FIRE the director of the FBI while he is overseeing an investigation into your campaign, and your choice of his successor is bound to attract even more scepticism than is customary. On June 7th Donald Trump announced—via Twitter, naturally—that he is nominating Christopher Wray for the post made available by last month’s troubling defenestration of James Comey. The president called his choice “a man of impeccable credentials”.

Will others see it that way? Mr Wray is certainly a more palatable candidate to Mr Trump’s critics than some of the Republican politicians who had also been under consideration, several of whom withdrew their names from the process. He is a former federal prosecutor and assistant attorney-general, who worked in the Justice Department during the fall-out from the September 11th attacks; he was subsequently involved in the prosecution of Enron executives. Mr Wray is currently a partner at King & Spalding in Atlanta, where he had worked before entering public service. (Sally Yates, whom Mr Trump fired as acting attorney-general in January, has worked for the same law firm.)

Mr Wray’s representation of assorted corporations, during his private practice, will doubtless be examined during his confirmation process. That goes double, probably, for his association with Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor and a close ally of Mr Trump. Mr Wray represented Mr Christie in the matter of the closure of traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge in 2013. In the course of his career his path has crossed, too, with that of Robert Mueller, a previous boss of the FBI who—amid the uproar that followed Mr Comey's firing—was appointed as special counsel to oversee the probe into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Precisely what relationship Mr Wray, as a Trump appointee, might have with Mr Mueller’s team remains to be seen. A further curiosity—“more than a little bit curious”, Mark Warner, the senior Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, told CNN—is the timing of Mr Trump’s announcement. It came on the eve of Mr Comey’s testimony to Mr Warner’s committee, in which he is expected to address reports that Mr Trump asked for his loyalty, and, on another occasion, suggested he go easy on Michael Flynn, briefly national security adviser until he resigned after misleading the vice president over his exchanges with the Russian ambassador. Mr Comey may also comment on Mr Trump’s claim that, as FBI director, he had assured the president that he was not personally under investigation. (In testimony to the same committee on June 7th Dan Coates, the director of National Intelligence, declined to discuss an allegation in the Washington Post that Mr Trump asked him to intervene with the FBI on his behalf.)

The New York Times reported this week that, after one awkward encounter in the White House, Mr Comey asked Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, to see to it that he was not left alone with Mr Trump. That is a risk that Mr Wray may soon have to run instead. Meanwhile, Mr Sessions’s relations with the president are also said to have grown testy, in part because of his own recusal from Russia-related inquiries following the misleading testimony he gave in Congress about his own contacts with the Russian ambassador. The Times and others say that Mr Sessions has offered to resign. Even Mr Trump might be wary of embarking on another politically charged recruitment process just at the moment.