FBI Director Christopher Wray is among the high-ranking senior officials who are expected to be ousted as part of a massive agency overhaul by President-elect Donald Trump when he assumes office in January, Newsweek reported Friday.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate is also expected to be part of the exodus, according to the report.
Trump took aim at the FBI during his campaign, saying he wanted to clean house at an FBI he has said is filled with politically motivated officials.
Wray, appointed by Trump in 2017 for 10 years, had intended to serve out his full term, according to the report. However, Trump demanded his immediate resignation after Wray testified before Congress that Trump’s ear injury from an assassination attempt in July might not have come from a bullet. The FBI later said in a statement that a bullet did indeed strike Trump’s ear.
“That was the first time for me that I lost confidence in him,” former FBI agent Stuart Kaplan told Newsweek. “And then I really started to question his integrity.”
Former FBI agents and other law enforcement analysts who spoke to Newsweek were divided over whether Wray would “save face” and resign prior to Trump taking office.
“I think Wray will be gone,” Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director, told Newsweek. “Whether he’s wise enough to pull himself out or not, I don’t know.”
Patrick Eddington, Cato Institute senior fellow, told Newsweek it’s unlikely Wray would “throw in the towel preemptively” and resign, adding that the director and Abbate and a host of others at the top will be “ejected, essentially,” once Trump takes office.
One person under consideration for Wray’s job is Trump adviser Kash Patel, according to reports. Patel is a former House and National Security Council staffer who worked for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Matt Gaetz, whom Trump nominated for attorney general, is among congressional Republicans who have joined Trump in repeatedly accusing the Department of Justice of being weaponized against Trump and conservatives in general. Some have said the FBI, an agency under the DOJ, should be defunded or disbanded all together.
“And now we’ve seen in the last four years under Biden and [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray, I think the reputation of the FBI has gone tremendously downhill because it’s become clear to just about everybody, including me and my former colleagues, that the FBI became very biased going after conservatives, pro-lifers, allies of Trump, all of that,” Fuentes told Newsweek.
Eddington said the only question is how deep the purge will be.
“Will they actually try to go after [lower-level] civil servants. Here’s where we’re talking about people who would actually be running FBI field offices. I want to see whether or not they actually reach down that far. I believe they will,” he told Newsweek.
