federal judge in louisiana. here s his exchange with republican congressman mike johnson on wednesday. the fbi made the social media platforms pull that information off the internet if it came from conservative sources. they did this under the guise that it was disinformation. can you, can you define what disinformation is? our focus is on malign, foreign disinformation; that is, foreign hostile actors who engage in mr. wray to use our social media platforms i have to stop you for time. that s not accurate. you need to read this court opinion, because you re in charge of enforcing it. paul: joining the panel, columnists dan henninger, kim strassel and bill mcgurn. so, bill, first, let s start with that exchange on disinformation. what do you make of the fbi director s answers? i think he answered very weakly. he came across as a man who either hadn t read the material as congressman johnson suggested, or he just didn t take the whole oversight process very
washington bureaucracies that get built up over the years. and i think part of the frustration you hear from republicans is they don t know quite what to do about it to get better leadership and stop this interference with politics in the elections of 2020, 2016. i mean, how do you get your arms around it if you, you re really a member of congress and you want to make them work better many. well, it s extremely difficult. this would be true of, say, the transportation department, the commerce department, hhs, big, sprawling bureaucracies. well, over time the fbi has itself become a big, sprawling bureaucracy. and they have a big assignment. director wray is right that they, a lot that they are doing. cyber crimes against the united states are real, we learned this past week the commerce secretary gina raimondo was hacked by the chinese before she went to beijing paul: she s going to beijing. before she went to beijing. so it is a real problem. but the fact is, it is damaging
for the director of the fbi to sit there and say he s not quite aware of what s going on in an area like this interaction between the fbi and social media companies over conservative opinion on social media. and it suggests that that i don t think it s going to change so long as joe biden paul: right. it s going to require a new administration, a new fbi director, a new attorney general. but the next fbi director is going to have to be willing to get in there and do s&p some realignment of the do some realignment of the management structure. bill mcgurn has suggested it should be a former fbi agent, not just a lawyer. i agree with bill on that. but it s going to be a big the problem is the americans estimation of an important institution like the fbi, thiess half of the population, is in decline. that s not good. paul: bill, we only have about 30 seconds, but what about some of the ideas republicans are floating to cut the salary of christopher wray or defund, cut the funding
hard working fbi employees. no bundies agrees with that. they do great no one disagrees with that. they do great work every day. but what holds these scandals together is they all came from the top of the fbi. they re all happening out of headquarters, they re all happening because of decisions that were made much like what happened in crossfire hurricane to centralized cases in d.c., take them out of field offices where these probes then become much more subject to political interference. and we ve had some recent whistleblower testimony and testimony in front of congress talking about that with regards to decisions that were made to centralize the mar-a-lago raid at donald trump s house rather than leave it to miami. and that was my big takeaways. christopher wray, he talks a lot about the employees and how they deserve more respect, but it s the leadership of the fbi that is failing all of those hard working fbi employees. paul: dan, over the years you ve given a lot of thought to
as congressman johnson suggested, or he just didn t take the whole oversight process very seriously. he was corrected, i think, three times based on what the judge found, that he was making allegations the that weren t true such as that this was only about foreign disinformation. there were a lot of ordinary americans who had their posts taken down. i think he, he just kind of showed defiance to congress and kept bizarrely pointing to recruitment levels to say the fbi is still like it was in days when ephraim zimbalist was on t- [laughter] i think he s living in his own world that way. unfortunately, except for congressman developson, few of them really johnson, few of them really pressed with specific questions. i would have liked to see some on the hunter biden