It's time now for our daily Bloomberg Law Brief, exploring legal issues in the news. And Today, Bloomberg Law host During Grasso discussed his confirmation hearing sort President Trump's picked a lee the FBI, Christopher Ray. She speaks with Benjamin Wagner, a partner at Gibson Dunn and former U S Attorney for the Eastern District of California. Benjamin did Ray pass the loyalty test to the rule of law that the
senators seemed to be giving him, Well, I think so. Um. Obviously, he needed to convey that he understood this was a very unusual situation that he was in. The circumstances surrounding the departure of the prior director, the ongoing Special Council investigation UH puts Mr Ray in a very, uh, sort of unusual situation going in as FBI director, And I think he needed to convey that he understood that that
he was going to be independent by the book. UH. And I think he did a good job of responding to questions from both sides of the aisle in reassuring senators that that he understood the situation and and he
could be relied upon to be nonpartisan and independent. Ray was asked so many questions as hypotheticals that were really based on things that James Coby did or said, for example, his press conference on Hillary Clinton's email investigation and his testimony that Trump asked him to drop the investigation into former National Security advisor Michael Flynn. What was your reaction to the senators taking the facts and putting them into
hypotheticals for him, Well, you know, it's not surprising. There's always a little bit of this kind of game that goes back and forth um at uh confirmation hearings for these kinds of positions. You saw it in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing recently, where that nominees understandably don't want to be sort of on the record talking about facts that are either outside their uh their personal knowledge or
talk about things that may come before them. Uh, and they may have to, you know, be be held to opinions that were expressed earlier when they didn't know all
the facts, and so they're very careful about that. And for that reason, Uh, you know, senators have been through this rigmarole before, and so I think they approach it in the sort of a hypothetical uh in order to get the person talking, so they can get a sense of the person without UH forcing a question that they know that the nominee will not answer, as Benjamin Wagner, a partner at Gibson and Dunn, speaking with Bloomberg La
host Jun Grass. So you can listen to Bloomberg Law weekdays at one pm Wall Street Time here on Bloomberg Radio and among the top legal stories from Bloomberg Law, A federal judge in Hawaii has vastly expanded the list of relatives exempt from President Trump's travel ban. The ruling is the latest pushback in the fight set off by the band the President first attempted in January, will culminate with arguments in front of the U. S. Supreme Court
in October. And that's this morning's Bloomberg Lawbrary. If you can find more illegal news at Bloomberg Law dot com and Bloomberg BNA dot com. Attorneys will find exceptional legal research and business development tools there as well. Visit Bloomberg Law dot com and Bloomberg BNA dot com for more information.