Wray’s resignation 'eases' path for Trump’s hand-picked 'lackey': report

On Wednesday, December 11, FBI Director Christopher Wray announced his resignation. Wray plans to stay until the end of President Joe Biden's term, but he will be gone by the time President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in on January 20, 2025.

Trump, who has nominated far-right MAGA conspiracy theorist and QAnon supporter Kash Patel for FBI director, made no secret of his plan to fire Wray. Appointed to a ten-year term in 2017, the current FBI director opted to quit before he got fired.

Journalist Andrew Egger, in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 13, argues that Wray would have been better off staying until after Trump's inauguration — then waiting for Trump to fire him. By resigning, Egger laments, Wray has made things easier for "lackey" Patel.

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Egger explains, "Trump — the man who nominated Wray in the first place — long ago deemed Wray a deep state enemy for, among other things, permitting the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago in what would become part of the classified-documents case against him…. So Trump decided —decades of precedent of keeping the FBI independent of political influence be damned — that he'd simply fire Wray and replace him with an FBI director more his style. Kash Patel, Trump's replacement pick, checks every box that matters."

The Bulwark journalist continues, "He is slavishly devoted to Trump personally, has few prospects outside MAGA World — and so, couldn't afford to betray Trump even if he wanted to, and nurses his own burning hatred toward Trump's foes."

Patel, Egger warns, "spent years publicly auditioning for the role by going on right-wing podcasts and listing the people he'd like to see prosecuted, the lists of names rolling effortlessly off his tongue."

"(Wray) could have forced Trump to actually go through with the act of firing him," Egger stresses. "Instead, he judged that the best way to set the FBI up to survive Trump was to ease the handover to Trump's hand-picked lackey."

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Andrew Egger's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.