FBI Director Christopher Wray is in a bind.

Having declared “grave concerns” about the disclosure of a classified, Republican-written memo detailing alleged surveillance abuses directed at a Trump campaign adviser, he now must grapple with the likelihood that President Donald Trump will defy him and approve public disclosure of the document.


A senior White House official told reporters on Thursday that Trump planned to release the hotly contested document and might do so as soon as Friday.

“The president is OK with it,” the official said. “I doubt there will be any redactions. It’s in Congress’ hands after that.”

The high-stakes showdown over tactics used in the FBI’s investigation of alleged Russian influence in Trump’s orbit comes just six months into Wray’s tenure, as he’s trying to prove himself to the bureau’s roughly 35,000 employees.

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“He’s got to be the guardian of the FBI writ large and is doing things right,” former FBI Assistant Director Ron Hosko said. “He doesn’t have a big, personal dog in some of these fights. … It all predated Chris Wray showing up, but it’s about: How does the workforce view him and how do they view his leadership?”

Trump’s insistence on releasing the House Intelligence Committee memo — written by Republican staff members and adopted on a party-line vote — in the face of private and public objections from the FBI director he nominated led to speculation on Thursday that Wray might resign in protest.

However, several of his former colleagues said they did not expect him to take such a drastic step.

“He’ll save his fire,” a former Justice Department colleague said. “He’ll tough this one out. I think he’d understand where we’re going is a dangerous direction. I think he has great fidelity to the DOJ in general and the FBI in particular, and he will understand his leadership is needed.”

Another official who worked alongside Wray during his time at Justice said: “I just don’t think it’s the kind of matter about which one resigns over.”

Hosko added that he’d be “a little bit surprised and … a good bit disappointed” if Wray departed over the memo flap, a move that would seem to guarantee more tumult at the bureau.

"Somebody needs to lead the organization through crisis,” Hosko said. “Do you want to be the guy who quit in crisis in these circumstances?”

NBC News quoted a senior FBI official as saying Wray had no intention of stepping down because of the battle over the intelligence-related memo.

A statement from an FBI agents group on Thursday praised Wray for defending the bureau’s people, but the message also seemed to underscore the risks to his stature if the White House rebuffed most or all of his requests regarding the memo.

“The FBI Agents Association appreciates FBI Director Chris Wray standing shoulder to shoulder with the men and women of the FBI as we work together to protect our country from criminal and national security threats,” said the group’s president, Thomas O’Connor.

Among those rallying to Wray’s side on Thursday in the fight with the White House was former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired last May. Without mentioning Wray by name, Comey applauded him for going public with the bureau’s objection to the memo’s release.

“All should appreciate the FBI speaking up. I wish more of our leaders would,” Comey wrote on Twitter. “But take heart: American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy.”

Many Wray supporters said they were hoping the White House would offer some concession that would allow the new director to save face and explain to his personnel that he managed to temper the impact of the memo even if he failed to block its disclosure.

However, the White House’s signal on Thursday night that redactions were unlikely seemed to dampen the chances of that kind of compromise.

It also was unclear how deleting information from the document would address the rationale the FBI gave for the “grave concerns” warning issued on Wednesday: that the memo is inaccurate because of “material omissions of fact.”

Speaking to an audience in Washington last fall, Wray foreshadowed the kind of dilemma he now faces.

“At some point for everybody in this room and everybody in my organization, our integrity will be tested,” he said at an awards ceremony for federal government watchdogs. “It happens to everybody. It happens to all of us. It could be at a time where we’re being asked to make a decision that is inconsistent with what we know is right and what we know is true, where we’ll be asked to do something without fully thinking it through.”

At another point during his address , delivered in October at the Ronald Reagan Building, the new FBI chief said he understood the risks of speaking truth to power.

“We are a country built on checks and balances,” Wray said. “The reality is nobody likes being checked, and that’s often where the danger is.”

The top lawman also seemed to confirm his friends’ view that he is anything but rash and would not resign impulsively.

“There’s actually something quite valuable and noble about being calm and steady and predictable,” Wray said.

One former FBI agent who worked closely with him at the Justice Department noted that Wray threatened to quit in a 2004 showdown where Comey, the deputy attorney general at the time, and then-FBI Director Robert Mueller threatened their resignation over a White House effort to continue a surveillance program that Comey believed to be illegal.

“I don’t know if it rises to the level of that,” said the ex-agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “That was unconstitutional. That was a trigger like a bright line they could not cross. If the document is putting people’s lives at risk by compromising sources and methods the government uses to collect information, that might be a different story.”

One challenge the FBI faces is how to rebut the claims in the relatively brief memo without delving into even more sensitive and more classified details on U.S. intelligence operations.

“I can pick 20 sentences from ‘War and Peace’ and suggest it’s the pilot script of ‘The Brady Bunch,’” former FBI agent Asha Rangappa said. “To prove it’s not, you have to show a whole chapter. … They’re really in a difficult position.”

Indeed, Republicans have charged that a rebuttal prepared by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat, delves far more deeply into sources and methods than the GOP-created memo does.

Still, some see scenarios playing out in which Wray might be forced out or feel he has no choice but to quit.

Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor, warned that the memo’s release could set off a chain reaction if Trump tried to use it as a basis to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign and its contacts with Russia.

“Whether a wave of very damaging resignations would move the Republicans in Congress, at this point it seems unlikely,” Buell said. “But it could move the national conversation in a very bad way for Trump. Even with this additional ammo, if it turns to be ammo, I think there’s a significant deterrent still to a Trump version of a ‘Saturday Night Massacre.’ Based on Wray’s behavior recently, I think he’d be risking the resignation of the FBI director if you fired the deputy attorney general over this.”

Asked whether he thought Wray would resign over the memo’s release — regardless of what happened to Rosenstein — Buell replied: “You only get to fire that shot once. If you’re Wray, you have to think about what’s really my breaking point.

“What’s the point at which I can no longer perform a function that’s serving the country? I’ve never been in those shoes. None of us have.”

Josh Meyer contributed to this report.

