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Against the backdrop of mounting pressure, FBI director Christopher Wray is contemplating whether or not to resign as the bureau’s honcho, according to a new report, while Republicans warm up to his potential replacement.
President-elect Donald Trump has made clear his intention to replace Wray, who is seven years into a 10-year term, with FBI director designee Kash Patel and Senate Republicans mostly approving of his calls for new leadership atop the bureau.
In response, Wray, 57, whom Trump tapped for the role in 2017, is thinking about stepping aside “on or before the inauguration,” sources familiar with his mindset told the Washington Times.
The FBI would not confirm that, telling The Post that “Every day, the men and women of the FBI continue to work to protect Americans from a growing array of threats.”
“Director Wray’s focus remains on the men and women of the FBI, the people we do the work with, and the people we do the work for.”
Thus far, the director has been coy about his intention. If he declines to resign early, Trump, 78, will have the authority as president to fire him.
And a growing chorus of Republican lawmakers in Congress believe he should do just that.
“Look at what the FBI has done since he’s been director,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) told The Post Tuesday. “Let’s go back and look at the way they treated Donald Trump and the classified material that he had versus President Biden and the classified material that he had.”
“Those two cases alone will tell you the FBI is compromised because of director Wray,” Mullin said.
The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 after determining that Trump still had classified documents in his possession — despite a lawyer attesting that he didn’t in a written statement weeks prior.
Trump was later charged with 40 counts related to his alleged hoarding of classified documents as well as accusations that he obstructed justice and made false statements — but the case has since been dismissed.
In early 2023, it emerged that Biden retained over two dozen documents with classified markings at his Wilmington, Del., residence and the Washington, DC-based Penn Biden Center.
Biden, 82, was not charged over the matter in part because special counsel Rober Hur concluded it may be difficult to get a jury to overcome the president presenting himself “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The charges against Trump in the document case were tossed out by a judge in July. Following Trump’s victory last month, special counsel Jack Smith moved last month to end his bid to revive that case via an appeal as well.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is seemingly poised to become the next Senate GOP Judiciary Committee chairman, wrote a scathing missive to Wray Monday urging him to step aside.
“For the good of the country, it’s time for you and your deputy to move on to the next chapter in your lives,” Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote in an 11-page letter to Wray, referring to the director and deputy director Paul Abbate.
“[I] must express my vote of no confidence in your continued leadership of the FBI.”
Grassley referenced the Mar-a-Lago raid in his litany of concerns about Wray.
Still, other senators are reticent to lash out at Wray specifically.
“I’m not gonna get involved in that. That’s up to President Trump and director Wray,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters Monday when asked if Wray should resign or be fired.
At the same time, Cornyn lamented what he described as the politicization and weaponization of the bureau over recent years.
“I don’t think it’s right to continue this weaponization of the Department of Justice and FBI against political opponents, and that’s why I think it’s so important that this be about restoring the FBI and the DOJ to non-political organizations.”
This has been one of Patel’s core rallying cries against the bureau. The former senior adviser to the acting director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration last year penned a book, “Government Gangsters,” laying out those very concerns.
Critics have harped on his list of 60 so-called “Deep State” actors in that book, contending that he had crafted a catalog of enemies.
That’s fueled intense media and Democratic scrutiny over Patel.
“The game up here is not to put yes’s, it’s to keep no’s off the board, and Kash is going to deliver. We’ll get him confirmed. I’m really confident about that,” Mullin surmised.
“I think the Democrats are they’re gonna continue to try to find somebody that they’re gonna go after,” Mullin bemoaned. “The only one I was concerned about the president spending political capital on was Matt Gaetz — he’s no longer in the picture.”
More moderate members of the GOP Senate conference who could be potential swing votes such as Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), have been largely quiet on Patel, but given no indication that have significant apprehensions about him.
Should Patel, 44, get confirmed, he will become the first Indian American to helm the bureau as well as its youngest and 9th director.
