President Donald Trump wouldn’t reveal his level of confidence in FBI Director Christopher Wray,who has found himself on the opposite side of the White House when it comes to the investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and whether campaigns should accept dirt on their opponents from foreign governments.
“Well, we’ll see how it turns out,” Trump told The Hill, a CNN affiliate,when asked about his confidence level in the FBI director, who has been on the job for nearly two years.
“I mean, I disagree with him on that and I think a lot of people are disagreeing. You may even disagree with him on that,” Trump said regarding his allegations of spying on his campaign.
Trump also publicly disagreed with Wray when asked about taking dirt on political opponents in an interview with ABC earlier this month.
In that interview, when asked if he would be open to taking dirt on political rivals from foreign governments, Trump said, “I think I’d want to hear it.” When told that Wray told lawmakers during his confirmation hearings that it would be “wise” for political operatives to inform his agency about attempts by foreign governments to interfere in US elections, Trump dismissed those concerns.
“The FBI director is wrong,” he said.
Trump has long had issues with the leadership of the FBI.
He fired then-FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, saying in an interview that he wanted to do it over Comey’s oversight of the Russia investigation. He then publicly chastised Andrew McCabe, who became the acting director of the FBI after Comey was dismissed, because McCabe’s wife ran as a Democrat for a state Senate spot in Virginia with the backing of former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a friend of Hillary Clinton and her family.
Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, would later fire McCabe just days before he was set to retire from the FBI. Wray replaced McCabe in August 2017.
Trump has also railed against former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who exchanged anti-Trump text messages during the 2016 presidential campaign that were later released publicly. The duo has become a regular punching bag for the President, who believes the upper echelons of the FBI were biased against him during the 2016 campaign and the early days of his administration.
