Christopher Wray’s big mistake: Why it was wrong for the FBI head to step down

Last Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray surprised the nation by announcing that he would be stepping down on Jan. 20, at the end of President Biden’s term. Wray’s 10-year appointment was due to run through 2027.

Wray was appointed by President-elect Trump in 2017, during his first sojourn in the White House. He took over at the FBI after Trump fired James Comey.

Comey had been fired because Trump was upset that he had not ended an investigation into whether the Russian government had colluded with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. A similar fate seemed to have been awaiting Wray.

On Dec. 1, Trump announced “his intention to cut short the term of FBI Director Christopher Wray and select Kash Patel to lead an agency the president-elect often criticized on the campaign trail.” At that time, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) predicted that “Wray would either resign or Trump would fire him. ‘It’s no secret to anybody, including Chris Wray, that he is not going to continue to serve as the head of the FBI under Donald Trump.’”

Cruz was right. Wray will not be around to offer any resistance to the incoming president if he tries to use the FBI to harass and prosecute his political opponents.

As the New Yorker’s Beverly Gage puts it, if Trump gets his way, “the Bureau could be politicized in ways that even its notorious first director (J. Edgar Hoover) would have rejected.” “(F)or all his many faults and abuses of power,” Gage writes, Hoover “was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the FBI’s nonpartisan independence.”

Not so Kash Patel, the person Trump wants to install as head of the bureau.

“Hoover,” Gage observes, “used to describe the Bureau as the ‘one bulwark’ against a hidden left-wing conspiracy that penetrated all corners of American life. In Patel’s world, the FBI is the conspiracy.”

That is one reason Wray’s decision is both regrettable and dangerous.

It is a capitulation to Trump’s desire to bring all federal government agencies, including the FBI, to heel and turn them into personal fiefdoms that serve his every desire. Historian Ruth Ben-Giat notes that people like Trump want to “exercise a form of governance known as ‘personalist rule.’ Government institutions are organized around the self-preservation of a leader whose private interests prevail over national interests.”

Moreover, Trump’s attack on Wray violated, Gage argues, “a long-standing norm distinguishing F.B.I. directors from other Presidential nominations; since they may have to investigate the Administration itself, they are supposed to be more independent and less subject to White House pressure.”

Wray’s resignation also sends a message to others in the federal government who fear they will be targeted after Jan. 20. Get out while the getting is good.

Like me, Benjamin Wittes worries about the signal Wray’s resignation “sends the workforce, and the American people, about a leader’s willingness to throw himself in front of a wrecking ball to protect core institutions of democracy.” What Wray did indicates that it may be best for others to make a “quiet exit mumbling platitudes while the wrecking ball roars by.” 

Chris Wray is “throwing in the towel because Trump wants him to.” That is exactly the response that authoritarian leaders want. Their playbook counsels them to purge anyone who stands in their way. But even for strongmen, it is better for their opponents to purge themselves.

One gets a sense of just how well Wray’s resignation fits in with that plan from Trump’s reaction to it — barely contained glee. Trump took to Truth Social and posted the following: “The resignation of Christopher Wray is a great day for America as it will end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice. I just don’t know what happened to him….Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America…”

Trump went on to say, “As everyone knows, I have great respect for the rank-and-file of the FBI, and they have great respect for me. They want to see these changes every bit as much as I do…I look forward to Kash Patel’s confirmation, so that the process of Making the FBI Great Again can begin. Thank you!”

Whom was Trump thanking? Could it be Wray himself? I think so. But I don’t think anyone interested in preserving democracy and the rule of law in this country should share that sense of gratitude for what Wray has done.

Of course, Wray is not the first to face the fight or flight choice in dealing with authoritarian leaders. And the choice is far from easy.

Yet he should have stayed and tried to uphold the rule of law for as long as he could. That is exactly what Wray is asking his subordinates at the FBI to do.

He called on them to fulfill their obligation to “keep ... Americans safe and uphold ... the Constitution.” That, he said, “will not change. And what absolutely cannot, must not change, is our commitment to doing the right thing, the right way, every time.” Wray spoke of what he called the “unshakeable foundation that’s stood the test of time and cannot easily be moved. And it — you, the men and women of the FBI — are why the Bureau will endure and be successful long into the future.”

Finally, as he told his colleagues of his decision to resign, he said, without a hint of irony, “That shared commitment binds us together.  ... One of the great strengths of the FBI is that we’re a team, separated by states and oceans and time zones, but still working together to support the FBI’s mission.”

Wray’s resignation gives the lie to that “shared commitment” and to that “all for one and one for all” ethos. Staying would have shown, Wittes argues, that “as long as there are ‘investigations to supervise, to conduct and to protect’ and as long as there ‘are all those people in the [FBI’s] cafeteria, in the halls, in the file rooms and in the field offices who ... need [that] firm layer of insulation from what was coming,’ he would be that layer of insulation until kicked out of the building.”

The choice Wray made was to “preemptively obey, spare himself the embarrassment, roll out the red carpet for Kash Patel, and make what Trump is doing look orderly and not quite so much like a purge of professionals from the chief federal government outfit entitled to bear arms against American citizens.”

Writing about the meaning of resignations like Wray’s, political scientist Tom Dumm suggests that those who contemplate leaving face what Dumm calls “(a) test of honor.” When they actually resign, it is like “a peaceful death.”

While I understand why Wray resigned, I don’t think he passed that test of honor. Still, I hope his resignation brings him a kind of peace. But I fear that what he did paves the way for anything but peace for the colleagues whom he leaves behind and the American people.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College.

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