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FBI Director Christopher Wray has signaled his intention to quit his post next month ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, creating a vacancy that Trump intends to fill with loyalist Kash Patel.
Wray reportedly told FBI employees at an agency town hall that he would step down in January, nearly two and a half years before the expiration of the ten-year term he was sworn in for in August 2017.
The former federal prosecutor, a Yale Law School graduate who ran the Department of Justice’s criminal division during the George W Bush administration, will be the second FBI director to exit the agency due to Trump’s intervention.
The vacancy Wray filled in 2017 was created months earlier when Trump fired then-director James Comey because of Comey’s refusal to quash investigations into Trump’s allies as well as a probe into the then-president’s 2016 campaign’s potential ties to the Russian government.
Comey was only the second FBI director to be fired from the position since Congress enacted a statute specifying that the head of the nation’s preeminent federal law enforcement agency could serve a single ten-year term.
More follows…
