Turley: Wray’s playing Americans for chumps — so what will Congress do about it?

“He could have answered some
of these questions,” Turley told Fox News’ Brian
Kilmeade. “He just chose not to” (via Mediaite):

Turley’s frustration spilled out into his blog this
morning as well. Focusing on Wray’s responses to
questions about FBI censorship on social media,
Turley accused Wray of an “obviously false”
response:

Despite the near total lack
of substance, Wray did make one surprising denial.
He insisted that the FBI does not engage in
censorship efforts, focuses only on “foreign
disinformation,” and does not pressure companies
to censor others. Those denials are not only
directly contradicted by the recent 155 opinion of
a federal court and the Twitter Files, but a new
release from the Twitter Files and journalist Matt
Taibbi.

Wray said that “…The FBI is
not in the business of moderating content, or
causing any social media company to suppress or
censor.” He then added that these companies are
not under any pressure in making their own
decisions whether the censor people or groups
flagged by the FBI.

The statement is obviously
false. The FBI maintained a large operation of
agents actively seeking the censorship of
thousands, as discussed in my prior
testimony.

The 155-page memorandum from
Judge Terry Doughty accompanying his injunction too,
and more officially than from Turley’s testimony
alone. But just a day earlier, Matt Taibbi released more
of his trove of Twitter Files documents that
showed the scope and
the fervor in which the FBI
under Wray conducted its “Censorship Enterprise,” as
Taibbi dubbed it. Taibbi had been withholding these
due to a dispute with Elon Musk, but decided that
the Missouri v
Biden case was too important to
let these documents remain out of sight any longer:

On June 11, 2020: a senior
FBI official in Washington emailed the FBI’s San
Francisco office, asking about three accounts:
@deepnotion2, @go_trump_2019, and @thePOTUSBox,
and to advise of any “actions taken.” The FBI
agent in San Francisco passed the note to a
Twitter lawyer. The next day, Twitter responded:
“We have suspended the accounts.”

From FBI whim in DC to Bay
Area Twitter suspension, the sequence took about
24 hours. It wasn’t written as a direct order, but
subsequent events showed it might as well have
been.

Though a senior Twitter
lawyer in that case ordered the accounts
suspended, a technical issue left them still up
two weeks later, triggering a “WTF?” email from
the original FBI man …

Translation: we sent a letter
two weeks ago, why [expletives deleted] are these
accounts still up? Also, while you’re cleaning up
that mess, could you send us a new list of
“linked” accounts for “lead purposes”?

Click over to Racket to see
the screencaps of the originals from Taibbi.
Then-exec Yoel Roth responded by offering a
groveling apology, followed by a request for the FBI
to share its insight into why these accounts were
problematic in the first place. “We don’t at this
time have clear indication that they are foreign in
origin,” Roth told FBI investigator Elvis Chan, and
noted that one came back as Canadian, not Russian.
They suspended the account anyway, at which Taibbi
marvels:

Roth then asked, in the
gentlest language possible, if the FBI could
possibly share with Twitter why those accounts
needed to come down, since “we don’t at this time
have clear indication that they’re foreign.” If
“we zapped the account, now could you send us the
reason?” isn’t good enough to convince people of
the nature of this relationship, I don’t know what
would be.

Read through all of Taibbi’s
review of this material, which reveals a robust,
aggressive, and intentional program of censorship.
Are we to believe that the director of the FBI never
knew about this effort? And are we to believe that,
having had this exposed months ago in the Twitter
Files reports, Wray still can’t
provide answers as to why the FBI ran a censorship
effort aimed at the speech of Americans on social
media?

Come on, man.

However, all of that prompts
another question, which Turley asks in this same
segment:

I mean, the thing is
Congress has to make a decision here. You know,
they just went through an entire hearing where
they were given nothing. He was far more detailed
when Eric Swalwell asked him about the FBI family
day.

With that, he just held
forth at length. But when he was asked about
censorship, he gives answers that seem rather
obviously false. He said that the FBI focused on
foreign disinformation. That’s just not true. I
mean, we have the emails. At some point, you are
treating the public like chumps. …

So the question is, what is
Congress going to do about it. They have a very
serious censorship scandal. You have 155 page
opinion from this court. You have the Twitter
Files that you just mentioned. There’s ample
evidence to show that what the director said
yesterday does not comport with the truth. So the
question is what is Congress going to do about it?

The Weaponization of
Government subcommittee has started to build
evidence for some action.
In Wray’s case, the only substantive option would
have to be impeachment, but the chances of removal
in the Senate range between zero and YGBKM. The long
game would be to continue to publish this material
and the ways in which this administration in
particular have weaponized government into an
authoritarian Big Brother, and then put that issue
to the voters. It may not be satisfying, but
patience and thoroughness will pay off better in the
long run than stunt votes and the premature finality
they provide.