FBI Director Chris Wray says he will step down amid Trump plans to replace him

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Dec 11, 2024

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FBI Director Chris Wray on Wednesday announced he plans to steps down as President-elect Trump prepares to replace him once he takes office next month.

In an announcement at an all-hands meeting of FBI employees at its Quantico, Virginia headquarters, Wray said he will leave office when President Biden leaves the White House.

“The right thing for the (FBI) is for me to serve until the end of the current administration in January and then step down,” Wray said. “This is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”

Wray hailed the FBI and sounded wistful about the decision to resign.

“I love this place, I love our mission and I love our people,” he said.

Trump wasted little time cheering the news of Wray’s departure.

“The resignation of Christopher Wray is a great day for America,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “I just don’t know what happened to him.”

Trump has already announced plans to nominate MAGA hardliner Kash Patel as the next FBI director even though Wray has two years left on his 10-year term in office.

“We want our FBI back, and that will now happen,” Trump said. “I look forward to … the process of Making the FBI Great Again can.”

Wray had not previously tipped his hand about whether he would resign of force Trump to fire him, a move that might have underlined the incoming president’s insistence on stamping his personal authority over the FBI.

Wray’s resignation clears one potential obstacle to Patel’s taking over the helm of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency. Patel still needs to win Senate confirmation.

Trump, who showered praise on Wray when he appointed him in 2017, has recently repeatedly slammed Wray as a tool of the so-called “deep state” that he claims has “weaponized” the justice system against himself and his conservative supporters.

The president-elect was particularly angered by the FBI’s role in executing a court-approved search of his Mar-a-Lago home that turned up hundreds of classified documents he improperly took with him after the end of his first term.

Wray was appointed after Trump fired his predecessor James Comey over his involvement in the investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

The FBI director post was given a single 10-year term by Congress in a set of reforms in the 1970s after the perceived abuses of longtime chief J. Edgar Hoover.

In the pre-Trump era, the position was considered to have significant independence from the president, but Trump has made it clear that he believes the FBI should act at his direction.

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