Trump’s team sets sights on new FBI leadership
Summary
The incoming administration is aiming to replace Director Christopher Wray before his term ends.
Donald Trump’s transition team is ramping up plans to replace FBI Director Christopher Wray before the end of his 10-year-term, the start of what the president-elect hopes will be a major shake-up of the agency that has been his perennial punching bag.
Vice President-elect JD Vance on Tuesday tucked an announcement of the search at the end of a social-media post that began with him referring to someone as a “mouth breathing imbecile."
Vance said he had recently met with Trump to interview people to be the bureau’s director, in the search for a candidate who would “dismantle the deep state." He later deleted the post.
Trump’s advisers have discussed several candidates, people familiar with the talks said. They include former Rep. Mike Rogers, who was defeated this month in the race for Michigan’s open Senate seat, and Kash Patel, one of Trump’s closest advisers and supporters who served in various roles during his first administration.
A spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The search likely spells the end for Wray, whom Trump appointed during his first term in 2017 after firing Wray’s predecessor, James Comey. The director search also signals other major changes lie ahead for the bureau as the president-elect had threatened to seek retribution against political rivals.
Republicans for years have accused the FBI of overzealously targeting conservatives, a charge Wray, a Republican who served as a top Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, called “somewhat insane to me considering my own personal background."
Chief among those GOP critics is Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, who as a Florida congressman tried to block funding for a new FBI headquarters, saying its officials deserved to sit in their “rat-infested" building until they changed their approach.
A person close to Wray said he has been planning with his team to lead the agency at least through next year. But some FBI and Justice Department officials privately acknowledge that his days on the job are likely numbered, as Trump quickly soured on Wray amid years of federal investigations into the former president’s conduct.
Throughout the first Trump administration, Justice Department officials said they were unsure from one week to the next whether Wray, who tried to keep a low profile, would be fired.
That relationship didn’t improve much after Trump left the White House, with the former president claiming repeatedly that the bureau was targeting him unfairly. His rage flared during the FBI’s unprecedented August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents he had declined to relinquish.
Since winning re-election, Trump has moved to stock his cabinet and White House staff with loyalists who back his agenda.
Trump considered Rogers, a former FBI special agent and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to run the bureau after he fired Comey.
Patel, is a former White House and Pentagon aide whom Trump late in his first term considered naming to top positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. He has echoed Trump’s comments that the FBI is corrupt and has openly called for firing and potentially prosecuting FBI and Justice Department officials.
Trump’s allies have proposed FBI changes that include potentially giving political appointees at the Justice Department greater oversight of the bureau and its traditionally independent director, shrinking the size and power of its Washington headquarters and affording more resources instead to agents in the field. Some people in Trump’s orbit have suggested reviewing all of the FBI’s investigations and terminating those they find objectionable, the Journal has reported.
Trump has sought to overhaul the FBI ever since its probe into whether his campaign worked with Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, an investigation that spurred the appointment of a special counsel. Robert Mueller’s probe dogged Trump’s presidency, but Mueller didn’t find a criminal conspiracy.
The Justice Department, under the direction of special counsel Jack Smith, prosecuted Trump on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election and mishandled classified documents after he left office. Now that Trump has been elected again, both cases are certain to end.
Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and Andrew Restuccia at andrew.restuccia@wsj.com
