The conference room in the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC had a capacity crowd of staffers on Wednesday afternoon who gathered to listen to their director, Christopher Wray, confirm news they had been dreading. He would go rather than be pushed.
With three years of his ten-year term remaining and Kash Patel already announced as president-elect Donald Trump’s intended replacement, decades of a federal investigative unit that had been determinedly beyond partisan politics was on the brink of a monumental change.
“I’ve 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,” Mr Wray said, adding: “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.”
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The bureau is hardly a sentimental place but there was, reportedly, a standing ovation for Wray and even tears shed as he accepted handshakes from staffers as he left the room.
“This is not easy for me. I love this place. I love our mission and I love our people.”
In January, Wray’s office, if the next president’s wishes are confirmed, will be occupied by a man who shares none of that affection or respect for one of the most storied branches of federal law enforcement. Kash Patel’s rise to prominence is geometrically aligned to his increasingly public loyalism to Donald Trump.
His nomination, at the end of November, came in the middle of a series of cabinet selections which had the bipartisan effect of stunning many veterans of Congress. It was an indirect admission that he intended to fire Wray. Trump was ambivalent in his wording when he was asked about that during his first major post-election interview with NBC News on Sunday.
“Well I cant say I’m, thrilled with him. He invaded my home. I am suing the country over it. He invaded Mar-a-Lago. I’m very unhappy with the things he has done. Crime is at an all-time high. Migrants are pouring into the country from prisons and mental institutions. I don’t want to be Joe Biden and give you an answer and then do the exact opposite. So I don’t want to do that. What I do want to say is that I certainly cannot be happy with him.”
Under Wray’s leadership, the FBI had carried out several investigations into Trump following his first term in office, including the highly publicised search of his Florida estate in 2022, which led to the classified documents criminal proceedings.
Trump responded to confirmation that Wray intends to go with a Truth Social post describing Wednesday as “a great day for America”, that will “end what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice”.
He reiterated his belief that the FBI had “used their vast powers to threaten and destroy many innocent Americans, some of which will never be able to recover from what has been done to them”. He ended the post by describing Patel as “the most qualified nominee to lead the FBI in the agency’s history”.
“I would have loved to see him stay on for his full term,” Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Wray on Wednesday night.
“Christopher Wray is someone who was first appointed by George Bush to be head of criminal [division of the department of justice] after 9/11. He then went on to serve with great distinction, appointed by president Trump himself, served through president Biden’s term. I understand his decision. He wants to leave on his own terms and there was no sign out there that president-elect Trump would keep him on. In this way he gets a month to say goodbye to his frontline workers; he supervises over 30,000 people across the country. And also to put his affairs in order and I think it was the right thing to do given the remarks the president-elect has made.”
The resignation means that Trump has effectively ended the leadership of the previous two FBI leaders. In 2017, he fired James Comey, whose late intervention in the 2016 presidential election, when he announced a reopening of an email-investigation of Hillary Clinton 11 days out from the election, is regarded as a significant moment in that campaign.
Trump replaced Comey with Wray; his confirmation was approved by every single Republican in the Senate. But Trump grew increasingly annoyed by and hostile to Wray’s obvious intention to execute the role in a way which did not bow to the whims of the president.
Kash Patel, who sells Trump-related merchandise and has even penned a children’s book portraying the president-elect as a king and he himself as the king’s wizard, has a vision of the FBI that is in keeping with the election promise to gut Washington of its bureaucratic waste.
Patel has said that he wants to make the FBI headquarters a “museum of the deep state” and to send its 7,000 employees “across America to chase criminals”. He has threatened to “go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media”.
Wray’s announcement, on a stormy, wet December day in Washington, comes during a blitz of transition in thousands of federal offices. But it leaves the Bureau in arguably its most parlous state since the revelations that came in the wake of the death of J Edgar Hoover, who had reigned over its offices from 1924 until 1972.
The ten-year term limit was designed to both limit any repeat of such individual control but to also ensure a degree of continuity and independence, impervious to administration changes in the White House. Although Wray was seen to be in an impossible position, there will remain a belief that he should have tried to defend the independence of the office by remaining in his role and forcing the new president to fire him.
Despite Trump’s claims, the counter view of Kash Patel is that he is too inexperienced for the role he has been nominated for. Patel spent Wednesday meeting with senators in their offices in the Capitol building. He still has to persuade his Republican colleagues that he is the man to lead the FBI into a new era. It will certainly be uncharted. And the vacancy is there now.
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