Former FBI Director Wray Referred to DOJ For ‘Misleading’ Congress

A Washington government-transparency group has asked the Justice Department and the FBI to open a criminal probe into former FBI Director Christopher Wray, alleging he gave false testimony to Congress and impeded two high-profile investigations.

Oversight Project President Mike Howell told Fox News Digital that the referral targets Wray’s statements about the FBI’s “Richmond memo,” a document from the bureau’s Virginia office that revealed anti-Catholic bias, and his testimony concerning an alleged Chinese Communist Party (CCP) scheme to distribute fake driver’s licenses before the 2020 election, Fox News reported.

Wray addressed the Richmond memo during July 2023 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, after the document controversially identified Catholics as potential domestic threats.

“Well, what I can tell you is you’re referring to the Richmond product, which is a single product by a single field office, which, as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” Wray said.

But the Oversight Project called that statement either misleading or completely untrue.

Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) questioned Wray about the Richmond memo and a so-called “Trump questionnaire” circulated within the FBI, which probed agents’ loyalty to the former president and asked whether they had taken part in protests or rallies linked to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.

“We keep hearing about these ‘isolated examples’ whether it’s Richmond Catholics, this [questionnaire] — isn’t it a pattern?” Tiffany asked.

The Oversight Project also referenced Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley’s opening remarks from a June hearing on Biden-era “cover-ups,” in which the Iowa Republican said the Richmond memo “used the shoddy research of the radical Southern Poverty Law Center to accuse traditional Catholics of being violent extremists.”

“Based on records I released the other week, there wasn’t just one FBI document that used biased anti-Catholic sources, but over a dozen,” Grassley said. “And more FBI field offices were involved than we’d been led to believe.”

A second Richmond memo, similar to the first, which went unreleased following the backlash, was part of a partially redacted series of documents that Grassley’s committee transmitted to FBI Director Kash Patel in June. It said that the bureau “assesses RMVE (Racially Motivated Violent Extremism) interest in RTC (Radical Traditional Catholic) ideology is likely to increase … in the run-up to the [2024] general election cycle.”

“Director Wray’s testimony was inaccurate not only because it failed to reveal the scope of the memo’s production and dissemination, but also because it failed to reveal the existence of a second, draft product on the same topic intended for external distribution to the whole FBI,” the Oversight Project said in a separate statement.

The Oversight Project specifically alleged violations of obstructing proceedings before Congress, perjury, and providing false statements, Fox News noted further.

Grassley told Fox News in June that his office had uncovered 13 other documents similar to the Richmond memo. He added that they had gone out and that “at least 1,000 people had access to information that … was telling people that the Catholic Church needed to be watched because it could be considered a terrorist organization.”

Patel cited the CCP influence case in a June statement, stating then that “former FBI leadership withheld the facts and misled the public on China’s 2020 election interference. And they did so for political gain. This FBI is exposing all of it and giving Americans the truth they deserve.”

Patel asserted that the FBI “buried” evidence in 2020 for political expediency and thanked Grassley for aiding current FBI leadership in bringing the issue to light.

Fox noted further that during September 2020 testimony, Wray told Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., that the FBI had “not seen historically any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether by-mail or otherwise.”

Wray noted that the FBI had uncovered instances of localized voter fraud and said his testimony was never meant to minimize the broader threat.

Howell’s group countered that newly released documents provided to Congress by Patel in June undercut Wray’s claim, revealing that as early as August 2020 the bureau was warning that China had mass-produced fraudulent IDs to aid then–candidate Joe Biden.

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