(DCNF)—Republican South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds said Sunday on ABC News that FBI Director Christopher Wray is a “good man” and that he has “no complaints” about his job performance, even as President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire him.
Trump announced Saturday his new pick for FBI director as his former chief of staff to the secretary of defense, Kash Patel. On ABC News’ “This Week,” co-host Jonathan Karl began by questioning the lawmaker on his initial reaction to Trump’s nomination, to which Rounds pointed out that it was not only within the president’s rights to make a nomination but also normal for a president to want a loyalist on his team.
“I’ll also share with you — Chris Wray, you know, who the president nominated the first time around. I think the president picked a very good man to be the director of the FBI when he did that in his first term. When we meet with him behind closed doors, I’ve had no objections to the way that he’s handled himself. So I don’t have any complaints about the way that he’s done his job right now,” Rounds said.
Over the years, Republicans have repeatedly called out Wray, with all the 2024 GOP presidential candidates, except for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, vowing they would fire the director and implement either structural reforms or dismantle the bureau altogether. In 2022, the House Judiciary Committee released a 1,050-page report alleging the agency is “broken” due to Wray’s and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s leadership, as they oversaw an agency that allegedly “altered and mischaracterized evidence to federal courts, circumvented safeguards, and exploited weaknesses in policies.”
“Once again, the president has the right to make nominations, but normally these are for a 10-year term. We’ll see what his process is and whether he actually makes that nomination,” Rounds said. “Then if he does, just as with anybody who is nominated for one of these positions, once they’ve been nominated by the president, then the president gets, the benefit of the doubt on the nomination. But we still go through a process, and that process includes advice and consent, which for the Senate means advice or consent sometimes.”
Less than a year after the report was released, Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced an article of impeachment against Wray, accusing the FBI director of guiding the agency to intimidate, harass and entrap “American citizens who have been deemed enemies of the Biden regime.”
Wray has come under fire over the years for issues like raiding Mar-a-Lago in search of national security material, failing to answer whether the FBI had informants in the field during Jan. 6, refusing to confirm if President Joe Biden had mishandled classified information after leaving office in 2017, allegedly aiding in the slow-walking of criminal investigations into Hunter Biden’s alleged unpaid taxes from 2017 and 2018, and questioning if Trump was hit by an actual bullet during a hearing after the first assassination attempt against the former president.
Lawmakers also called out the FBI director and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last month after their refusal to speak before the Senate on global threats facing the U.S. homeland, highlighting how the dismal departs “from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s longstanding tradition of transparency and oversight of the threats facing our nation, for the first time in more than 15 years.”
Patel has also long vocalized his criticism of the weaponization of the surveillance state, stating during a recent podcast what his plans would be if he were to assume the director’s role.
“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state,” Patel said in the interview. “I’d take the 7,000 employees who work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.”
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