Countering strident attacks on his agency from the president who appointed him, FBI Director Chris Wray on Thursday defended the tens of thousands of people who work with him and declared, “There is no finer institution, and no finer people, than the men and women who work there and are its very beating heart.”

Wray provided his first public defense of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency since a weekend of Twitter attacks by President Donald Trump, who called the FBI a biased institution whose reputation is “in Tatters — worst in History!” and urged Wray to “clean house.”

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