President Donald Trump said via Twitter early Wednesday that he will nominate Christopher A. Wray to be the new director of the FBI.
Wray was nominated by President George W. Bush as assistant attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division, according to the U.S. Department of Justice website. He held that job until 2005.
The graduate of Yale Law School led the Enron Task Force when he was with the Department of Justice.
In his tweet, Trump said Wray had “impeccable credentials.”
As head of the Criminal Division, Wray led investigations and prosecutions in securities fraud, health care fraud, money laundering, public corruption and several other areas of federal criminal law, according the the website of King & Spaulding, a Washington firm where he currently serves as a litigation partner.
Wray currently specializes in white collar law and internal investigations, according to the Justice Department site. He represented New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie after the Bridgegate Scandal, in which the governor’s allies were found guilty of causing lane closures at the George Washington Bridge in 2013 as political retaliation.
Trump fired the last director of the FBI, James Comey, as he was overseeing an investigation into links between the Trump presidential campaign and the Kremlin.
Trump’s announcement comes a day before Comey appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In the highly-anticipated hearing, Comey will almost certainly be asked whether Trump tried to get him to back off a probe into former national security advisor Michael Flynn.
Trump’s tweet also comes just hours before acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and the top U.S. intelligence officials testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats will likely be asked about a Washington Post report that he told associates that Trump asked him if he could persuade Comey to ease off Flynn.