FBI Director Christopher Wray was front-page news nationwide this past week. He found himself at loggerheads with President Donald Trump over the highly controversial House Intelligence Committee memo and also saw his deputy director, Andrew McCabe, step aside.
Wray, the eighth director of the FBI, has deep Atlanta ties. Here are five things you need to know about him.
1. An Atlanta lawyer: Wray, 50, moved to Atlanta in 1993 to join King & Spalding, one of the city's top law firms. He left King & Spalding in 1997 to become a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney's Office here. He tried a number of high-profile cases. Among them: He helped secure a guilty plea from Pat Jarvis, a former popular Atlanta Braves pitcher and ex-DeKalb County sheriff, on a mail fraud charge. He obtained corruption convictions against the city of Atlanta's former chief investment officer and a politically connected businessman. And he was instrumental in the prosecution of a man convicted of setting church fires, one of which killed a Georgia firefighter. He returned to King & Spalding in 2005 and had worked there as a partner until being tapped to head the FBI.
2. Mr. Wray goes to Washington: Wray's former King & Spalding colleague Larry Thompson was deputy U.S. attorney general when he recruited Wray to join him at the Justice Department in 2001. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Wray helped coordinate anti-terrorism and counterespionage efforts. In 2003, President George W. Bush nominated Wray to be assistant attorney general. He won unanimous Senate approval to head the department's criminal division and became the youngest person to hold that position since the Kennedy administration. ("At the age of 36, Mr. Wray has accomplished more in the legal profession than many of us as attorneys do in a lifetime," then-Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said at Wray's confirmation hearing.) While heading the criminal division, Wray oversaw the prosecutions of terrorism cases as well as a number of high-profile corporate fraud cases, such as the Enron scandal.
Credit: TOM BRENNER
Credit: TOM BRENNER
3. An independent streak: On a number of occasions, Wray has pushed back against President Trump, the person who nominated him to head the FBI. When Trump tweeted in December that the FBI's reputation was in "tatters" and was the worst in its history, Wray told the House Judiciary Committee a few days later that the bureau he saw had "tens of thousands of brave men and women who are working as hard as they can to keep people they will never know safe from harm." After being confirmed by the Senate with a 92-5 vote, Wray held an invitation-only, swearing-in ceremony in Washington. Among Wray's invitees: Sally Yates, his former colleague at the U.S. Attorney's Office here and whom Trump had fired as acting U.S. attorney general when she refused to defend the administration's travel ban.
4. Personal: Wray grew up in Manhattan and went to Andover preparatory school before graduating cum laude from Yale University with a degree in philosophy. During his freshman year, he met fellow student Helen Howell, an Atlantan who graduated from Westminster Schools and whose great-grandfather, Clark Howell, once owned The Atlanta Constitution. They were married at the Cathedral of St. Philip before Wray returned to Yale to get his law degree. They have two children.
5. Will he stay or will he go? Before Trump gave his authorization for the House Intelligence Committee memo to go public, CNN reported that White House aides were worried Wray, who tried repeatedly to stop the memo's release, would resign. But senior aide Kellyanne Conway quickly responded by telling Fox News that the president had not expressed such a concern at all. During his confirmation hearing, Wray was asked what would he do if the president asked him to do something that was illegal or unethical. "First, I would try to talk him out of it," Wray answered. "If that failed, I would resign. There isn't a person on this planet whose lobbying or influence could convince me to just drop or abandon a properly predicated and meritorious investigation."
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