WASHINGTON — Outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray defended the bureau as it faces a barrage of attacks from President-elect Donald Trump and his allies. And he offered a chilling warning about China, saying it posed a “unique and unprecedented” threat that is taking aim at critical U.S. infrastructure.
In his only exit interview with a print publication, Wray on Sunday told The Atlanta Journal Constitution that he decided to resign his post nearly three years early — rather than wait for Trump to fire him — because he wanted to shield the FBI and its 38,000 employees from more political chaos.
“It was a very, very hard personal decision for me. My focus, my sole focus, was on doing what I think is best for the FBI,” he said.
In a wide-ranging interview, Wray talked about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the search for classified documents at incoming President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and making phone calls to agencies where law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty.
Wray declined to comment directly on Republicans who have condemned the FBI for being part of the “weaponization” of the justice system. But he made clear his support for the bureau was unwavering.
“I see a group of professionals who are fiercely dedicated to trying to do the right thing in the right way, faithful to our core values, with rigor, with objectivity, with professionalism, without regard to politics or partisan preferences,” Wray said.
Atlanta ties
Wray, 58, also said he has yet to decide what he will do next, although he still considers Atlanta to be his home.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
An attorney, Wray is certain to be courted by law firms in Atlanta and nationwide. He said even though he is retiring from the FBI, that doesn’t mean he’s retiring from work.
“My plan is to take a lot of time off — months off — to reconnect with my family, decompress a little bit and see what I want to do next,” he said. “What the future holds at this point I don’t know.”
Wray became the FBI’s eighth director in August 2017 after then-President Trump fired James Comey, marking the first time a president had terminated an FBI director. Three months later, Wray was confirmed by the U.S. Senate with a 92-5 vote, with only Democrats voting against him.
Last month, Wray announced he would resign as FBI director on Jan. 19, the day before Trump returns to the White House. Because an FBI director’s term is for 10 years, Wray will be leaving with about two and a half years remaining.
Wray drew criticism for bowing out before the end of his term and not forcing Trump’s hand to replace him.
But Wray noted that Trump, who has nominated loyalist Kash Patel to become the next FBI director, had already indicated he was going to make a change.
“So once you accept or recognize the inevitability of that, it was my judgment after a whole lot of thought, that what was in the best interests of the FBI was for me not to drag the FBI deeper into the fray,” Wray said.
‘Left with no real choice’
When nominating Wray more than seven years ago, Trump called him “a man of impeccable credentials.” But Trump eventually soured on Wray, particularly after FBI agents searched the former president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, leading to Trump being indicted in the classified documents case — charges that have since been dismissed.
When Wray announced he would resign, Trump posted on social media it was “a great day for America.”
Wray told the AJC on Sunday that he stood by the search of Trump’s Florida estate.
In this instance, the bureau started out using the least intrusive means by trying to get classified documents returned voluntarily, he said.
“But if those things don’t succeed, meaning if we learned that our agents haven’t been given all the classified material back, or, worse yet, have had their efforts frustrated or even obstructed, we’re left with no — our agents — are left with no real choice,” he said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
So prosecutors obtained permission from a federal judge to issue search warrants at Mar-a-Lago.
“That’s what happened,” Wray said. “And the FBI has been doing mishandling of classified document cases for decades, including retrieving documents from people’s homes.”
‘Defining threat of our generation’
Wray has long been worried about China. He drew skepticism shortly into his tenure when he warned about the threat to U.S. security from the Chinese government. In Sunday’s interview, he pointed to his time serving under President George W. Bush as assistant attorney general, in which he oversaw counter-intelligence investigations.
“What I saw once I got into this job as FBI director, in terms of the breadth, the depth, the complexity, the pervasiveness of the threat from the Chinese government, blew me away,” he said. “And I’m not the kind of guy that uses expressions like blow me away lightly.”
The threat from China is “unique and unprecedented,” Wray said. “It includes economic espionage, intellectual property theft on a scale that targets everything, from large Fortune 500 companies all the way to small startups. And it includes every sector of our economy, ranging from high tech, innovation, AI and things like that all the way over to agriculture, and energy and health care.”
Moreover, he added, China is “pre-positioning” itself to carry out attacks against critical U.S. infrastructure. “We’re talking about things like water treatment plants, transportation systems, the electrical grid and natural gas and oil pipelines.”
Wray pictured a possible scenario of China, in a major conflict involving Taiwan, causing massive disruptions “to basically paralyze us at a key moment.”
But Wray said that since he sounded the alarm, he believes “the world in many ways has woken up to the threat posed by the Chinese government, which I consider to be really the defining threat of our generation.”
Jan. 6 attacks
Wray said the bureau deployed hundreds of agents from many of its 58 field offices to track down and arrest insurrectionists who breached security at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th.
He noted that roughly 170 of those charged were convicted of assaulting law enforcement, dozens of them with dangerous or deadly weapons. About a dozen more were convicted or pleaded guilty to taking part in a seditious conspiracy.
When asked how he would feel if many of those convicted in the Jan. 6th riots would be pardoned, as Trump has indicated he might do, Wray declined to comment on that specifically.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Instead, he said, “There are some very serious offenses reflected from these investigations, including in particular, in my view, violence against law enforcement, which I think the people who work in law enforcement deserve support from all Americans at every level.”
During his seven-plus years as director, Wray has also made it a priority for the bureau to become a partner with state and local law enforcement as well as the private sector to combat and ward off crime. The FBI now leads 700 task forces, comprised more than 9,500 agents and officers, across the nation.
During a farewell speech to the agency on Friday, Wray praised the bureau’s ability to stop a number of planned acts of terrorism during his tenure. This included agents thwarting attacks of houses of worship in Las Vegas and Pittsburgh, as well as possible bombings at San Francisco’s Pier 39, a crowded hospital in Kansas City and a July 4th parade in Cleveland.
Since becoming FBI director, Wray has made more than 400 phone calls to law enforcement agencies after one of their members were killed in the line of duty.
This has included, he said, the deaths of one officer just a few months into the job, an officer whose wedding day was the following week and an officer whose wife was eight months pregnant.
“It’s heartbreaking, every single time,” he said.
Wray said his darkest day as director was in February 2021 when two FBI agents were killed and four others injured in a shooting when executing a search warrant at a home in Sunrise, Fla.
“I was on the phone with their families that same day,” said Wray, becoming emotional. “And I was in their living rooms the next morning, less than 24 hours later. … There are no words that are really adequate at a time like that.”
Still, Wray said, serving as FBI director has been “the honor of a lifetime, certainly of my lifetime.”
Particularly satisfying, he said, is “the feeling of doing something that’s really meaningful, to be able to have such an impact on so many different issues and threats facing the American people and to do it with an extraordinary, extraordinary group of people who are some of the finest professionals I’ve ever encountered — patriots — incredibly dedicated to service over self.”
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Christopher Wray
Age: 58
Birthplace: New York City
Education: B.A. in philosophy, Yale University; law degree from Yale Law School.
Professional:
King & Spalding law firm in Atlanta, 1993-1997.
Assistant U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, 1997-2001.
Associate deputy attorney general, then principal associate deputy attorney general, U.S. Justice Department, 2001-2003
Assistant attorney general for DOJ’s criminal division, nominated by President George W. Bush, 2003-2005.
Partner, King & Spalding, 2005-2017.
Director, FBI, 2017-present.
Personal: Wife, Helen, married in 1989, and two children, Caroline and Trip.
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