President Donald Trump suggested the Department of Justice should investigate his own former FBI chief over a conspiracy theory involving the deadly Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.
Over the weekend, the president accused then-FBI Director Chris Wray of planting hundreds of FBI agents in the crowd to stoke violence, a claim so wild that even Trump’s current FBI director, Kash Patel, rejected it during an interview with Fox News.
The president nevertheless doubled down on the conspiracy when asked by NBC News whether Pam Bondi’s DOJ should investigate Wray.
“I would imagine. I would certainly imagine. I would think they are doing that,” Trump said.
Wray, he added, “did a terrible job and we just found out about it.”
“I think it’s very inappropriate what he, what he did. And I think a lot of his service was very inappropriate,” he said. “But we haven’t gone beyond that. Don’t forget, we just found out about all of these FBI agents being there.”
The comments came just days after Trump’s DOJ indicted Wray’s predecessor, James Comey, who is accused of lying to and obstructing Congress. Trump fired Comey in May 2017 for investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and replaced him with Wray.
The president has insisted that the case against Comey is about “justice” and “not revenge,” despite repeatedly calling for retribution against Comey on social media.
In the meantime, the conservative outlet Blaze Media wrote last week that the FBI had embedded 274 plainclothes agents in the mob that stormed the Capitol building in January 2021 in an attempt to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Trump then boosted the claims on Saturday, writing on Truth Social that the FBI had “secretly placed, against all Rules, Regulations, Protocols and Standards, 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax.”
“This is different from what Director Christopher Wray stated, over and over again!” he added. “That’s right, as it now turns out, FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials’.”
However, a report by the DOJ inspector general’s office found that there weren’t any undercover officers at the Capitol that day. Twenty-six confidential FBI sources did attend, but they weren’t authorized to break into the building.
On Saturday evening, Patel clarified that 274 agents had in fact gone to the Capitol, but that they were sent there for crowd control after D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department declared that the gathering had devolved into a riot.
That crowd control function “goes against FBI standards,” he told Fox.
Trump nevertheless wrote in his Truth Social post that Wray “has some major explaining to do.”
“That’s two in a row, Comey and Wray, who got caught LYING, with our Great Country at stake,” he wrote. “WE CAN NEVER LET THIS HAPPEN TO AMERICA AGAIN!”
Before securing the indictment against Comey, the president forced out Erik Siebert, who had been Trump’s own pick to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, over Siebert’s refusal to bring charges against Trump’s political enemies.
Siebert was replaced by Trump’s former personal attorney, 35-year-old Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer who doesn’t have any prosecutorial experience.
Besides prosecuting Trump’s political foes, she will be responsible for overseeing most of the country’s terrorism and espionage cases, which fall within her office’s jurisdiction because of its proximity to the capital.
The post Trump Targets Another Enemy Over Unhinged J6 Conspiracy Theory appeared first on The Daily Beast.
