FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday defended the bureau in his opening remarks before a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.
Republican members of the committee, led by Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, are moving forward with an investigation into what they claim has been the politicization of the nation's top law enforcement and investigative agency, particularly in the investigations of former President Donald Trump.
"The work the men and women of the FBI do to protect the American people goes way beyond the one or two investigations that seem to capture all the headlines," Wray told committee members in his opening remark, explaining how the agency has been investigating the Chinese government and working to target drug cartels and the trafficking of illegal substances, including in Jordan's Ohio district.
"That's just scratching the surface; the men and women of the FBI work tirelessly every day to protect the American people from a staggering array of threats," Wray said while specifying recent arrests "throughout the area around Marion, Ohio" that led to the arrests of 31 people involved in trafficking cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl.
"In that one investigation, run out of the FBI's two-man office in Mansfield [Ohio], we worked with partners from multiple local police departments and sheriff's offices to take kilograms of fentanyl off of Marion streets — enough lethal doses to kill the entire population of Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati combined," Wray said. "And that's just one investigation led by one small office in Ohio."
Wray added that the FBI's 38,000 employees are working hard every day to protect the American people.
"Take violent crime," he said. "Last year alone, working shoulder to shoulder with our partners and state and local law enforcement, the FBI arrested more than 20,000 violent criminals and child predators. That's an average of almost 60 bad guys taken off the streets per day, every day."
There are also "thousands of active investigations" into the Chinese government's efforts to steal U.S. secrets, "rob our businesses of their ideas and innovation and repress freedom of speech right here in the United States," said Wray.
Wray also said the FBI leads more than 750 task forces made up of more than 6,000, state and local task force officers (TFOS).
"Each of those TFOS represents an officer, a deputy, or an investigator that a local police chief sheriff or state superintendent was willing to send our way, certainly not because they didn't have enough work to do in their own department, but because they saw the tremendous value that our FBI led task forces bring," said Wray.
Further, he said, the FBI "continues to attract applicants in record numbers," with the number of Americans applying tripling since he was appointed by then-President Trump in August 2017.
"The thing that unites them all is a commitment to public service, a willingness to put others above themselves, and that is true from the bottom of the organization to the top," said Wray. "Just taking our top eight leaders as an example, they all came up through the bureau as line agents.
"They've worked in 21 different field offices and have a combined 130 years of field experience. They include a West Point grad, veterans of the Army, Air Force, and Marines as well as a former police officer and a state trooper, and not a single one is a political appointee."