How low will Hageman go to defend her political savior?

FBI Director Christopher Wray had already taken a lot of guff from Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hageman by the time she confronted him at a House Judiciary hearing last Wednesday. 

At a May session, she accused Wray of being “corrupt,” then laughably compared his agency to the piercing evil eye in “The Lord of the Rings.” The latter was such an off-the-wall attack, Hageman deserves extra debate points for creativity.

“The Eye of Sauron has turned inward, and it is operating with a white-hot intensity that seeks to destroy everything in its path,” Hageman solemnly said. I swear her eyes appeared to glow red.

I knew Hageman wasn’t close to approaching the depths she was willing to reach to paint Wray as a jack-booted persecutor of conservatives like her. What could Wray do to make it stop? Perhaps a “have you no sense of decency” line, as counsel Joseph Welch dramatically asked notorious communist-hunter Sen. Joe McCarthy?

The entire Wray-Hageman exchange can be viewed here. 

So, having seen the previews, I was ready for a real show when Hageman started her inquisition of Wray and the FBI’s alleged collusion with social media corporations like Facebook and Twitter to stomp on the First Amendment. She claimed Twitter’s interaction with the FBI was so constant and pervasive, the agency treated the company “as if it were a subsidiary.”

“Neither you or the FBI have any legal authority to circumvent the First Amendment by using a surrogate to do your dirty work,” Hageman said. “Yet that is exactly what you have been doing.” 

Conservatives charge that the Department of Justice, FBI and other federal agencies have met regularly with more than two dozen social media companies to order them not to allow false election claims, disproven COVID-19 conspiracy theories and other disinformation on their platforms.

On July 4, Louisiana Federal District Court Judge Terry Doughty gave credibility to that narrative when, in Missouri v. Biden, he ordered President Joe Biden, federal agencies and officials not to pressure companies to delete or suppress broad categories of information that are protected speech.

The Biden administration’s counter-argument is that it isn’t telling social media companies what to take down or how to set policies. However, it maintains the government has an interest in promoting accurate information about critical issues like public health and elections, and curbing the spread of illegal material, including terrorism and child sex abuse.

Doughty — a 2017 Donald Trump appointee — wrote a 155-page decision prohibiting such action on the grounds it violates protected speech. His first sentence modestly declares the case “involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”

It gave Hageman and other far-right House members precisely the ammo they needed to drive Wray into a corner. “The American people fully understand that there is a two-tiered justice system that has been weaponized to persecute people based on their political beliefs,” Hageman said. “And that you have personally worked to weaponize the FBI against conservatives.”

Up until that point, the best defense Wray mustered consisted of weakly saying he disagreed with the claims of Hageman and the committee, and he was just trying to do the right thing.

Then he hit his limit with the weaponization issue and clearly expressed his annoyance. 

“The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” Wray told Hageman. He should have left out “somewhat.”

Wray has been a registered Republican all his life. He was a senior political appointee in George W. Bush’s Department of Justice, clerk to a noted conservative judge and a Federalist Society contributor. Trump appointed him to head the FBI. Few people this side of Liz Cheney — Hageman’s vanquished Wyoming congressional opponent from last year — are more conservative. (Irony intended.)

Wray pushed back on another Hageman attack. When she said he ignored two U.S. senators’ letters asking to meet about how the COVID-19 virus originated, Wray recalled the FBI was initially the first federal agency to agree with conservatives’ conclusion it started in a Wuhan, China lab.

Two days after Hageman grilled Wray on Capitol Hill, Republicans could no longer point to Missouri v. Biden as a definite win. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an injunction to prevent the lower court’s ruling from going into effect. The appeals court will hear arguments about whether the injunction will be lifted at any time during the process.

The action effectively took the wind out of the GOP committee members’ sails. But Hageman isn’t backing down from her criticism of the FBI and its director. On Newsmax, she continued spewing conspiracy theories — with no evidence — about the FBI investigating parents who complain at school board meetings, traditional Catholics and members of the anti-abortion movement.

Hageman said the FBI and DOJ are “slandering” those they’re investigating as “being radical,” framing the agencies as the hypocrites and radical operatives. In other words, Hageman employed the old Republican mainstay “I’m rubber, you’re glue” defense.

The “FBI’s gone rogue” story has been so entertaining that we can be forgiving for not anticipating the Hunter Biden plot twist.

Attorney Robert Corn-Revere made the connection in a thoughtful analysis of Doughty’s decision in Reason Magazine. He said the judge was troubled that the FBI failed to alert social media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation. 

Do you catch that, or did the double negatives throw you off the trail? The problem was that “the FBI didn’t advise the companies not to moderate this story.” A federal judge was upset that the FBI didn’t tell social media companies to promote stories about the first son’s laptop. This is the bizarro world in which our congressional representative dwells.

Techdirt podcaster Mike Masnick summarized the judge’s message as, “Don’t communicate with social media companies, except if your communication boosts the storylines that will help Donald Trump.”

Bingo! This is what makes all the far-right’s noise about the “weaponization” of the justice system, and particularly Hageman’s claim about Wray being a traitor to his political roots, such a crock. 

Presidents from both the Republican and Democratic parties have used the power of the office to clip the wings of their political adversaries. It’s wrong, but a natural instinct. An easy case can be made, though, that Trump’s weaponization of the government’s powers was more plentiful and far shadier than most.

Corn-Revere sued Trump over several allegations: the president leveraged antitrust actions against critical media companies, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses, and made frequent threats to revoke or reinterpret Section 230, a federal law that shields online platforms from liability for users’ posts. The case became moot when Trump’s presidency ended.

Let’s not forget Trump labeling the press as “the enemy of the people” and his continued daily harassment as a 2024 presidential candidate of whatever enemy he chooses to abuse on a given day. Or the former president’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, who sure seemed to be doing Trump’s bidding in many cases, including protecting political fixer Roger Stone, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Talk about weaponizing the justice system. There are few more blatant examples than Trump firing former FBI Director James Comey for daring to investigate his collusion with Russia in his first presidential campaign. How about withholding military aid to Ukraine unless it investigated Biden, his eventual opponent?

Hageman makes a logical choice to be one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders in Congress. She owes her political career to Trump hand-picking her to oppose Cheney, who had the audacity to vote for his well-earned second impeachment.

I seriously doubt if there’s anything Hageman wouldn’t do or say on her benefactor’s behalf, since he plucked her from political obscurity. As his federal and state indictments pile up and criminal trials begin, we’ll have plenty of chances to see how low she’ll go.