FBI director Christopher Wray has announced that he will step down at the end of President Biden’s term in January. Wray delivered the message in a townhall-style meeting with bureau employees earlier today. “After weeks of careful thought,” Wray said, according to a statement provided by the FBI, “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.”
Wray was appointed as head of the nation’s primary law enforcement agency in 2017, after President Donald Trump fired James Comey over concerns with how he had handled the Clinton email scandal. More recently, Trump stated that he was not “thrilled” about Wray because of his decision to “invade Mar-a-Lago,” referring to the agency’s raid on Trump’s Florida resort in 2022 which uncovered a trove of classified documents being kept there, leading to federal charges in 2023.
Wray’s announcement that he is stepping down formalizes what many were already expecting, as the now president-elect Trump had already publicly stated his decision to appoint Kash Patel as head of agency once in office. “I mean, it would sort of seem pretty obvious that if Kash gets in,” Trump said recently in an interview with NBC News, “he’s going to be taking somebody’s place, right?” Patel is a former Department of Justice prosecutor who worked with Congressman Devin Nunes during Trump’s first term. Patel is credited with drafting the “Nunes memo,” which alleged that the FBI did not follow proper procedure in seeking a warrant to wiretap a Trump staffer during his 2016 campaign. He also publicly asserted that Trump had declassified broad sets of sensitive documents before leaving office after the Mar-a-Lago raid, however, when summoned to testify before a federal grand jury on the matter he invoked the 5th amendment.
Patel has embraced a number of conspiracy theories associated with Trump supporters over the years. In the wake of the 2020 election, a DOJ official testified that Patel pushed for him to investigate claims that Italian military satellites had altered electronic votes from Trump to Biden. Patel was also on the board of Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, where he amplified outlandish claims made by QAnon accounts. Patel has participated in interviews on podcasts friendly to the Trump-supporting conspiracy movement, saying that “there’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” and that QAnon has “been so right on so many things.”
Wray has yet to make a public announcement regarding his decision to step down.
