Editors at the Washington Examiner are not sad to see the FBI’s director say goodbye.

Few exiting officials merit fiercer censure than FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is resigning three years early. In an extraordinarily scathing letter, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) rightly provided it.

Wray has been a dissembler since he took over the bureau in 2017. He came into office promising transparency, candor, competence, depoliticization, and systemic reform. He has produced none of it, acting instead as an obfuscator and excuse-maker, as if his job is to be the FBI’s corner-cutting defense attorney. … Wray has shown that neither his word nor his judgment can be trusted.

On case after case and on institutional FBI culture more broadly, Wray has covered for the bureau rather than dutifully serving the public. On institutional matters, in 2022, it came to light that an internal audit three years earlier showed that FBI personnel broke the rules at least 747 times in only a year and a half in “high-profile” investigations involving politicians, news media, and religious groups, but Wray neither advised the public of those findings during the interim three years, nor made public amends, nor addressed the problems until more than a year after the audit was publicized.

Wray contemptuously brushed off concerns about the blatant mistreatment of a peaceful pro-life protester subjected to an armed raid at his home on a case that was bogus from the start. He lied to Congress about the extent of the FBI’s targeting of traditional Catholics for “threat mitigation” and prevaricated about the FBI investigating parent activists as domestic terrorists and about whether the FBI helped censor speech on social media platforms. He repeatedly resisted valid subpoenas for information on these and other cases.

Fortunately, Wray will have left his post before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated next month. Grassley, though, does not intend to let him slink away. In a blistering 11-page letter on Dec. 9, the senator used some of the examples above, and many others, to make sure the door hit Wray in the back on his way out.