Trump blasts Chris Wray for denying there’s evidence Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election

Donald Trump went after his hand-picked FBI director on Tuesday, claiming Christopher Wray’s claims must be the result of him reading a different Inspector General report.

‘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. ‘With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!’

Trump has accused the FBI of conducting a ‘major spy scandal’ by surveilling his 2016 campaign’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

Shortly after Page left the Trump campaign in 2016, the FBI obtained a warrant to surveil Page’s communications and read his saved emails – specifically looking into his ties to Russia.

Trump says anyone involved at the FBI was working on behalf of the ‘deep state.’

‘I think that’s the kind of label that’s a disservice to the men and women who work at the FBI who I think tackle their jobs with professionalism, with rigor, with objectivity, with courage,’ Wray told ABC News in an interview that aired Monday. ‘So that’s not a term I would ever use to describe our work force and I think it’s an affront to them.’

FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed in an interview Monday that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 elections, and insisted calling the bureau and its employees part of the ‘deep state’ is a ‘disservice to the men and women who work at the FBI’

‘With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI,’ Trump claimed of Wray’s comments

Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report Monday of the Justice Department’s investigation into potential bias at the helm of the Russia investigation.

Although it found the FBI did not show political bias during the investigation, it did outline 17 mistakes in the bureau’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications, which was the avenue it used to obtain a warrant to look into Carter’s devices.

‘We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision to seek [surveillance] on Carter Page,’ Horowitz wrote in the report.

‘In my view, every error and omission is significant and it’s something we need to take seriously,’ Wray said of the outlined missteps.

Wray is also becoming the brunt of the president’s ire when he became the most senior government official to undercut Republican claims that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

Members of the GOP are peddling the conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled – either solely or in conjunction with Russia – on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

‘We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election,’ Wray said.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report Monday on the DOJ’s investigation into potential bias at the helm of the Russia investigation. ‘We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision to seek [surveillance] on Carter Page,’ he wrote 

Democrats are conducting an investigation into the president, and are expected to reveal articles of impeachment against Trump later in the day Tuesday.

The probe stems from the president’s call over the summer with his Ukrainian counterpart where he urged him to announce an investigation into political rival and former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

Also in the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump requested the leader look into ‘CrowdStrike,’ which referenced the theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network in 2016.

‘As I said, we at the FBI have no information that would indicate that Ukraine tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,’ Wray told ABC when asked about the debunked conspiracy theory.

Wray warned that election interference is still a major concern of the upcoming 2020 elections.

‘Well, as far as the election itself goes, we think Russia represents the most significant threat to the election cycle itself,’ he said.

‘But we certainly know that other nation states, China, Iran, others have an interest in influencing our democracy in other ways through different forms of engagement, different types of malign foreign influence,’ he continued. ‘So we are trying to make sure that we’re working hard with others to protect America against all those threats.’

He also urged American media consumers to be cognizant about where they get their information.

‘I think part of us being well protected against malign foreign influence is to build together an American public that’s resilient, that has appropriate media literacy and that takes its information with a grain of salt,’ Wray said.

Wray took over as FBI director in August 2017 after the former director, James Comey, was fired by Trump in May 2017.