Report: If re-elected, Trump will immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray

FBI Director Christopher Wray.
(Image credit: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

Should President Trump win a second term, he plans on immediately firing FBI Director Christopher Wray, two people who have discussed the matter with Trump told Axios.

Trump is also expected to quickly replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. They aren't the only three people on the chopping block, the sources said, but they are at the top of the list. One official said Trump hasn't fired any of them because of the optics of doing so before the election.

Haspel and Wray do not have any fans in Trump's inner circle, Axios reports, with one person saying the "view of Haspel in the West Wing is that she still sees her job as manipulating people and outcomes, the way she must have when she was working assets in the field. It bred a lot of suspicion of her motives." As for Wray, Trump became enraged in September when the FBI director testified that there are no signs of widespread election fraud, despite Trump claiming otherwise.

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Privately, Trump has complained about Attorney General William Barr, and he's never been too enamored with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, but there are no formal plans to remove them, Axios reports. In a statement, White House spokesman Judd Deere said, "We have no personnel announcements at this time nor would it be appropriate to speculate about changes after the election or in a second term."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.