For decades, the majority of F.B.I. background checks were such routine affairs that the task was commonly assigned to “first-office agents”—rookies—to give them practice conducting interviews. This week’s scrutiny of whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford is taking place under slightly different conditions—and with extremely high stakes not just for Kavanaugh and Ford, but for the F.B.I. itself. “I could very well see this becoming a test of Chris Wray’s integrity,” says Robert Anderson, a former F.B.I. executive assistant director. “Not because of what these interviews find or don’t find. The agents will do a great job of whatever they are allowed to do. But at the end of the week, if there are unanswered questions, will the director push to do more?”

So far, nearly everything about the reopened background check is out of the ordinary and soaked in politics. “The way background checks normally work is expanding circles,” says former F.B.I. agent Asha Rangappa. “For instance, agents would ask, ‘Do you know anyone else that I could talk to who would have been living in the area that summer and who knew Brett Kavanaugh?’ Then you would go talk to those people.” But that kind of legwork requires an open-ended time frame in order to be thorough, and President Donald Trump imposed a one-week deadline to evaluate events that took place 36 years ago. At the same time, F.B.I. field offices are being bombarded with tips, and media reports of those tips, giving the investigation the feel of a missing-child hunt. Worst of all, the White House and Senate Republicans initially tried to tightly restrict the list of people that the F.B.I. could question. “The higher profile the investigation, the more micro-management you get from headquarters and the Department of Justice and Congress,” Anderson says. “We had that on Ed Snowden and General [David] Petraeus. ‘Tell us who you are talking to. Tell us why you are talking to them.’ That’s standard. Telling you who to interview or not interview, though? That’s troublesome.”

The one-week deadline also forces a narrower scope, with questions about whether Kavanaugh has made false statements in his congressional testimony likely to drop by the wayside. “It is so difficult to prove intentional deceit, as opposed to just having a hazy memory of what ‘Devil’s Triangle’ meant,” says James Gagliano, who spent 25 years as an F.B.I. agent. “But Kavanaugh’s drinking habits? Those are abso-freakin-lutely relevant. They’re going to ask Mark Judge, ‘Did you guys do keg stands? Did you get so drunk that you passed out?’ We will follow the evidence wherever it goes. But if they stop us when an actual lead comes up, because of an arbitrary time limit?”

Anderson has plenty of company in his skepticism about the motives behind how the probe was launched and designed. “Part of why this investigation was asked for was it gets the burden off of the Senate and drops it into the F.B.I.’s lap,” he says. “Anybody handing the bureau an investigation and saying you only have seven days is not looking for a real investigation. So I think Director Wray is in a tough spot.”

Especially coming on the heels of the bureau’s tumultuous past three years. The F.B.I.’s handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation may have swung the 2016 election; Trump, the ungrateful winner, fired the previous director, James Comey, for failing to protect him from an investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia, and last month labeled the bureau “a cancer.” Public confidence in the F.B.I., and agent morale, have suffered. So how Wray—who was two years behind Kavanaugh at Yale, both as an undergrad and in law school—deals with the inquiry is being very closely watched, inside and outside the bureau. “If the White House is directing this in a manner inconsistent with how we normally do our cases, and agents aren’t allowed to follow logical leads,” says Carlos T. Fernandez, a former top anti-terrorism official, “from what I know of Director Wray, he would be the kind of person to resign.”

Short of quitting, Wray could find himself facing a Comey moment: whether to issue a public statement characterizing the end of the investigation. Yet he seems to be savvily attempting to head off that kind of crisis, while shoring up the bureau’s credibility, and giving it more freedom to examine Kavanaugh's past. “It’s not accidental that the details of the restrictions on the F.B.I. all leaked out within 24 hours of the investigation beginning,” says Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman under former attorney general Eric Holder. “After 18 months of the president attacking or undermining the F.B.I. at every turn, Trump now wants to use it as a public stamp of approval for Kavanaugh, when he won’t let it conduct a real investigation. The F.B.I. can read the political tea leaves, and they know there’s likely to be at least one house of Congress where the Democrats have subpoena power next year. They will make sure there’s a very clear written record that if this investigation wasn’t complete, it was because they weren’t allowed to make it complete. They’re not stupid. And the F.B.I. is not going to be Donald Trump’s patsy.”