Haley Joins 2024 GOP Candidates Who’ve Said They Would Fire FBI Director

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during a campaign event in the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, in Manchester, N.H., on Feb. 17, 2023. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley has said that she would fire FBI Director Christopher Wray were she to be elected.

During a June 28 interview with The Epoch Times in New Hampshire, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said that, while she would oust the FBI leader, it would not stop there.

“I think that, first of all, you have to understand that they have lost all trust with the American people. And we have to go build that trust back. We can’t build that trust back if Christopher Wray is the head of the FBI,” she said.

“But it’s not just Chris Wray. You’ve got to get rid of all that senior management out there, too,” continued Haley. “We’ve got to go and make an example of people. We’ve got to go and show that we’re truly cleaning it up if we’re going to take care of it.”

While The Daily Caller first reported on Haley’s campaign press secretary, Ken Farnaso, saying that Haley would fire Wray, this was the first time the candidate herself said she would relieve the FBI director of his duties.

Wray, a Republican, has come under fire for, among numerous issues, allegedly allowing the FBI to be weaponized against conservatives—from not holding accountable those behind the Steele Dossier, which prompted Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to be spied on, and then a special counsel investigation that found no collusion between the campaign and Russia, to the FBI being sent to school board meetings as parents expressed frustration and anger over far-left and explicit content being taught to schoolchildren.

Wray has also come under fire from the GOP for not being forthcoming in producing documents allegedly tied to corruption surrounding President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Under threat of contempt, Wray allowed members of the House Oversight Committee to view in a classified setting an unclassified document alleging Joe Biden taking a bribe from a foreign official when he was vice president.

Additionally, Haley said that on her first day in the Oval Office she would get rid of executive branch agency leaders.

“First thing is you control what you can control first, and that’s your agencies. You go and relieve and replace every head of every agency because you want to make sure you’re putting people that understand their consumer. They understand who they’re serving, the challenges that they have, and the opportunities [that] could be there,” she said.

‘Working for the People’

“The second thing is you go and you make sure that—I did this as governor—you send people into every agency to clean it up, pull down old rags, pull down old programs, get rid of any problem children so that you can get it used to working again,” continued Haley. “And then you give each agency goals that in the first 90 days they have to accomplish so that they can start showing that they’re working for the people and not the other way around.”

Finally, in her interview with The Epoch Times, Haley called for Wray to answer questions from Congress. Ditto Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“First of all, Biden, I think that he’s got a lot to answer for. The fact that he hasn’t done a press conference to acknowledge all the Hunter Biden stuff is irresponsible at best, and he needs to answer that, but it smells bad,” she said.

“And so, yes, I think that—I think Congress should be investigating,” she continued. “If the DOJ won’t do it, I think Congress should and I think Congress should open up an investigation on Biden and find out exactly what was taken, what was done in return, if anything, and how much Biden knew.

“In terms of Merrick Garland, I mean, look—it got weaponized under his watch, so he’s got some serious questions to answer as well, and I think they need to do an investigation on him.

“Christopher Wray needs to answer the same questions, all of these people.

“The American people don’t trust what they’ve done. They all owe it to answer as many questions as possible to let us know how we got to this point, and there’s got to be accountability. We can’t just let this go.”

Other 2024 presidential candidates who have said they would fire Wray include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence.

“No, I would not keep Chris Wray as director of the FBI,” DeSantis told Fox News last month. “There'll be a new one on day one.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and GOP presidential candidate, has said he would dismantle the FBI and replace it with something else.

“I think it’s a new apparatus built from scratch that actually respects the law instead of making it up,” he told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in April.