Trump FBI Pick Christopher Wray No Stranger to Crisis

President Donald Trump's pick to lead an FBI rocked by politics and estranged from the White House is no stranger to crisis and the media spotlight.

Current and former associates who worked with Christopher Wray as a federal prosecutor in Georgia, on the top floors of the Justice Department in the nation's capital or in private practice say he built a reputation as a "steady hand" and sharp-minded attorney adept at navigating high-profile investigations, Washington scandals and the upper echelons of Beltway politics.

"He would be very difficult to impeach given his background," says attorney Kurt Kastorf, who worked with Wray at his current law firm, King and Spalding. "He would be fairly difficult for Democrats to drag through the mud, and he's a genuinely qualified and good attorney."

The White House said Monday evening it had sent Wray's nomination to the Senate, roughly three weeks after Trump announced on Twitter his intent to pick Wray.

As a senior official at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, Wray led the investigations into the Enron and Worldcom accounting scandals in 2001 and 2002, and helped coordinate the department's response to the 9/11 attacks. More recently, as an attorney specializing in white-collar investigations at the well-heeled law firm King and Spalding, he served as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's personal lawyer during the Bridgegate scandal.

In the hours after the 9/11 attacks, serving then as a deputy associate attorney general, he briefly became the top official at the Justice Department's headquarters while the attorney general was in the air and the deputy attorney general was rushed to a secure location.

He also played a part in a piece of Washington lore, siding with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey in opposing the use of warrantless wiretapping – a dispute that famously culminated in a 2004 bedside standoff involving a hospital-bound Ashcroft.

"He’s been involved in some of the most significant moments in the history of the Department of Justice, and weathered the storm and survived these crises, and remains universally well respected," says David Chaiken, a partner at Troutman Sanders and former federal prosecutor who worked opposite Wray while conducting an investigation in Georgia.

Other former colleagues say that may bode well for his ability to stand up to Trump, who has acknowledged that he fired the FBI director because of the Russia investigation and who has been accused by Comey of seeking to quash any probes into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

"He's not going to roll over for anybody. If the idea here is to get a trained dog, boy, oh, boy, you missed," says John A. Drennan, a lawyer in the District of Columbia who worked extensively with Wray at the Justice Department from 2003-2005.

Wray cut his teeth in the U.S. attorney's office in Atlanta, a prestigious post in the Justice Department that also produced former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, former Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia and other notable officials.

His views on topics like surveillance, or which investigative tools should require a warrant, may not be so different from those of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

"He's probably what we would consider a law-and-order Republican," Drennan says. "I don't think he's a wild, crazy man. I've never seen him articulate anything I thought was ever, 'Oh, my god, you're going to put everyone in a gulag.' He seems kind of middle-of-the-road."

He adds: "You have to understand, middle of the road for the Justice Department – we're prosecutors, so we have a view about sentencing and what the government needs to investigate crime, and that's not the view of the ACLU. He was pretty much in the DOJ prosecutorial view of things. He wasn't outside of that."

Privately, some question whether Wray has the kind of experience, credentials and reputation that his predecessors brought to the FBI. Louis Freeh, for example, had spent five years as an FBI special agent. As a federal prosecutor, he led one of the highest profile mafia cases in history and won the conviction of a man who assassinated a federal judge. He was serving as a federal judge when he was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1993 to lead the bureau.

Robert Mueller, who is now the special counsel overseeing the FBI's Russia investigation, spent 12 years working in U.S. attorneys' offices in San Francisco and Boston and later served as an assistant attorney general and acting deputy attorney general before his nomination by President George W. Bush in September 2001.

And Comey served six years as a federal prosecutor before being named U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York – the Manhattan-based post that is perhaps the Justice Department's most prestigious – and later deputy attorney general, the department's No. 2 position, before his nomination by President Barack Obama.

Wray, by contrast, after spending eight years at the Justice Department, spent most of his career since in private practice.

Notably, Wray was picked after Trump interviewed at least five other candidates – among them acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and former Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The FBI Agents Association, meanwhile, endorsed former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican of Michigan who led the House intelligence committee from 2011-2015 and served as an FBI agent from 1989-1994.

The timing of Trump's announcement of his intent to tap Wray was also notable: It came in a tweet one day before Comey's highly anticipated testimony to the Senate and less than a week after Reuters reported that the search for a director was in "disarray."

"This is going to be a guy that’s running an organization of about 35,000 people with an $8 billion budget, dealing with spying by the Chinese, spying by the Russians, going toe-to-toe with Mitch McConnell on the budget, going dark, all that stuff. Is this the guy for that? I don’t know," one former senior Justice Department official says. "He’s unobjectionable, in the sense that he’s unobjectionable. But that’s not what we want."

The official later added: "We want someone who's got the gravitas to lead the world's most important law enforcement organization."

The White House and Justice Department issued statements on Wray's selection June 7, calling him "an impeccably qualified individual" who will "serve his country as a fierce guardian of the law and a model of integrity."

Wray, in a statement released at the time of his nomination Monday, said he was "honored and humbled to be nominated by the President to lead the FBI, the premier law enforcement organization in the world."

Some civil liberties advocates, however, have expressed deep reservations about Wray. His firm, King & Spalding, for example, counts among its clients the Russian energy firm Rosneft – which has close ties to President Vladimir Putin. It also advises the trust that the Trump family set up with the president's election.

Meanwhile, Wray's former client, Christie, was the head of Trump's transition. And while Wray apparently did not make a political contribution to any presidential campaigns in the 2016 election, he has donated at least $35,000 to GOP candidates or committees.

"Christopher Wray's firm's legal work for the Trump family, his history of partisan activity, as well as his history of defending Trump's transition director during a criminal scandal makes us question his ability to lead the FBI with the independence, even-handed judgment, and commitment to the rule of law that the agency deserves," ACLU national political director Faiz Shakir said in a statement.