 anti-Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s use of a private email server that ended without criminal charges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although he did not mention Trump\u2019s criticism, Wray rebutted him directly, saying, \u201cMy experience has been that our reputation is quite good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere 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,\u201d Wray said of the agency he has led for just four months. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The White House on Thursday tried to soften Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cappreciated and respected,\u201d but said the president\u2019s \u201cissues are with the political leaders in the FBI under former director Comey, particularly those that played politics with the Hillary Clinton email probe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The emphasis on the Clinton and Trump probes reflected how the FBI in the last two years has found itself entangled in American politics, with investigations focused on the Democratic presidential nominee and the Republican president and his successful campaign. Those investigations have transformed routine oversight hearings, like the one Thursday, into platforms for tense questions about the political leanings of an agency that prides itself on being removed from partisan consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wray\u2019s defense of the FBI came after the committee\u2019s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said he was concerned by reports that Peter Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent involved in the Clinton investigation, was removed from Mueller\u2019s team last summer following the discovery of text messages seen as potentially anti-Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEven the appearance of impropriety will devastate the FBI\u2019s reputation,\u201d Goodlatte said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, top Democrat on the House Judiciary panel, predicted Trump\u2019s attacks on the FBI will only grow louder as Mueller continues investigating. \u201cYour responsibility is not only to defend the bureau but to push back against the president when he is so clearly wrong, both on the facts and as a matter of principle,\u201d Nadler told Wray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wray\u2019s tenure as the new FBI chief would be difficult even without the intense scrutiny of the Russia investigation. Since he was sworn in on Aug. 2, the U.S. has experienced two of the deadliest shootings in its modern history and an attack on a bike path in Manhattan that officials have said was terrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s weekend tweets created a fresh dilemma for Wray. With his bosses, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Sessions\u2019 deputy, Rod Rosenstein, staying publicly silent, it fell to Wray to defend the agency. But FBI directors traditionally have been low-key and stoic \u2014 with Wray\u2019s predecessor, James Comey, a notable exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And Trump\u2019s firing of Comey while he led the Russia probe shows what can happen to a director who antagonizes the president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wray repeatedly deflected questions about the FBI\u2019s handling of the Clinton investigation, saying the entire matter was under review by the Justice Department\u2019s inspector general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Republicans repeatedly pressed him on reports that Strzok tweaked the language of the FBI\u2019s finding from \u201cgrossly negligent\u201d \u2014 the standard laid out in the relevant statute \u2014 to \u201cextremely careless,\u201d which was the language that Comey ultimately used in discussing the Clinton case with the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Countering strident attacks on his agency from the president who appointed him, FBI Director Chris Wray on Thursday defended the tens of thousands of people who work with him and declared, \u201cThere is no finer institution, and no finer people, than the men and women who work there and are its very beating heart.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":39490,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":68,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,31,15,68,33],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2395,1217],"class_list":["post-20135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-management","category-leadership","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"IHII3YDSG5FY5CYYEGX3MDJTRY","arc_canonical_url":"\/management\/leadership\/2017\/12\/07\/fbi-director-heads-to-hill-after-trumps-attacks-on-agency\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n