FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed Wednesday that he will step down from his post next month, ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration, creating a vacancy that the incoming president intends to fill with loyalist Kash Patel.
Wray reportedly told FBI employees at an agency town hall that he would step down in January, nearly two and a half years before the expiration of the 10-year term he was sworn in for in August 2017. The news of his announcement was first reported by The New York Times.
In prepared remarks, he said he’d had “weeks of careful thought” on the matter and ultimately “decided the right thing for the Bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current Administration in January and then step down.”
“My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day. In my view, 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,” he said.
The former federal prosecutor, a Yale Law School graduate who ran the Department of Justice’s criminal division during the George W Bush administration, will be the second FBI director to exit the agency due to Trump’s intervention.
The vacancy Wray filled in 2017 was created months earlier when Trump fired then-director James Comey because of Comey’s refusal to quash investigations into Trump’s allies as well as a probe into the then-president’s 2016 campaign’s potential ties to the Russian government.
Comey was only the second FBI director to be fired from the position since Congress enacted a statute specifying that the head of the nation’s preeminent federal law enforcement agency could serve a single 10-year term.
Like his predecessor, Wray’s exit comes after clashes with Trump over criminal probes into his conduct, specifically the August 2022 FBI search of Trump’s home that led to criminal charges against Trump for allegedly unlawfully retaining national defense information and obstructing justice.
Trump complained about the court-authorized search and blamed Wray for it in an interview with NBC News last week, telling Meet the Press host Kristen Welker: “He invaded Mar-a-Lago ... I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done.”
In a post on Truth Social, the president-elect celebrated news of Wray’s impending departure, calling it a “great day for America” that would “end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice.”
Trump, who in 2017 said Wray would “serve his country as a fierce guardian of the law and model of integrity,” added “I just don’t know what happened to him” and accused the FBI of having “illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me,” and doing “everything else to interfere with the success and future of America.”
While Wray has cultivated a reputation for being nonpartisan during his time atop the bureau, his proposed successor, Patel, is an extremely partisan figure who rose to prominence through his loyalty toTrump.
He has vowed to root out what he calls “the deep state” — a term often used by Republicans to describe nonpartisan civil servants who cross Trump or his allies — by firing FBI leadership, moving its headquarters out of Washington and instituting loyalty tests for personnel.
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland praised Wray for having “served our country honorably and with integrity for decades, including for seven years as the director of the FBI under presidents of both parties.”
Garland said Wray has “worked tirelessly to protect the American people and to lead an agency of 38,000 dedicated public servants” with “principled leadership” in a “heightened threat environment” during his tenure as director.
“The Director of the FBI is responsible for leading the federal law enforcement agency that serves as the connective tissue among the intelligence community, state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, and our international law enforcement partners. And the Director of the FBI is responsible for protecting the independence of the FBI from inappropriate influence in its criminal investigations. That independence is central to preserving the rule of law and to protecting the freedoms we as Americans hold dear,” he said.
Wray, Garland added, “has done that job with integrity and skill.”
