The FBI under the Biden administration’s leadership has faced repeated scandals over the last four years, including in the waning days of the administration when a suspected terror attack rocked New Orleans early on New Year’s Day morning.
Outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was nominated by Trump in his first administration, announced last month that he would step down from his post, clearing the path for Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, to rally support for his confirmation process in earnest ahead of Trump’s inauguration this month.
As President Biden’s administration comes to a close, Fox Digital revisits some of the top scandals the FBI has faced in the last four years.
FBI initially reports New Year’s Day attack ‘not a terrorist event’
Chaos broke out on New Orleans’ famed Bourbon Street just after 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day when a truck plowed through crowds of revelers, leaving at least 15 dead and dozens of others injured.
The FBI took the lead on the case and landed in hot water with conservatives and others for initially reporting to the public that the attack was not an instance of terrorism before ultimately backtracking.
‘We’ll be taking over the investigative lead for this event. This is not a terrorist event,’ said New Orleans field office FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Alethea Duncan during a Wednesday morning press conference.
During that same press conference, however, the mayor of New Orleans contradicted Duncan’s comment and minced no words in detailing that the city faced an act of terror.
‘Know that the city of New Orleans was impacted by a terrorist attack. It’s all still under investigation,’ Mayor LaToya Cantrell said.
The FBI soon backtracked from its position that the attack was not an act of terror, releasing statements throughout the day that they were investigating the matter as related to terrorism, including confirming that an ISIS flag was found on the suspect’s vehicle that plowed through the crowds.
‘This morning, an individual drove a car into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing a number of people and injuring dozens of others. The subject then engaged with local law enforcement and is now deceased. The FBI is the lead investigative agency, and we are working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism,’ the FBI said in one of its three statements provided to Fox Digital.
The FBI’s handling of the matter, however, has sparked outrage from elected officials, Trump allies and voters on social media.
‘The FBI has a no-fail mission. There is no room for error. When they fail, Americans die. It’s a necessity that Kash Patel gets confirmed ASAP,’ a source close to Trump told Fox News Digital on Thursday morning.
Other conservatives and Trump allies railed against the FBI on social media, claiming the FBI has focused resources on issues such as DEI training and hiring instead of investigating and preventing crime.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and other conservatives also took issue with the FBI for allegedly responding to the suspect’s home in Texas after the media had already staked out the property.
‘The FBI didn’t show up to the NOLA suspect’s address until 1pm today. We were on scene before. No one came out of the home or answered the door,’ New York Post reporter Jennie Taer posted to X on Wednesday.
Blackburn responded to the Post reporter by saying the FBI had ‘failed’ its mission as the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
‘The fact that a reporter has better intel than the FBI tells us all we need to know. The FBI has failed its core mission,’ Blackburn posted.
The suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was armed with a Glock and a .308 rifle during the attack and was killed after opening fire on police. Jabbar, a 42-year-old U.S. citizen who lived in Texas, is believed to have acted alone, the FBI announced Thursday.
Trump slammed Biden and his administration’s policies for the attack.
‘With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER,’ Trump posted on Truth Social.
Earlier Thursday, when approached for comment on the criticisms of its handling of the attack, the FBI directed Fox News Digital to its three previous statements on the attack that described it as an act of terror but did not comment on the New Orleans’ agent saying Wednesday that the attack was not connected to terrorism.
‘An ISIS flag was located in the vehicle, and the FBI is working to determine the subject’s potential associations and affiliations with terrorist organizations,’ one FBI statement said.
‘The FBI is the lead investigative agency, and we are working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism. We are aggressively running down all leads to identify any possible associates of the subject,’ the statement added.
Trump slams Wray for ‘illegal raid’ on Mar-a-Lago
Approximately 30 armed FBI agents converged on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida in August 2022 to execute a search warrant regarding classified documents in the former president’s possession.
The unprecedented raid included agents rifling through former, and upcoming, first lady Melania Trump’s wardrobe. The agents seized 33 boxes of documents.
‘He invaded my home. I’m suing the country over it. He invaded Mar-a-Lago. I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done. And crime is at an all-time high. Migrants are pouring into the country that are from prisons and from mental institutions, as we’ve discussed. I can’t say I’m thrilled,’ Trump said of Wray during an interview with NBC that aired Sunday.
Earlier this year, it was revealed the Biden administration authorized the use of deadly force during the raid. The jarring revelation added fuel to the fire of conservatives slamming the raid, though the FBI clarified that the same language was used in a similar search warrant for President Biden’s Delaware home.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who called for Wray’s resignation in a scathing letter last month, argued there were ‘serious questions’ about the raid, considering that Trump had been cooperating with investigators with regard to the classified documents.
‘This raid occurred despite serious questions about the need for it. President Trump apparently was cooperating with the investigation, notwithstanding liberal press reports. He voluntarily turned over 15 boxes of documents months before the FBI’s drastic escalation,’ Grassley continued, adding that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never faced such a raid ‘even though she and her staff mishandled highly classified information while using a non-government server.’
Trump, in reaction to Wray’s resignation, again railed against the ‘illegal’ raid on Mar-a-Lago.
‘Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America. They have used their vast powers to threaten and destroy many innocent Americans, some of which will never be able to recover from what has been done to them,’ he wrote on Truth Social.
Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee in July and said he ‘would not call it a raid’ on Mar-a-Lago, instead saying the FBI conducted ‘the execution of a lawful search warrant.’
The FBI’s ‘Richmond memo’ on traditional Catholics
In January 2023, conservative lawmakers slammed an internal FBI memo from the Richmond field office titled ‘Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.’
The memo identified ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic[s]’ as potential ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists’ and said that ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology almost certainly presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development.’
The memo was rescinded, but lawmakers scrutinized Wray as to why Americans were targeted due to their religious beliefs, which defies the U.S. Constitution.
Twenty Republican lawmakers in a letter to Wray last year said the memo ‘singled out traditional Catholics for their pro-life views, accusing RTCs of ‘hostility towards abortion-rights advocates’ in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision.’
‘This specific call out to pro-life views is of even greater concern, considering the slow rate of investigation and response to the violent attacks that a number of pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic Churches have experienced since the Dobbs decision was leaked in May of last year,’ they wrote.
But Wray said at a 2023 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that ‘We do not and will not conduct investigations based on anybody’s exercise of their constitutionally protected religious [expression].’
The FBI also came under fire during Wray’s tenure when the FBI raided a home and arrested a pro-life man in Pennsylvania in 2022.
Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven who would often pray outside a Philadelphia abortion clinic, was arrested at his rural Pennsylvania home in Kintnersville by the FBI. The arrest stemmed from an altercation he had with a Planned Parenthood escort in Philadelphia in October 2021. Houck was accused of pushing the abortion clinic escort, who allegedly verbally harassed Houck’s 12-year-old son outside the clinic.
The Biden administration alleged Houck violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which makes it a federal crime to use force with the intent to injure, intimidate and interfere with anyone because that person provides reproductive health care.
Houck was acquitted by a jury last year after arguing that he was protecting his son. He and his wife, Ryan-Marie, argued that the FBI used excessive force during the arrest, filing a lawsuit against the DOJ this year alleging the arrest followed a ‘faulty and malicious investigation.’
Parents outraged over DOJ targeting school board meetings
The DOJ and FBI were heavily criticized by parents nationwide in 2021 when Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo directing the FBI to use counterterrorism tools related to parents speaking out at school board meetings against transgender-related issues and critical race theory curricula.
The memorandum followed the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sending a letter to President Biden and asking that the federal government investigate parents protesting at school board meetings, claiming school officials were facing threats at meetings.
The NSBA requested that parents’ actions be examined under the Patriot Act as ‘domestic terrorists,’ sparking Garland’s eventual memo, which did not use the phrase ‘domestic terrorist.’
‘After surveying local law enforcement, U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country reported back to Main Justice that there was no legitimate law-enforcement basis for the Attorney General’s directive to use federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources to investigate school board-related threats,’ the House Judiciary Committee stated in an interim report on the memo last year.
Garland testified before the Senate last year that the memo ‘was aimed at violence and threats of violence against a whole host of school personnel,’ not parents ‘making complaints to their school board,’ but the memo set off a firestorm of criticism from parents nonetheless.
‘The premier law enforcement agency of the United States of America, the FBI, was used as a weapon by the DOJ against parents who dared to voice their concerns at the most local level: their school board,’ Moms for Liberty founder Tiffany Justice told Fox News Digital last year.
Allegations of Biden family corruption not investigated
In Grassley’s blistering 11-page letter to Wray last month, he slammed the FBI for acting as an ‘accomplice to the Democrats’ false information campaign’ surrounding his investigation into ‘alleged Biden-family corruption.’
Grassley said the FBI ‘sat on bribery allegations’ against Biden when he served as vice president, as well as Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian officials.
‘Consistent with that FBI failure, yet another glaring example of FBI’s broken promises under your leadership is its inexcusable failure to investigate bribery allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden, while strictly scrutinizing former President Trump. You’ve repeatedly claimed you would ensure the FBI does justice, ‘free of fear, favor, or partisan influence.’ The FBI under your watch, however, had possession of incriminating information against President Biden for three years until I exposed the existence of the record outlining those allegations, but did nothing to investigate it,’ he wrote.
At question in the investigation was an FBI-generated FD-1023 form that allegedly described a multimillion-dollar criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions. Grassley ultimately acquired the document through legally protected disclosures by Department of Justice whistleblowers.
That document reflects the FBI’s interview with a ‘highly credible’ confidential human source who described meetings and conversations they had with an executive of Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings over the course of several years, starting in 2015. Hunter Biden sat on the board of Burisma at the time.
Biden denied the accusations, calling the bribery allegations a ‘bunch of malarkey’ last year.
‘Still, to-date, the DOJ and FBI have neither answered whether they investigated the substance of the FD-1023, nor have they provided an explanation for any effort undertaken to obtain the financial records and other pieces of evidence referenced within the document,’ Grassley wrote to Wray on Monday. ‘This sounds a lot like Director Comey’s leadership of the FBI, which was nothing short of shameful.’
When asked about Grassley’s letter last month, the FBI said it ‘has repeatedly demonstrated our commitment to responding to Congressional oversight and being transparent with the American people.’
‘Director Wray and Deputy Director Abbate have taken strong actions toward achieving accountability in the areas mentioned in the letter and remain committed to sharing information about the continuously evolving threat environment facing our nation and the extraordinary work of the FBI.’
Wray suggests Trump was hit by ‘shrapnel’ during first assassination attempt
Trump faced a shocking assassination attempt in July while giving a speech at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The shooter, perched on the roof of a nearby building, fired a series of shots that grazed Trump’s right ear and wounded two rally attendees. Local father and volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore was fatally struck while protecting his family.
Wray came under criticism regarding the assassination attempt when he appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and cast doubt on whether a bullet actually struck Trump.
‘I think with respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that, you know, hit his ear,’ Wray said at the hearing.
Trump blasted him online for the comment.
‘FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress yesterday that he wasn’t sure if I was hit by shrapnel, glass, or a bullet (the FBI never even checked!), but he was sure that Crooked Joe Biden was physically and cognitively ’uneventful’ – Wrong!’ Trump wrote on Truth Social in July.
’No, it was, unfortunately, a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard. There was no glass, there was no shrapnel. The hospital called it a ‘bullet wound to the ear,’ and that is what it was. No wonder the once storied FBI has lost the confidence of America!’
The FBI later confirmed a bullet, ‘whether whole or fragmented,’ struck Trump.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
