Back during the Cold War, I worked with a world-class Russian scientist who had defected from the Soviet Union with his family and sought asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Geneva, Switzerland. The most chilling story he told me about life under the Soviet dictatorship was a day in the late 1930s when officers from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) knocked at the door of his family’s apartment, handcuffed his father, and disappeared with him without an explanation. Exactly ten years later, his father returned. His explanation was that to keep citizens under control and intimidated, the NKVD routinely arrested ten percent of the population without explanation, and after ten years, if they were still alive, they released them.
Christopher Wray presided over the worst times experienced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation since J. Edgar Hoover, who died in 1972 after beginning and ruling over the FBI for forty-eight years. Whereas Hoover used his position to coerce presidents to maintain him in office, Wray’s FBI was used by Special Counsel Mueller’s in the investigation to keep President Donald Trump from running again in 2020 from either removal from office or intimidation. Wray’s FBI continued to harass Trump after he left office in 2021. With the Department of Justice under Attorney General, Merrick Garland, and his Special Counsel, Jack Smith, the FBI under Wray tried for a second time to put Trump behind bars to keep him from running again in 2024.
The Justice Department and FBI during Wray’s term in office always seemed to push their crime prevention mandate beyond a political bridge too far. For the first time, we hear of excessively large early morning FBI raids with heavily armed squads on unarmed political targets like Roger Stone. If they wanted to arrest Stone, his attorney would have peaceably brought him into the nearest FBI office. But then, the FBI would have missed having CNN reporters on-site recording the banging on the door answered by Stone in his pajamas as a not-too-subtle warning that this could await other Trump associates if they would not ‘drop a dime on him’.
The armed FBI teams used were likely either the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) or its Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Teams. The FBI cites that these groups are used for criminal abductions, crises, hostage negotiation, storming barricaded buildings, climbing difficult terrain, or arresting dangerous suspects. Stone did not seem to fall into any of these ‘special situations’ nor did the armed group that invaded Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago to obtain presidential records whose possession was in active negotiation.
Political intimidation reached a critical mass when the Justice Department and the FBI were unable to discern the difference between the rights of American citizens to peacefully assemble as provided in Amendment I of the Constitution, unruly mob riots, seditious conspiracies, or insurrections. The Justice Department and the FBI were so anxious to destroy Trump for inciting an insurrection and intimidating his followers that the FBI had opened 400 case files in the first month, charged 750 by the end of 2021, charged 1200 by the end of 2023, and 1500 by the end of the fourth anniversary.
However, since as many as 1200 people entered the Capitol building which placed them in the category of those who knowingly entered the restricted area (that is, the Nation’s Capital) without authorization, they had already committed a federal crime, essentially a misdemeanor, at best. Probably one in three, or 400 of the 1200 who entered the capital deserved to be charged, often with multiple charges including assaulting police, resisting or impeding officers, and/or obstructing officers during a civil disorder. The others could validly be classified as unjust Federal intimidation for pursuing their First Amendment Rights!
This may be the largest number of mass civilian arrests by the federal government in U.S. history!
The timing of Wray’s decision to resign rather than wait to be fired by incoming President Trump could have been because the Justice Department’s Inspector General released his January 6 Report which stated that twenty-six FBI informants were immersed in the crowds at the Capitol. Give Wray credit for his interviews with Congress where he stonewalled all attempts to find out whether the FBI had agents at the Capitol, or what they were doing there. The IG Report somehow missed that too.
Whether Wray’s previous testimony to the Congress was just evasive or criminal perjury is subject to the political mindset of the reviewer.
The Fall of the House of Wray Legacy will be remembered for his FBI’s participation in attempts to intimidate Trump (and his followers) with two impeachments, two Special Counsel investigations, indictment of eleven associates – many serving jail time and experiencing financial hardship, and mass intimidation of hundreds of voters which exacerbated the deep political divisions within our nation, and interfering in three national elections – and for him keeping mum on any of the details.
TW3
John Whitmore Jenkins
December 19, 2024
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