Tea at Trianon: FBI Director Christopher Wray’s Absurd Denials of Wrongdoing

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 5, 2023

FBI Director Christopher Wray’s Absurd Denials of Wrongdoing

From Gregg Jarrett:

Credit to Fox News anchor Bret Baier for asking tough and direct questions of Christopher Wray. But the answers parried back were less than honest and forthright. No surprise there. Wray ended up bobbing and weaving like a prize fighter. It wasn’t exactly a redux of the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” match. But he must have studied Muhammad Ali’s famous rope-a-dope routine before his bout with the Special Report host. The director is no heavyweight, that’s for sure.
When Wray wasn’t refusing to answer questions, he was dodging and deflecting in a most conspicuous fashion. He ducked an important inquiry about the many whistleblowers who have courageously exposed rampant internal corruption at the bureau. He pivoted away from explaining why the FBI concealed from the American voters Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal until after the recent mid-term elections.

The FBI director also refused to address polls that show Americans have lost all confidence in what was once the world’s premiere law enforcement agency. Under his stewardship, the bureau’s reputation is in tatters and has descended to all time low. But the director seems to have his head stuck squarely in the sand. Oblivious. Arrogant. Self-righteous. These are typical Washington contagions. Masks don’t help. No vaccine is available.

In the most revealing exchange, Wray denied outright any wrongdoing by the FBI, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Unbelievably, he claimed that agents didn’t “tell” social media companies to censor or suppress information like the Hunter Biden laptop story. This, despite reams of documents showing that the bureau did precisely that.

Wray tried to parse his language by using the word “tell.” It was a distinction without a difference. Hundreds of FBI emails and text messages, as well as testimony from former Twitter executives, show that the agency cajoled, encouraged, manipulated, pressured, and all but directed the platform to kill the laptop story, which it promptly did. The FBI sent encrypted missives to Twitter officials pushing them to banish people from the site based on purely political views. Every hour of every day Twitter was getting inundated by FBI demands. (Read more.)