FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed Wednesday that he will be resigning from his post before President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20. Wray announced he will resign just seven years into his 10-year term in the aftermath of external pressure for him to step down, most notably from Trump. Trump has instead decided to nominate Kash Patel for the role, indicating to Wray that he would either have to resign early or be fired. 'It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway — this is not easy for me.'"My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day. In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work," Wray said.“It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway — this is not easy for me," he continued. "I love this place, I love our mission, and I love our people — but my focus is, and always has been, on us and doing what’s right for the FBI."Trump nominated Wray to take over as FBI director in 2017 during his first presidential term. At the time, Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey after he launched the now-debunked investigation into the Russia hoax in 2016. Wray was confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate in 2017, but this time around, Trump's nominees may have a harder time. Patel himself has taken to the Hill this week to meet with senators and to lock down the votes for his confirmation. Other Trump nominees, most notably Pete Hegseth, who was nominated to head the Department of Defense, have faced their fair share of scrutiny and pushback from establishment Republicans in the Senate. Trump's nominees like Patel and Hegseth can afford to lose only three votes from Republicans, assuming that Vice President-elect JD Vance participates in the vote as a tie-breaker. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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Image: Roku Roku City, the purple-tinted cityscape screensaver that debuted in 2018, might look a little sharper and more detailed the next time you see it scrolling by. This week, Roku is increasing the screensaver’s resolution to 1080p; it was still stuck at 720p until now — despite running on millions of 4K Roku TVs and 4K-capable streaming players. That’s blasphemous, if you ask me, so it’s nice to see some progress. The surprisingly popular, fictional skyline is also being updated with an “expanded color palette” and more activity and Easter eggs that you’ll spot if looking closely. Apparently there’s a train station in there somewhere, so the denizens of Roku City have gained a mass transit system. Billboards “will now feature a new star button that allows viewers to learn about things like original Roku content, Roku Zones, and more.” (If I had to guess, the “more” at the end there is probably referring to ads and sponsored content.) It took six years for us to reach full HD. So if this cadence stays on track, maybe we’ll all be experiencing Roku City in native 4K by 2030.

Image: Apple Apple is bringing layered recordings to the Voice Memos app on the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. With the new feature, you can record vocals while listening to an instrumental track out loud in iOS 18.2. Even though the microphone will technically pick up the instrumentals, Apple says the iPhone 16’s A18 Pro chip allows it to isolate vocals with “advanced processing and machine learning,” letting Voice Memos create a separate track with just your voice. From there, you can mix the two layers, as well as edit or listen to them separately. Apple first announced this feature with the launch of the iPhone 16 Pro in September. On a support page, Apple notes that you can still listen to multitrack recordings on any device with iOS 18.2, but they won’t work with devices running anything earlier. You’ll have to separate the tracks for them to work on a device with an older version of Apple’s operating systems. The addition of layered recordings should make Voice Memos even more useful to musicians and creators, especially since they sync to Voice Memos on Mac and iPad, letting you drop them into Logic Pro for editing.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge The Department of Justice during the Trump administration defied agency policy in an attempt to identify journalists’ sources, the agency’s inspector general alleges in a new report. The IG alleges the agency sought “non-content communications records” — information like email logs, rather than the content of those conversations — on eight journalists across The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. The Times had previously reported that Trump’s DOJ was looking into whether former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey had been the source of classified information that leaked in 2017 about Russian hackers. The report comes just over a month before President-elect Donald Trump is set to resume office following his election win and raises questions about how his administration will handle similar information requests in the future. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) attempted to pass the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (PRESS) Act by unanimous consent on Tuesday, but was blocked by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). If passed, it would help protect reporters from having to reveal their sources. “In our judgment, the Department’s deviation from its own requirements indicates a troubling disparity” The IG found that Trump’s DOJ in his first term failed to follow policy in seeking the journalist’s records, including neglecting to convene a committee to review the compulsory records requests. The alleged violation happened just a few years after the department under the Obama administration “overhauled” its policy regarding the news media following backlash over its aggressive tactics toward journalists. “We were troubled that these failures occurred only a few years after this overhaul,” the IG’s office writes. Trump’s DOJ also sought similar kinds of records from two members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers across the political spectrum, the IG allegedly found, though the department did not have a policy at the time addressing this kind of information gathering. “In our judgment, the Department’s deviation from its own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy for the role of the news media in American democracy and, on the other hand, the Department’s commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role,” the IG’s report says. In a memo from DOJ Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer included in the report, the agency noted that much of the report focuses on matters “undertaken before the Department’s revised News Media and Congressional Investigations policies were put into place that changed the operative requirements.” Still, the DOJ agreed with the core recommendations from the IG, including considering changes to how certain information requests are escalated to more senior officials.