'Are you protecting the Bidens?' Matt Gaetz grills FBI director on Hunter's Chinese 'shakedown'

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) condemned FBI Director Christopher Wray for his lack of substantial responses after the law enforcement official couldn't answer which FBI employees had been punished for fraudulent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests.

Gaetz hammered the top FBI agent regarding protecting the Biden family in the wake of alleged text messages from Hunter Biden to a Chinese Communist Party official.

Gaetz displayed a WhatsApp message allegedly sent by Hunter Biden that the congressman described as a "shakedown," which was sent to CCP official Henry Zhao in 2017 with the following text:

I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.

"Sounds like a shakedown, doesn't it, Director?" Gaetz asked after reading a portion of the message. "You seem deeply uncurious about it, almost suspiciously uncurious. Are you protecting the Bidens?" Gaetz asked Wray.

"Absolutely not," Wray responded.

"You won't answer the question, and everyone knows why you won't answer, because to the millions of people seeing this, they know it is a shakedown," Gaetz interjected.

The Florida congressman also went after the FBI director for the agency's repeated unlawful uses of FISA requests.

The FBI admitted to 204,000 FISA queries on American citizens in 2022, according to the Daily Mail.

"People were looking themselves up, looking their ex-lovers up. Who has been held accountable or fired as a consequence of the FBI for using the FISA process as their creepy personal snoop machine?" asked Gaetz.

"There have been instances in which individuals have had disciplinary action and they were no longer with —" Wray responded, before Gaetz interrupted, saying, "Name them."

"I can't get into it here, but we can follow back up," Wray stated.

"Don't you see that that's kind of the thing, Director, that you preside over the FBI that has the lowest level of trust in the FBI's history ... the reason is because you don't give straight answers, you give answers that later a court deems aren't true, and then at the end of the day you won't criticize an obvious shakedown when it's directly in front of us," Gaetz said vehemently.

The congressman also cited the inspector general, who said that of 3.4 million FISA inquiries, more than one million were in error.

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