Wednesday was not a good day to be FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The embattled official appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and could not offer a definition for “disinformation.” That failure came despite the bureau making the spread of messages labeled as such a focal point for their questionable activities.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) requested that Wray provide a clear definition for Congress, but the director resisted.
Johnson posed a clear question. “They did this under the guise that it was disinformation. Can you define what disinformation is?”
Wray evaded a direct response, instead replying, “What I can tell you is that our focus is not on disinformation, broadly speaking…” In other words, he had no specific answer to defend what were clearly multiple attacks on the First Amendment by his agency.
FBI Director Christopher Wray is having a TOUGH day in front of Congress today.
Here, @RepMikeJohnson confronts him over agency's "disinformation" program that Wray tries to pretend never existed. pic.twitter.com/2VFgYLedWv
— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) July 12, 2023
Johnson noted that the FBI worked to diminish conservative voices on such important topics as the pandemic, the 2020 presidential election, voting security, and even negative comments about President Joe Biden.
And all of this was done in the name of fighting “disinformation.” Despite this clearly stated motivation by the agency, Wray was unable to offer a definition of what disinformation even is.
Chairman Jim Jordan got the intense proceeding underway by recounting the finding of a Louisiana federal judge last week. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty found that the FBI colluded with Big Tech to suppress dissenting information on COVID-19, vaccines and Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
The ruling found that the agency “misled” the American public on numerous issues, a term Jordan quickly interpreted as lying.
The chairman declared that “when the court says the FBI misled, that’s a nice way of saying they lied. They lied, and as a result, important information was kept.”
Even when pressed, all Wray could respond with was that targeted “disinformation” only came from “malign foreign actors.” He never provided Congress with a definition of the term.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald nailed the crux of the issue with a blistering tweet after Wray’s stonewalling. He clarified that the reason Wray was unsuccessful in defining the term is that it’s a completely bogus classification designed to be meaningless.
Greenwald said it is merely “concocted with no fixed meaning. That’s what gives it its power (like ‘terrorism’).”
