Trump's election may usher in leadership change at FBI

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump lavished Christopher Wray with praise when he named him FBI director in 2017, introducing him as an “impeccably qualified individual” and a “model of integrity.”

So much has changed in the seven years since.

With Trump poised to reclaim the White House, Wray’s days as director may be numbered. Though the director's job carries a 10-year term, Trump’s blistering and repeated criticism of his own appointee raises the likelihood that Trump would either replace Wray upon taking office or that Wray would leave on his own to avoid being fired. Such a move would give Trump a chance to reshape the FBI's leadership in his own image at a time when he's threatened to pursue his own political adversaries.

“He enjoys the work, he's committed to the bureau, he's an outstanding public servant — but I don't think he's going to lobby for the job,” Gregory Brower, a former FBI official who served as director of congressional affairs until 2018, said of Wray.

"If the new president wants to replace him, then that’s what the new president’s going to do,” he added. “Based on what Trump has said in the past, I think it’s likely we’ll see that.”

Trump's transition office did not return an email seeking comment. An FBI official said Wray was continuing to oversee the bureau's day-to-day operations — including visiting the FBI’s election command post multiple times this week — and was planning with his team to lead the workforce into the next year. The official, an executive who interacts with Wray on a day-to-day basis, was not authorized to discuss the details publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Trump hasn't spoken publicly about Wray in recent days but he's known to take a particularly keen interest in the FBI and Justice Department in part because his first term and post-presidency life were shadowed by investigations, including two that resulted in indictments now expected to wind down. The positions are being closely watched because whoever occupies them may be confronted with Trump's stated desire to seek retribution against opponents, even though longstanding guardrails would complicate such plans, and because the FBI is facing more global threats than any time in recent memory.

A recent Supreme Court opinion conferring broad immunity on former presidents could also embolden Trump to demand particular Justice Department investigations, as occurred in his first term.

Wray was nominated in June 2017 to replace James Comey, the FBI director Trump inherited from President Barack Obama and then fired amid an investigation into ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign. A well-regarded Republican lawyer who served as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, Wray was recommended to Trump by Chris Christie after representing the then-New Jersey governor in an investigation into the closing of the George Washington Bridge.

“In 2017, the president wanted an FBI director with bipartisan support and a reputation for integrity who would maintain a low public profile and defer to the Attorney General,” Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general at the time of Wray’s appointment, said in an email to AP this week,

It didn't take long for Wray to provoke Trump's ire.

In 2018, he broke with Trump over the administration's declassification of information related to FBI surveillance of former campaign aide Carter Page. He later angered Trump over congressional testimony that stressed the election interference threat from Russia at a time when Trump was focused on China. He also described antifa, an umbrella term for leftist militants, as an ideology rather than an organization, contradicting Trump, who wanted to designate it as a terror group.

Wray's job was in a precarious position at the time of Trump's 2020 election loss, with Trump declining before the election to give Wray a vote of confidence and his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., posting online that Wray was working to “protect corrupt Democrats.” But the president left him in place.

Trump's view of FBI leadership soured even further in 2022 after agents searched his Florida home for classified documents, an action that resulted in an indictment on dozens of charges. This past summer, Trump faulted the FBI for not immediately confirming he'd been struck by a bullet during an assassination attempt and even took to social media to call on Wray to resign after the director vouched for President Joe Biden 's mental acuity during a congressional hearing.

Through it all, Wray has preached to the workforce a “keep calm and tackle hard” mantra, navigating the FBI through a politically turbulent time that in addition to Trump's criticism has also included stinging and sometimes misleading attacks from congressional Republicans over everything from the Hunter Biden investigation to government surveillance.

Wray has sought when possible to avoid conflict and maintain a by-the-book approach, striving over the years to appear responsive to congressional demands as well as determined to fix past missteps. Earlier in his tenure, for instance, he announced dozens of corrective steps following surveillance errors identified in the Trump-Russia investigation and remains open about the FBI's shortcomings during that inquiry.

“I look not just at the one or two investigations being discussed breathlessly on social media or cable news but at the impact that we’re having across the board to protect the American people,” Wray said in an interview AP with last year.

The normally mild-mannered director has also tried to forcefully defend his workforce from what he sees as illegitimate attacks, decrying as ludicrous the notion that the bureau was involved the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and calling it “insane” to suggest that he harbored anti-conservative bias.

Replacing Wray before the end of his 10-year term, a tenure intended to keep the FBI free from the influence of presidential politics, would be a departure from the norm. Obama, for instance, not only kept Robert Mueller as FBI director but asked him to stay on for an extra two years even though Mueller was a Bush appointee. Trump initially kept Comey in the job but fired him in May 2017, saying he was thinking of “this Russia thing” — a reference to the Russia investigation.

It's unclear who might be in line to replace Wray if he goes, but some candidates interviewed for the post after Comey's firing — including Adam Lee, the former top agent in Richmond, and William Evanina, the U.S. government's former top counterintelligence executive — could again be considered.

Frank Montoya, a former FBI senior official, said he was concerned that Trump was seeking someone willing to “kiss the ring” and adhere to his wishes.

“This is all about seizing control of the apparatus from the get-go,” he said.