Trump Scorns FBI Chief’s ‘Attitude’ Over DOJ’s Watchdog Report

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump slammed FBI Director Christopher Wray’s reading of a federal watchdog’s report on the probe into foreign meddling in the 2016 election, saying “with that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix” the agency.

“I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning.

The rebuke comes after Wray, a Trump appointee, defended the FBI from accusations that it was motivated by political bias in its investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign -- a charge rejected by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

“The inspector general found that, in this particular instance, the investigation was opened with appropriate predication and authorization,” Wray said in ABC News interview Monday.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham later Tuesday pushed back on the notion that Trump has become disenchanted with Wray.

“I don’t believe so,” Grisham said on Fox News. “I think one thing about this president is that if he’s not happy with you, you will be the first to know.”

Grisham said Trump has “great respect for the FBI” but also “wants to make sure that this kind of thing never happens again to him or to any other president going forward.”

The 434-page report rebutted assertions made by conservatives that the FBI illegally spied on Trump advisers and acted improperly when it opened an investigation into his presidential campaign and Russian election interference.

But the inspector general did find that FBI personnel made “serious” mistakes in how they obtained a surveillance warrant on one Trump adviser. Wray said that the report did find in “a number of instances” in which FBI employees failed either to follow bureau policies or to exercise appropriate diligence. He said he has ordered more than 40 corrective actions to address the failures.

Wray’s comments put him at odds with Trump, who has continued to argue that the report revealed serious misconduct at the FBI by selectively highlighting its findings on the surveillance warrants.

Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday said the decision to open a probe of Trump’s campaign in 2016 was “baseless” and relied on “flimsy” evidence that sets a poor precedent for the U.S. Barr said on MSNBC that there was insufficient evidence to open a probe, contradicting the key finding of Monday’s report.

Trump is scheduled to meet later Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Special Counsel Robert Mueller found that during their last meeting in May 2017, Trump said that a great pressure on him had been lifted after he fired Wray’s predecessor at the FBI, James Comey, who had led the Russia probe.

Wray also told ABC he had no information indicating Ukraine had interfered with the 2016 election, despite Trump and his allies suggesting that the country might have.

“I think it’s important for the American people to be thoughtful consumers of information and to think about the sources of it,” Wray said.

The House on Tuesday morning is expected to unveil two articles of impeachment against Trump over his effort to pressure Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Biden is one of the top candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.

To contact the reporters on this story: Kathleen Miller in Washington at kmiller01@bloomberg.net;Jordan Fabian in Washington at jfabian6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kasia Klimasinska at kklimasinska@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum

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