The director of the FBI was unable to give an answer to lawmakers when he was questioned about the agency’s widespread abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), when testifying before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.
FBI Director Chris Wray was questioned by lawmakers about a number of concerns, several of which involved the agency’s misuse of the FISA process, voiced by lawmakers during the hearing. FISA, enacted in 1978, sets limits on the extent to which the U.S. government and its agencies may gather “foreign information” on domestic soil.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was the first to question Wray about the FBI’s use of FISA as its own “creepy personal snoop machine,” asking how many illegal FISA queries have occurred during Wray’s time as FBI director. After Wray was unable to come up with an answer, Gaetz cited the Inspector General’s estimate of more than a million abuses and a court’s assessment of over 200,000 abuses.
“Seems like a number you should know, how many times the FBI is breaking the law under your watch - especially if it’s like over a million,” Gaetz said.
FBI Director Chris Wray has no idea how many times the FBI used illegal FISA queries to surveil American citizens under his leadership — despite inspector general reports and court rulings uncovering hundreds of thousands of instances pic.twitter.com/agHESCTREh
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 12, 2023
Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA) continued the line of questioning by asking Wray about Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation launched by the FBI into potential links between former President Donald Trump and Russian entities during the 2016 election. Cline asked Wray point-blank if Crossfire Hurricane was the only time the FBI violated the FISA process, and Wray admitted that it was not.
“Umm, well, there are a lot of different procedures, but (it’s) certainly not the only compliance incidents that we’ve had with respect to FISA,” Wray said.
Later in the proceedings, Rep. Chris Roy (R-TX) questioned how widespread FISA violations have been allowed to continually occur under Wray’s leadership, again concerning fraudulent filings that the FBI made while investigating the connection between Trump and Russia. Wray ducked the question and, instead, made an unsubstantiated claim that the FBI had already addressed the problem.
“This issue here has been wrapped up in a cloud of politics, but the fact is that the American people deserve to know how the FISA court is being abused and how it is being abused against a former president and against them,” Roy said.
Throughout his testimony, Wray admitted that the FBI had abused the FISA system numerous times, but mostly denied responsibility for the abuses taking place under his watch. Ultimately, his answers seemed to suggest that he believes that the FBI is at liberty to do whatever it deems necessary in order to “protect” American citizens.
“There are plenty of things we lawfully can do that we decide are better not to do,” Wray said, implying that, despite its numerous abuses, the FBI has been exhibiting restraint, up to this point.