WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump plans to nominate former Assistant Attorney General Christopher Wray to be the next FBI director, he announced in a Wednesday morning tweet.
Trump dubbed Wray, who was deputy attorney general from 2003 to 2005 under the George W. Bush administration, "a man of impeccable credentials."
The president, who has been critical of the FBI and Justice Department, chose a career prosecutor for the nation's top cop post rather than other candidates, including former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
He also made the announcement just a day before James Comey, the former FBI director he fired in May, is set to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Comey is expected to tell senators about a conversation he had with Trump in which the former director alleges the president asked Comey to drop the bureau's probe of his first national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Wray is a two-time Yale University graduate, picking up his law degree from there in 1992. The public service portion of his career began in 1997 when he joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia.
Since leaving the Justice Department in 2005, Wray has been a litigation partner at King and Spalding, a Washington, D.C., law firm. He currently is the chair of its Special Matters and Government Investigations Practice Group, which represents private clients in a variety of white-collar criminal and regulatory matters, civil litigation and internal corporate probes.
