POLITICS: Christopher Wray’s exit clears the way for a new, better FBI

Good riddance to FBI Director Chris Wray.

A pretty boy who perfected the art of stonewalling at congressional oversight hearings and treated the FBI airplane like his luxury private jet, he has presided over some of the worst injustices in the bureau’s history.

He sapped public trust and brought the mighty bureau to its knees.

Now he has bowed to the inevitable, announcing last week that he will be stepping down two years and nine months shy of his 10-year term.

He’s getting out before the arrival of Kash Patel, the tough-minded 44-year-old Deep State warrior chosen by Donald Trump to reform the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency, pending Senate approval.

Of course, Wray, 57, was criticized by the likes of disgraced ex-CIA Director John Brennan for resigning early. They wanted him to force a showdown with Trump that would give new ammunition for resistance media.

Shameful legacy

Wray scurried for the exit two days after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), patron saint of whistleblowers, sent him an excoriating 11-page letter expressing “my vote of no confidence in your continued leadership of the FBI. . . .

“For the good of the country, it’s time for you and your deputy [Paul Abbate] to move on to the next chapter in your lives.”

Deputy Director Abbate should also have turned in his badge. The alleged leftist personally overrode objections of FBI case agents to the needlessly provocative Mar-a-Lago raid against Trump and has been cited by FBI whistleblowers as the prime driver of retaliation against them.

The director’s resignation vow also preempted a report the next day from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirming the truth about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that Wray has always dodged. The FBI had 26 “confidential human sources,” a k a informants, at the Capitol that day, 17 of whom went into the Capitol or the restricted area around it.

We still don’t know what they did there, but they were not charged, unlike almost 1,600 Trump supporters.

The political persecution of nonviolent Jan. 6 defendants in the inexplicably largest investigation in FBI history, while Antifa-BLM rioters went unscathed, is just one of Wray’s fiascos.

Here are a few more:

• Raiding Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, where FBI agents rummaged through Melania Trump’s underwear drawer.
• Pre-bunking The Post’s “Laptop From Hell” story on Biden corruption by telling Twitter and Facebook to expect a Russian “hack and leak” operation in October 2020 likely mentioning Hunter Biden.
• Placing 70-year-old Trump advisor Peter Navarro in leg irons when he was arrested for the nonviolent misdemeanor of defying Nancy Pelosi’s subpoena.
• Siccing FBI agents onto Catholics who attend Latin Mass, parents at school board meetings and Christians praying outside abortion clinics, while doing little about dozens of attacks on pro-life centers and churches.
• Retaliating against whistleblowers and other honorable agents who stood up against abuses of power rampant on Wray’s watch.
• Downplaying the first assassination attempt against Trump by questioning whether he was hit by a bullet to the ear, or just “shrapnel.”
• The DEI wokification of the FBI.

That’s Wray’s shameful legacy, compounding the destruction wrought to the bureau’s culture by his predecessors Robert Mueller and James Comey.

The FBI has dropped the ball on its original mission of fighting crime and has become a quasi-Stasi, spying on Americans and being weaponized against conservatives.

Fall from grace

Forget Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity. The FBI now stands for Fear, Bias and Intimidation, or any number of snarky acronyms dreamed up by disillusioned former agents.

Most Americans have lost faith in the FBI, according to polling cited by CNN this month. It’s the worst approval rating in FBI history: a 16-point drop since 2019 to 41% this year, spanning most of Wray’s tenure.

Fewer than one-quarter of Republicans now think the FBI is doing an “excellent or good job” because they know it has been weaponized against them.

So Patel will have his hands full making the FBI great again. Former agents warn that saboteurs will be lying in wait for him.

“There will be a serious effort to undermine [him],” predicts Chris Piehota, 59, a former FBI executive assistant director (the third most senior rank).

“There are elements that will create inertia, allow initiatives to fail . . . create an environment of inefficiency and ineffectiveness so that [critics can say] this administration came in and now nothing works. . . .

“How many passwords will be lost, and systems go offline? It will be death by a thousand cuts . . . guerilla warfare that will happen unless the president brings in a leadership team who share his vision and values and beliefs and are there to execute his wishes.”

Piehota, who retired in 2020, watched in horror as the organization to which he had devoted his life was eroded from within. His new book, “Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew,” lays out a blueprint to rebuild the FBI’s reputation and competence.

But his most important advice to Patel, he says, is to replace the top three levels of management with at least 20 like-minded reformers, experienced in the Kremlinesque ways of the bureau.

“Bring back the old FBI dragonslayers who say, ‘I’m not really concerned about your pronouns and personal issues today. We have national security threats and crime to deal with,’ ” he said Sunday.

Luckily, Patel is no neophyte when it comes to the malevolent machinations of the so-called Deep State.

The dragonslayer

He learned on the job, from both sides of the fence, during eight years as a public defender in Miami, then as a federal prosecutor at the DOJ’s National Security Department; the congressional investigator who cracked open the Russiagate conspiracy; Trump’s senior White House counterterrorism official; principal deputy to the acting director of national intelligence; and chief of staff for the Department of Defense.

As he explains in his seminal book “Government Gangsters,” the Deep State is not some crazy conspiracy theory but is the concerted “politicization of core American institutions and the federal governmental apparatus by a significant number of high-level cultural leaders and officials who . . . disregard objectivity, weaponize the law, spread disinformation, spurn fairness, or even violate their oaths of office for political and personal gain, all at the expense of equal justice and American national security.”

Along with the formidable incoming Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Devin Nunes, his former boss on the House Intelligence Committee, who was just named by Trump as chairman of his Intelligence Advisory Board, Patel has joined the battle to confront Deep State actors time and again.

In retaliation, the FBI spied on him while he was investigating the FBI in 2017 and 2018, an outrage he won’t quickly forget.

Patel describes his antagonists as “thugs in suits, nothing more than government gangsters who act like they are righteous. . . . There are no depths to which the Deep State will not descend, crimes they will not commit, or lives they will not destroy to get their way.”

But he believes they are not invincible — and Trump could not have chosen a better dragonslayer.