On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke to a joint audience of The Atlanta Press Club and The Commerce Club. Notable members in attendance included former Attorney General Sally Yates, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and former U.S. Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux and Buddy Darden. The event was moderated by former CNN President Tom Johnson.
Wray’s speech focused on the FBI’s progress in taking down violent gangs and criminals and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has impacted the agency’s work. Wray, who is a Georgia resident, talked at length about the FBI’s joint work with local police departments, specifically highlighting multiple raids conducted in Georgia over the last few years.
“Our nationwide statistics — the Bureau’s nationwide statistics — for the last couple of years confirm that the violent crime threat in this country is real and not letting up. People deserve to be able to go to work, meet with their friends, go shopping — in other words, live their daily lives without fear and when that sense of safety is undermined, everybody loses,” said Wray.
He highlighted the work of the Atlanta Metropolitan Major Offenders (AMMO) Task Force, which he said recently completed an investigation into five offenders from New Jersey who had posed as FBI agents and shot up a Bergen County home as part of a home invasion. “That investigation resulted in charges against all five fugitives for attempted murder, kidnapping, and robbery,” he noted.
The second half of Wray’s speech focused on AI, and how the FBI has been working to shut down criminals who are using it. He focused mainly on cybercrimes, saying that the “IC3, which is our Internet Crime Complaint Center, reported that losses from cybercrime jumped nearly 50% last year, from 6.9 to 10.3 billion” in a year.
Wray again highlighted cases in which the FBI had successfully shut down cybercrimes, and pointed to the dangers posed by countries such as China and Russia who have previously used state-sponsored hackers to interfere in US matters, saying of China that “there was no threat that blew [him] away more coming into this job after just a couple months than the threat posed by the Chinese government.”
During the Q&A portion of the program, Wray declined to comment on a recent report by the Washington Post that stated that the Department of Justice had hesitated to prosecute former President Donald J. Trump after the January 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol, saying “I’m not in the business of commenting on different newspapers’ ideas of what did or didn’t happen.”
Wray was also asked about the increased polarization of politics in America, with one reporter specifically inquiring about Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene filing articles of impeachment against him.
Saying he has “enormous respect for Congressional oversight,” Wray noted that his studies of previous FBI directors led him to believe that the FBI has been through similar things before, with the main difference now being “the pervasiveness of social media, 24/7 cable coverage…everybody’s got a microphone regardless of whether they have any facts.” He says he simply focuses “on the work” and looks at things “not like how the pundits and the prognosticators and politicians” do but instead at the results the FBI has achieved.
“We are in an environment these days where people’s standard for whether something is fair or objective or right is whether they like the result,” Wray said. “And that’s a bad place for us to be as a country. Because, if your standard for whether an investigation was fair is whether you like the outcome, or whether an election was fair is whether you like the outcome, or whether a Supreme Court decision was fair is whether you like the outcome, then by definition, you are going to have large swaths of people who are questioning the legitimacy of all of our major institutions.”
