FBI Director announces that he will resign at the end of Joe Biden’s term

FBI Director Chris Wray will leave his post early next year, the office said Wednesday, after Republican President-elect Donald Trump expressed his intention to fire the veteran official and replace him with firebrand Kash Patel.

Wray said at a town hall meeting that he would resign “after weeks of thinking it through,” three years before completing a 10-year term marked by high-profile, politically charged investigations, including the one that led to two separate Trump indictments last year. .

Trump and his hardline allies turned on Wray, and the FBI in general, after agents conducted a court-approved search of Trump’s Florida resort in 2022 to recover classified documents he had kept afterward. to leave office.

The raid triggered one of two federal prosecutions Trump faced while he was out of power, neither of which went to trial.

Trump denied any wrongdoing and described all cases against him as politically motivated. Federal prosecutors ended their efforts after his election, citing long-standing Justice Department policy not to prosecute a sitting president.

Trump said in the recent interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “I can’t say I’m thrilled with him. He invaded my house”, in reference to the search that the FBI did two years ago on his property of Florida, Mar-a-Lago, searching for classified documents from Trump’s first term as president.

Trump’s Republican allies joined him in alleging that the FBI had become politicized, although there is no evidence that Democratic President Joe Biden interfered in its investigative processes.

Trump himself had appointed Wray, also a Republican, for 10 years in 2017, after firing his predecessor James Comey, with whom the then president fell out over the FBI investigations into the alleged contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia.

But the soft-spoken director rarely seemed to go out of his way to publicly confront the White House.

In fact, Wray was quick to distance himself from the FBI’s Russia investigation and his leadership team.

On the same day as a harshly critical inspector general report on that investigation, Wray announced more than 40 corrective actions to the FBI process. for requesting secret national security surveillance orders. He said mistakes made during the Russia investigation were unacceptable and helped tighten controls for investigations of candidates for federal office.

FBI officials actively announced those changes to make clear that Wray’s leadership had ushered in a different era at the agency.

However, even then, Wray’s criticism of the investigation was occasionally measured (he disagreed, for example, with Trump’s characterization of it as a “witch hunt”) and there were other instances, particularly in response to specific questions, on which he memorably broke with the White House.

Last December, he said there was “no indication” that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election, countering a frequent talking point at the time from Trump. When the Trump White House blessed the declassification of materials related to the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide, Wray expressed displeasure.

Wray angered Trump for saying that Antifa was a movement and an ideology, but not an organization. Trump had said he would like to designate the group as a terrorist organization.

Wray described in detail the Russian efforts to interfere in 2020 elections that Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden, even though Trump and senior officials in his administration, including his attorney general and national security adviser, maintained that China was the strongest threat.

Wray also said the FBI had seen no evidence of widespread voter fraud, a claim Trump repeatedly insisted on.

Throughout his tenure, Wray said he followed the law and strove to impartially carry out the functions of the FBI. During a 2023 hearing before a House panel, he rejected the idea that he had a partisan Democratic agenda, noting that he had been a lifelong Republican.

“The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems a little far-fetched to me, given my personal background,” Wray said.

By resigning rather than waiting to be fired, Wray is trying to avoid a collision with the new Trump administration that he says would have further embroiled the FBI “deeper in the fray.”

“My goal is to keep the focus on our mission: the indispensable work you do on behalf of the American people every day,” Wray told agency employees.

“In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the agency deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values ​​and principles that are so important to the way we do our work.”

Before being named FBI director, Wray worked at prestigious law firm King & Spalding, where he represented former Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., during the “Bridgegate” case. He also led the Justice Department’s criminal division for a period during President George W. Bush’s administration.

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