RON HOSKO – former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division and currently the President at Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund
TOPICS: Christopher Wray hearing and FBI building budget
- FBI head nominee Wray pledges he would resign before improperly dropping an investigation. (Washington Post) – Christopher A. Wray, President Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, told a Senate panel Wednesday that if the president improperly pressured him to drop an investigation, he would first try to talk him out of it — and if that failed, resign. He testified during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that no one has asked him for a loyalty oath as part of his nomination, adding, “And I sure as heck didn’t offer one.” Wray, a low-key former senior Justice Department official, was nominated after Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James B. Comey in May amid a bureau investigation of potential coordination between Trump associates and the Kremlin to interfere in last year’s presidential election. Comey’s dismissal hung over the proceedings, as a number of lawmakers said they wanted to avoid a repeat of the controversial firing. The former FBI director has testified that the president asked him for his “loyalty” and suggested that he drop an investigation of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn.
- Federal government cancels costly, decade-long search for a new FBI headquarters. (Washington Post) – The federal government is canceling the search for a new FBI headquarters, according to officials familiar with the decision, putting a more than decade-long effort by the bureau to move out of the crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building back at square one. The decision follows years of failed attempts by federal officials to persuade Congress to fully back a plan for a campus in the Washington suburbs paid for by trading away the Hoover Building to a real estate developer and putting up nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to cover the remaining cost.
