FBI Director Chris Wray will step down from his post early next year, the bureau said on Wednesday, after Republican President-elect Donald Trump signalled his intent to fire the veteran official and replace him with firebrand Kash Patel.

Trump himself had appointed Wray, a fellow Republican, to his ten-year term in 2017, after firing his predecessor James Comey, who the then-president soured on over the FBI’s investigations into alleged contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia.

Trump and his hardline allies turned on Wray, and the FBI more generally, after agents conducted a court-approved search of Trump’s Florida resort in 2022 to recover classified documents that he had retained after leaving office.

That sparked one of two federal prosecutions Trump faced while out of power, neither of which went to trial. Trump denied wrongdoing and described all the cases against him as politically motivated. Federal prosecutors ended their efforts after his election, citing longstanding Justice Department policy not to prosecute a sitting president.

Trump’s Republican allies joined him in alleging that the FBI had become politicised, though there is no evidence that Democratic President Joe Biden interfered with its investigative processes.

“There are serious problems at the FBI. The American public knows it. They expect to see sweeping change,” Republican US Senator Bill Hagerty said in early December after Trump’s nomination of Patel.

Throughout his term, Wray said that he followed the law and strove to impartially carry out the FBI’s duties. During a 2023 hearing before a House of Representatives panel he rebuffed the idea that he was pursuing a Democratic partisan agenda, noting that he had been a lifelong Republican.

“The idea that I am biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” Wray said.

FBI directors are appointed for ten-year terms, a measure meant to avoid the appearance of partisanship after political turnover in the White House every four years.

Wray’s term was not due to expire until 2027.

As he has built out his roster of Cabinet officials over the past few weeks, Trump has assembled a team ready to carry out two of his biggest priorities: retribution against his political adversaries and a wholesale reshaping of the US government.

Patel, who would need to be confirmed by the US Senate, has never worked at the FBI and only spent three years at the Justice Department earlier in his career in the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section. If confirmed, he has pledged to shut down the FBI’s headquarters building in Washington and drastically redefine the bureau’s role with intelligence-gathering.

Throughout Trump’s first term, Trump repeatedly mused about the idea of replacing Wray for not being forceful enough in defending him from the 2016 investigation, but former Attorney General Bill Barr resisted such efforts, Barr recounted in his book “One Damn Thing After Another.”

The FBI has faced increasing criticism by Trump’s supporters for its various roles in investigating Trump over the years.

Some of the concerns pre-dated Wray’s tenure, including several damning reports by the Justice Department’s inspector general which faulted the bureau for making numerous errors in its warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during its early investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign known as “Crossfire Hurricane.”

During his tenure, Wray has overseen reforms of the FBI’s processes for securing FISA warrants.

The FBI during Wray’s time has also played a major role in helping to investigate and arrest many of Trump’s supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a failed bid to block Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.

More than 1,500 people were criminally charged in the attack.

Trump has pledged to grant clemency to some of the January 6 defendants, though he has not provided details.