FBI Director

Trump taps Christopher Wray to head FBI

Wray served as an assistant attorney general from 2003 to 2005 and acted as Chris Christie’s personal attorney during the Bridgegate scandal.

By LOUIS NELSON

President Donald Trump will nominate Christopher Wray as the next director of the FBI, he announced on Twitter on Wednesday, the day before ousted FBI Director James Comey is due to testify at a high-stakes Senate hearing.

"I will be nominating Christopher A. Wray, a man of impeccable credentials, to be the new Director of the FBI. Details to follow," the president wrote.

Wray served as an assistant attorney general from 2003 to 2005 during the tenure of former President George W. Bush. He is currently a partner at the law firm King & Spalding, where he chairs its special matters and government investigations practice group.

At the Justice Department, Wray was the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s criminal division. He was a member of Bush’s corporate fraud task force and led the task force charged with investigating the Enron scandal.

More recently, Wray acted as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s personal attorney during the federal investigation into lane closures on the George Washington Bridge that were put in place by members of Christie’s administration as political retribution for a mayor who did not support the governor’s reelection campaign.

Christie said last week he thought Wray “would provide great leadership at the FBI,” though he declined to say whether he had recommended him to the president. The two met when Christie was U.S. attorney in New Jersey and Wray was at the Justice Department. They collaborated on a criminal investigation into the accounting practices of Bristol-Myers Squibb.

“I have the utmost confidence in Chris. He’s an outstanding lawyer,” Christie told reporters last Thursday as Wray’s name was being floated for the position. “He has absolute integrity and honesty and I think that the president certainly would not be making a mistake if he asked Chris Wray to be FBI director.”

Wray was one of two candidates, along with John Pistole, a former TSA administrator and deputy FBI director, that Trump interviewed last week for the position. Former Sen. Joe Liberman was at one point believed to be the front-runner for the job but later withdrew himself from consideration while the president was abroad.

The president’s pick drew quick praise from a pair of Obama administration officials, including Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman who tweeted that Wray was “probably the best choice from the WH short list. His record in the Bush DOJ deserves scrutiny, but he's a serious, respectable pick.”

Norm Eisen, a White House ethics lawyer for the Obama administration, called Wray a “good choice” who is “very respected in [the] white collar bar” and “did good job on Enron” in a series of posts to Twitter. Wray’s past work for Christie should not necessarily count against him, Eisen wrote online, because it is “important not to confuse lawyers and their clients; I repped some controversial folks too before becoming a watchdog!”

Brian Fallon, the former spokesman for Democrat Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid, was more skeptical, writing online that “Wray's work as Christie's lawyer not disqualifying by itself, but may be basis to say he'll recuse from Russia probe as part of confirmation.”

Trump has been in search of a new head for the FBI since last month, when he fired Comey. The White House’s initial explanation for the surprise firing centered around a recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who pilloried the director’s unusually public handling of the bureau’s investigation into the personal email server maintained by Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state.

But Trump undercut that explanation days later in an interview with NBC News, in which he said he had already made up his mind to fire Comey before meeting with Rosenstein and that he had made the decision with the bureau’s ongoing Russia investigation on his mind.

Rosenstein has since appointed a special prosecutor to oversee the Russia investigation, a move Trump has railed against. Comey himself is scheduled to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, where is likely to be asked about reports that Trump pressured him to back off the bureau’s investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.