In this House of lies, there’s a conspiracy around every corner

By Dana Milbank

An honest man visited the House of lies this week. He did not like what he found there.

“Insane.” “Absurd.” “Ludicrous.” Those are the actual words FBI Director Christopher Wray used to describe House Republicans’ crackpot conspiracy theories.

“The American people fully understand,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) informed Wray at Wednesday’s hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, “… that you have personally worked to weaponize the FBI against conservatives.”

Right. Hageman, the election denier who ousted Liz Cheney in a primary, would have you believe that Wray — senior political appointee in the George W. Bush Justice Department, clerk to a noted conservative judge, contributor to the Federalist Society, Donald Trump-appointed head of the FBI — is part of a conspiracy to persecute conservatives. “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” he replied.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), told Wray that his FBI “suppressed conservative-leaning free speech” on topics such as the unconfirmed theory that covid-19 resulted from a lab leak in China.

“The idea that the FBI would somehow be involved in suppressing references to the lab-leak theory is somewhat absurd,” Wray answered, pointing a finger, “when you consider the fact that the FBI was the only — the only — agency in the entire intelligence community to reach the assessment that it was more likely than not that that was the explanation for the pandemic.”

And several Republicans on the panel floated the slander that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection was an inside job perpetrated by the FBI.

“This notion that somehow the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was part of some operation by FBI sources and agents is ludicrous,” Wray responded, “and is a disservice to our brave, hard-working, dedicated men and women.”

Good for him. But here’s what’s especially insane, absurd and ludicrous: No matter how many refutations Wray and others provide, Republicans are convincing people to believe their lies — and they are proud of the deception.

Johnson, the leadoff questioner at Wednesday’s hearing, told Wray about a recent NBC News poll, in which “only 37 percent of registered voters now view the FBI positively,” down from 52 percent in 2018. “That’s a serious decline in the people’s faith, and it’s on your watch,” he told Wray.

Several other Republicans joined Johnson in gloating about the FBI’s poor standing in public opinion. “We’re seeing the polling numbers,” said Rep. Barry Moore (Ala.). “The FBI is tanking.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) taunted: “People trusted the FBI more when J. Edgar Hoover was running the place.”

Reps. Wesley Hunt and Nathaniel Moran, both from Texas, also needled Wray about the FBI’s popularity. “You’re not aware of those numbers?” Moran jeered.

The Republicans are well aware of “those numbers” — because they are the ones who assassinated the reputation of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Support for the FBI isn’t low among all Americans; it’s at rock bottom among Republicans — only 17 percent of whom had a positive view of the FBI in the NBC poll, compared to 58 percent of Democrats.

Now why would that have happened? Well, maybe it’s because they’ve been fed an endless diet of lies and conspiracy theories about the FBI by elected Republicans and their Murdoch mouthpieces. These lies — and similar ones told about the Justice Department, public health agencies, the IRS and even the military — serve Republicans’ short-term interest of discrediting the Biden administration. But the lies are also destroying the right’s support for the most basic functions of government that even conservatives long supported, such as law and order and national defense. Maybe that’s the goal.

Now, the arsonists are admiring the ashes.

When Wray walked into the House Judiciary hearing room this week, he entered a parallel universe. Awaiting him in the audience were three women wearing T-shirts saying “Ashli Babbitt, Murdered by Capitol Police.” A few seats down, next to the woman with the “Biden’s Laptop Matters” phone cover, Ivan Raiklin, a self-styled “Deep State Marauder,” rose to heckle Wray: “Sir, can you stop violating our First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments?” Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) ordered a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, which ended in the women in the Ashli Babbitt T-shirts shouting “justice for all!”

Jordan opened with an ode to paranoia: “American speech is censored. Parents are called terrorists. Catholics are called radicals. And I haven’t even talked about the spying that took place of a presidential campaign or the raiding of a former president’s home.”

Gaetz accused Wray of “protecting the Bidens,” of being “blissfully ignorant as to the Biden shakedown regime,” of “whitewashing the conduct of corrupt people” and of operating a “creepy personal snoop machine” at the FBI.

“Amen!” called out one of the Ashli Babbitt women when Gaetz finished.

Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) accused Wray of a passel of crimes: “unlawful surveillance of American citizens, intimidation of American citizens … potential coverups of convenient political figures and potential set ups of inconvenient political figures.”

They invoked the “Russian collusion hoax” and the Steele dossier. Most sinister were the attempts to pin the Jan. 6 insurrection on the FBI.

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) invoked the conspiracy theory, popular on the far right, that a man named Ray Epps was an undercover FBI agent who instigated the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to discredit Trump. (Epps filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against Fox News for promoting the “fantastical story.”)

“Shame on you!” Nehls said to Wray. Nehls called the Jan. 6 investigation a “political witch hunt against greatest president in my lifetime.” Coming to the defense of people convicted for their actions during the insurrection, he claimed the FBI “is more concerned about searching for and arresting grandma and grandpa for entering the Capitol building that day than pursuing the sick individuals in our society who prey on our children.”

Before the hearing, the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri reported that Republicans planned to screen a video showing the “FBI planting the pipe bombs outside the DNC on Jan. 6.” Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) did screen the video, but he stopped short of fingering the FBI, suggesting only that there was some unspecified conspiracy involving law enforcement. (Massie, no legal scholar, at one point told Wray his behavior “may be lawful, but it’s not constitutional.”)

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) announced that he was “going to make the assumption” that there were “more than 10” FBI informants in the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021. Wray had said no such thing.

Patiently, Wray tried to disabuse the Republicans of their fantasies. No, the FBI doesn’t investigate parents for attending school board meetings. No, there were not undercover FBI agents in the crowd on Jan. 6. Actually, the FBI has opened more investigations into violence by abortion rights supporters than by abortion opponents.

But each time Wray batted down a wacky accusation, Republicans popped up with another.

Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) spoke of a “tyrannical FBI storming the home of an American family.”

Rep. Dan Bishop (N.C.) accused the FBI of being the “agent of a foreign power.”

Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) alleged that the FBI “interfered with the elections in both 2016 and 2020” and that Wray was in “denial” to say otherwise.

And Hageman saw Wray’s FBI doing the “dirty work” of “mass censorship” to “suppress the First Amendment” as part of a supposed “two-tiered justice system that has been weaponized to persecute people.”

It was, to coin a phrase, an “absurd” spectacle to watch this law-and-order conservative being attacked by MAGA lawmakers set on undermining the rule of law. Various House Republicans had already issued demands to “defund the FBI” (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia even sold T-shirts with the slogan), and on the day before the Wray hearing, Jordan, the Judiciary chairman, sent a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (Tex.) requesting that she “eliminate any funding for the FBI that is not absolutely essential.” (For good measure, Jordan also asked her to block some funds for the ATF.)

Were Republicans to succeed, Wray told the Judiciary Committee, they would leave Americans more vulnerable to fentanyl cartels, violent criminals, gangs, sex predators, foreign and domestic terrorists, cyberattacks, and Chinese spies. This is where a government of lies will take us.

The pandemic, thank God, is in the past. But covid disinformation continues to spread unchecked in the House of Representatives.

No one knows for sure how the novel coronavirus came to be. Among the U.S. intelligence community, five agencies believe it emerged from animals, while two (Wray’s FBI, later joined by the Energy Department) think it leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Scientists tend to favor the animal-origin theory, but here, too, opinion is split.

Then, in a reality all their own, there are the Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. They have embraced the lab-leak theory as gospel. Some of them even claim it was a Chinese bioweapon, an idea resoundingly rejected by science. And they accuse U.S. public health officials of an elaborate conspiracy — involving coverups and bribery — to suppress these “facts.”

As I’ve noted before, there ain’t no cure for long covidiocy.

The select subcommittee held a hearing this week, “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up,” to prove their conspiracy theory. They hauled in two scientists (on whose work the National Institutes of Health relied) to accuse them of being involved in a coverup because they argued (and still argue) that the animal-origin theory is probable.

“We as a committee have formed what we feel is most important in understanding all the information that’s brought forward to us, and that information points directly to a lab leak,” Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), a dermatologist, told the virologists.

Greene, whose technical expertise is in Jewish space lasers, suggested that the virus was a Chinese bioweapon and falsely declared that “the [intelligence community] believes that the origin of covid-19 is from the lab. Most of the intelligence community believes that.” She accused the virologists of using “pro-China talking points” and told them “it’s more important to really recognize that it probably came from the lab.”

Next came Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), who as Trump’s White House physician was known as the “candyman” for his liberal dispensing of pills. He advised the virologists that their animal-origin theory was “ridiculous” and that it “sounds like engineering” was responsible for creating the virus — engineering funded by the NIH. “What a lot of people think is going on here is that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins realized that they’d been implicated in the production or in the creation of this virus, and they were doing everything they could, including getting both of you to come on board as tools or vehicles, to undermine that theory.”

Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.), too, blamed human engineering, saying “we can stop gain-of-function research when we admit that that’s where the disease came from.” And the panel’s chairman, Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), proposed that “scientific integrity was disregarded in favor of political expediency, maybe to conceal or diminish the government’s relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Like Wray before the Judiciary Committee, the two scientists, Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and Robert Garry of Tulane University School of Medicine, tried to rebut the wild allegations: “The scientific evidence for this pointing to a single market in the middle of Wuhan is overwhelming.” The grant with which they were allegedly bribed was awarded before the pandemic. The virus on which gain-of-function research was conducted “could not have led to” covid-19. Their own initial suspicion that the virus came from a lab was “unsupported” by the scientific process. Fauci and Collins had no role in the witnesses’ conclusions.

But once again, the evidence hasn’t stopped the conspiracy mongers from convincing the public. A Quinnipiac University poll in March found that 64 percent of voters — and a whopping 87 percent of Republican voters — believe the virus came from a lab leak.

Turn down any corridor in this House of lies, open up any door, and you’re likely to find a new conspiracy theory under development, a new fabrication taking shape.

Take the House Oversight Committee. This week, it emerged that Gal Luft, star “whistleblower” behind the allegations of corruption against President Biden and his family, was indicted on a charge of acting as an illegal arms broker and an unregistered agent for China. Republicans immediately alleged a new conspiracy theory: that the Biden administration was “trying to silence our witnesses” (Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina) and that the timing is not “coincidental” (Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky).

But there was a small problem with the new conspiracy theory: Though the indictment was just unsealed, Luft was charged all the way back on Nov. 1, 2022 — before Republicans even took over the House. It appears his “whistleblowing” came after his indictment.

Or take the National Defense Authorization Act, the sprawling, $886 billion legislation that sets priorities for the U.S. military. It sailed through committee on a 58-1 vote and was on its way to overwhelming passage on the House floor this week.

But then the conspiracy mongers intervened, demanding that the House vote on amendments designed to address all manner of conjured problems that they claimed were making the U.S. military “weak.”

Roy said military recruitment was “in the toilet” because of critical race theory, “a large-scale effort to impose … tyranny over the minds of man.” The Texas Republican, claiming the military had turned into a “social-engineering experiment,” alleged: “The American people I talk to back home don’t want a weak or a woke military.”

Republicans Ralph Norman (S.C.) and Matthew Rosendale (Mont.) each suggested that it was the handling of transgender people that is “weakening” the military. “That’s why we’re down 30 percent in recruitment,” Norman claimed.

And Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who has opposed the flying of the Pride flag, claimed the military is suffering a “loss of focus” because of “woke ideology.”

They seemed not to grasp that, perhaps, military recruitment was off because, as Democratic Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.) put it, “a lot of Republicans are running around talking about how terribly weak our military is.”

Predictably, the debate turned ugly. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) sought to ban “radical gender ideology books” from base libraries, in particular one that describes “pornography and masturbation.” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) claimed his anti-diversity amendment “has nothing to do with whether colored people or black people or anybody can serve.” His reference to “colored people” was struck from the record.

A better leader would have rejected such attempts to besmirch the mighty U.S. military. But McCarthy couldn’t tell the conspiracy peddlers to take a hike. He needs their votes to keep his job. And so he gave them votes on a long list of poison pill amendments — abortion, diversity, transgender rights and more — that instantly turned the defense-authorization bill from a bipartisan triumph into a partisan donnybrook.

Running the House must be exhausting when even the easy things get tripped up by the never-ending lies. It would be so much easier just to tell the truth.