Soon after Trump lost the 2020 election, he called Wray and said he was not going to fire him, even as he moved to dismiss other high-profile officials, such as his defence secretary, Mark Esper.
But Trump, whose fury with the FBI deepened after the agency executed a search warrant in August 2022 at his Florida club and home, Mar-a-Lago, in search of classified documents, suggested earlier this year that Wray resign. In declaring well before being sworn into office that he wanted a new director, Trump was pushing Wray to resign before he could be fired.
“This is firing the FBI director,” said one law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorised to discuss the matter.
Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray.Credit: AP
A statement released by the bureau after Trump’s announcement did not address whether Wray would step aside.
“Every day, the men and women of the FBI continue to work to protect Americans from a growing array of threats,” the statement said. “Director Wray’s focus remains on the men and women of the FBI, the people we do the work with and the people we do the work for.”
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“It is extremely dangerous to have a change in an FBI director just after a change in administration,” the official said, referring to the long-standing policy of keeping the cycle for appointments of a director separate from the presidential election cycle and partisan politics.
Although a number of Trump’s allies expected him to announce a replacement for Wray, many did not believe he would ultimately select Patel, whose confirmation process before the Senate could be rigorous. Trump had at one point been considering making Missouri attorney-general Andrew Bailey FBI director, according to two people briefed on the matter.
Current and former law enforcement officials have worried that a second Trump term would feature an assault on the independence and authority of the FBI and the Justice Department, and for many of them, Patel’s ascension to the director’s role would confirm the worst of those fears.
Patel laid out his vision for wreaking vengeance on the FBI and the Justice Department in a book, Government Gangsters, calling for clearing out the top ranks of the bureau, which he called “a threat to the people”. He also wrote a children’s book, The Plot Against the King, telling through fantasy the story of the investigations into Trump’s 2016 campaign’s possible ties to Russians.
Donald Trump has described Kash Patel as “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter...”Credit: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
He has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute journalists once he is back in government, saying he would “follow the facts and the law”.
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
In planning to remove Wray from atop the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, Trump would be echoing one of the most defining acts of his first term, his dismissal of James Comey as FBI director as investigations of Trump associates began to heat up.
That act led to the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller, who spent nearly two years examining the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia. Trump wanted to fire Mueller, but he backed off when the White House counsel threatened to quit.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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