FBI’s Wray Has No Plans to Quit as Trump Pressures the Bureau
FBI’s Wray Has No Plans to Quit as Trump Pressures the Bureau
(Bloomberg) -- FBI Director Christopher Wray has no plans to resign, a bureau official said, as President Donald Trump and his supporters step up demands for the release of sensitive files that they say will show “spying” on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Wray is serving a 10-year term that began in 2017 and doesn’t plan at this time to step down, according to the FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity. However, Trump could fire him at any time and for any reason, as he did his predecessor, James Comey.
With Trump falling behind Democrat Joe Biden in polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election, the president and his political allies have renewed criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as being too slow to release information that they say will show anti-Trump bias in its investigation into whether Trump or any of his associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.
U.S. intelligence agencies found that Russia sought to help Trump win that election, and they say Vladimir Putin’s government is trying to do so again this year, but Trump regularly ridicules what he calls “Russia-Russia-Russia.”
‘Political CRIME’
“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax,” Trump, who is recuperating from the coronavirus, said in a tweet on Tuesday night amid a deluge of denunciations of his perceived enemies that continued into Wednesday morning.
“Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Trump said of the inquiry into the use of a private email server by his 2016 Democratic opponent.
Attorney General William Barr, who is Wray’s boss, and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, have been making public a steady drip of declassified material about the Russia probe heading into the Nov. 3 election.
“There are more documents to come,” White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Wednesday on Fox News. “The president wants transparency on all of this, and hopefully we’ll see documents in the coming days.”
Senate Republicans also have been trying to put the spotlight back on what they said was a politically motivated probe meant to undermine Trump’s candidacy in 2016 and, later, his presidency.
Comey, the former FBI director, told a Senate committee last week that the inquiry into whether people close to Trump conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election was largely conducted “by the book” but that specific aspects of the inquiry fell short.
Pressed by Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, who said the probe was based on faulty assumptions and evidence-tampering, Comey said he found the shortcomings -- which included doctoring an email from the CIA -- “deeply disturbing.” But he backed an inspector general’s report that concluded the probe was valid and not driven by bias in the bureau’s leadership.
The debate comes after U.S. intelligence agencies have once again assessed that Russia is interfering again in the 2020 presidential race to aid Trump by denigrating Biden. Trump has said U.S. officials should be more focused on China, not Russia.
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