FBI Director Christopher Wray told office staff Wednesday that he plans to resign when President Joe Biden’s term ends in January, an announcement that came a week and a half after the president-elect was elected. Donald Trump said he would nominate loyalist Kash Patel for the position.
Wray told a public meeting that he would resign “after weeks of careful consideration,” three years before the end of a 10-year term marked by high-profile and politically charged investigations, including the one that led to two separate charges. by Trump last year.
Wray’s planned resignation is not unexpected given that Trump had chosen Patel as his director and had repeatedly expressed anger at Wray, including in a television interview that aired Sunday.
Trump called Wray’s resignation “a great day for America” in a post Wednesday on his Truth Social account, adding that it “will end the militarization of what has become known as the Department of Injustice of the United States.”
By resigning rather than waiting to be fired, Wray is trying to avoid a collision with the new Trump administration that he said would have dragged the FBI “deeper into the fray.”
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“My goal is to stay focused on our mission – the essential work you do every day on behalf of the American people,” Wray told agency employees. “In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the Office deeper into the fray, while also reinforcing the values and principles that are so important in how we do our work.” »
Wray was appointed to the post by Trump and began his 10-year tenure — a term intended to protect the agency from the political influence of changing administrations — in 2017, after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey .
Trump had telegraphed his anger at Wray on several occasions. Trump said in his recent interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “I can’t say I’m thrilled with him. He invaded my house,” a reference to the FBI’s search of his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, two years ago, looking for classified documents dating back to Trump’s first term as president.
But the soft-spoken director rarely seemed to go out of his way to publicly confront the White House.
Peter Loge, a political scientist and associate professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, told Global News that Wray’s resignation before Trump’s inauguration was understandable.
“Nobody wants to run an agency where your boss, the president of the United States, doesn’t want you to run it,” he said. “It will be a hostile environment.”
Loge said Trump’s election victory gave him the right to appoint anyone he wanted to his administration and to leadership positions, including at the FBI.
“It’s his show to run,” he said. “It will then be up to voters to decide, in two years during the midterm elections, then in four years during the presidential election, how they think things are going.”
—With additional files from Reggie Cecchini and Sean Boynton of Global
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