Where Things Stand
The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, told bureau employees on Wednesday that he intended to resign before the Trump administration begins, bowing to the reality that President-elect Donald J. Trump had publicly declared his desire to replace him.
Mr. Wray made the disclosure while addressing employees Wednesday afternoon in remarks that tacitly acknowledged the politically charged position the F.B.I. now faces with an incoming president who openly scorns the agency.
“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.”
The director spoke wistfully about his time at the F.B.I. “This is not easy for me,” he said. “I love this place, I love our mission and I love our people.”
The announcement comes after Mr. Trump said in late November that he intended to nominate Kash Patel, a longtime loyalist, to run the F.B.I., and more than two years before Mr. Wray’s 10-year term would have expired.
Paul Abbate, the deputy F.B.I. director, is set to retire in April but would typically serve as acting director until Mr. Patel is confirmed. It is not clear who would replace Mr. Abbate, the most senior agent in the bureau.
Over more than seven years, Mr. Wray oversaw one of the most consequential and tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history, juggling high-profile criminal investigations of political figures, heated congressional inquiries and two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump.
Even as he fended off Mr. Trump’s relentless criticisms of the F.B.I., Mr. Wray supervised a wide array of national security issues that included terrorism, escalating cyberattacks and threats from geopolitical rivals like China, Iran and Russia. He also had to grapple with a spate of mass shootings and the rise of right-wing extremism while managing an agency with 35,000 employees and a budget of more than $10 billion.
But it was the bureau’s scrutiny of Mr. Trump that almost certainly cut short Mr. Wray’s tenure.
His F.B.I. repeatedly investigated Mr. Trump, including by searching the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 for classified documents, examining his widespread efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and delving into the possible links between his 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence operatives engaged in election interference.
“He invaded Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Trump told NBC News in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done.”
Under Mr. Wray’s watch, agents also investigated the current president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his handling of sensitive records after he left the vice presidency. They undertook several other politically charged cases that made the agency the subject of sharp partisan scrutiny, including its inquiry into Hunter Biden.
In the face of intense political cajoling, second-guessing and condemnation, Mr. Wray frequently urged his agents to “keep calm and tackle hard,” and preached a strict adherence to the investigative process that has been the agency’s calling card for decades.
His apparent successor could not be more different. Mr. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, is a fierce critic of the F.B.I. and has vowed to fire its leadership, empty its headquarters and root out the president-elect’s perceived enemies in what he calls the “deep state.”
“If Kash gets in, he’ll be taking somebody’s place, and that somebody is the man you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said in the interview with NBC News, referring to Mr. Wray.
Mr. Wray became the bureau’s eighth director in August 2017, after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey from the job in 2017 in the middle of the Russia investigation.
At the start, Mr. Trump called Mr. Wray “a man of impeccable credentials.” But the president quickly soured on him.
Mr. Wray withstood extraordinary pressure from Mr. Trump to leverage the powers of law enforcement to damage his perceived enemies and later to play down the threats of right-wing violent extremism and Russian election interference.
The rift between the men grew as Mr. Wray waved off false claims the president peddled about voter fraud and left-wing extremists. His tenure became increasingly tenuous after William P. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020, in part because he had fallen out of favor with the president. Mr. Barr was said to have argued against firing the F.B.I. director, shielding Mr. Wray from Mr. Trump’s fury.
Mr. Trump’s allies also took aim at Mr. Wray, faulting him for not speaking out vociferously against the Russia investigation or the botched wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser.
During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump publicly declared that Mr. Wray should resign, and it was clear his antipathy had only intensified, partly because of the 2022 search of his Florida home.
After an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Butler, Pa., Mr. Trump lashed out at the F.B.I. because the bureau did not definitively say he had been shot in the ear.
“No wonder the once storied F.B.I. has lost the confidence of America!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.
In leaving before Mr. Trump is sworn in, Mr. Wray may avoid the kind of public standoff that marked some firings during the first Trump administration. But the turbulence at the F.B.I. is all but certain to continue if Mr. Patel is confirmed and Mr. Trump tries to make sweeping changes at the agency.
Mr. Trump has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute his perceived enemies, whom he accuses of unfairly prosecuting him. He has also called for investigations of prosecutors, judges and politicians.
In his first term, Mr. Trump sought to weigh in on F.B.I. operations and at times expressed frustration that presidents typically stayed out of the bureau’s business.
“I am not supposed to be involved with the F.B.I.,” Mr. Trump said in 2017. “I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”
Though separated by years, the investigations into Mr. Trump led to the firing and resignation of two F.B.I. directors, highlighting the political perils of scrutinizing the incoming president.
Only a few months into his first term, Mr. Trump abruptly fired Mr. Comey, prompting bureau officials to open an inquiry into whether the president dismissed him to obstruct the Russia investigation. The firing helped spur the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as a special counsel to take over the broader inquiry, intensifying Mr. Trump’s ire toward it.
Just as Mr. Comey’s downfall was in part his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the president to protect him from investigation, Mr. Wray remained quiet when the president promoted politicized narratives about law enforcement, particularly the Russia investigation, and increasingly sought the bureau’s intervention in matters that could help him politically.
Though the president has the authority to fire the F.B.I. director anytime, only one director had been fired in the bureau’s 108-year history before Mr. Trump began his first term. President Bill Clinton fired William S. Sessions in 1993.
Mr. Wray was considered a safe choice to lead the F.B.I. and bring stability to an agency rattled by Mr. Comey’s firing. A former federal prosecutor who defended Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in the so-called Bridgegate scandal, Mr. Wray also served in the upper ranks of the Justice Department under President George W. Bush and helped guide the department through the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Former and current F.B.I. officials said he was the right person for the job, a cross between the laconic and hard-charging Mr. Mueller, who ran the bureau for more than a decade after Sept. 11, and Mr. Comey, whom they viewed as too focused on his public persona.
Mr. Wray was known for his quiet demeanor and relentless focus on following the rules. He kept a lower profile than Mr. Comey, a move calculated in part to avoid the president’s wrath, and his decision to stay out of politics won him the support of current and former F.B.I. agents. But Mr. Trump quickly directed his salvos at Mr. Wray.