Former FBI Director Christopher Wray is now facing a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, thanks to a new filing from the Oversight Project—a D.C.-based watchdog group. The group is accusing Wray of lying to Congress and obstructing not one, but two investigations into explosive FBI misconduct.
At the heart of the allegations: the FBI’s role in crafting a now-infamous memo that targeted Catholic Americans as potential domestic threats, and the agency’s apparent efforts to bury an investigation into a Chinese mail-in ballot scheme. These aren’t minor missteps—they’re serious accusations that strike at the core of the bureau’s credibility.
Oversight Project President Mike Howell told Fox News Digital that the criminal referral zeroes in on two specific instances where Wray may have misled Congress—his testimony about the infamous “Richmond memo” that exposed anti-Catholic bias inside the FBI’s Virginia field office, and his comments on a Chinese scheme to distribute fraudulent driver’s licenses ahead of the 2020 election.
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Back in July 2023, Wray appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and downplayed the FBI’s memo that outrageously flagged traditional Catholics as possible domestic extremists. That memo, which came out of the Richmond field office, caused national outrage—and for good reason. But according to Howell, Wray’s testimony may not have been just misleading—it may have crossed the line into criminal territory.
“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which is a single product by a single field office, which as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” Wray said in his testimony—which the Oversight Project says is false, or misleading at best.
Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., pressed Wray on the Richmond memo and so-called “Trump questionnaire,” which was circulated at the FBI and asked about allegiance to the president and whether agents had attended any protests or rallies associated with 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 pointed to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley’s opening remarks from a June hearing on Biden-era “cover-ups,” in which Grassley 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. The referral also notes that this remark by Grassley belies Wray’s testimony suggesting a one-off incident.
“And more FBI field offices were involved than we’d been led to believe,” Grassley, R-Iowa, said.
A second Richmond memo similar to the first that went unreleased following the backlash was part of a partially redacted series of documents Grassley’s committee transmitted to FBI Director Kash Patel in June. It stated 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.”
In a separate statement, the Oversight Project blasted Wray’s congressional testimony as misleading, pointing out that he “failed to reveal the scope of the memo’s production and dissemination” and “failed to reveal the existence of a second, draft product on the same topic intended for external distribution to the whole FBI.” That draft memo, they noted, “was intended for distribution as a Strategic Perspective Executive Analytic Report (‘SPEAR’). It was clearly a separate product.”
According to the Oversight Project, Wray’s statements may have crossed legal lines, specifically alleging violations such as obstruction of congressional proceedings, perjury, and making false statements.
Fox News Digital reached out to a phone number connected to Wray but, unsurprisingly, received no response.
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