For someone who played a stubborn manager on TV: “That’s you fired!” – Donald Trump does everything to avoid such confrontations. The real Donald, as president, usually had a mercenary do the deed a letter to the media or just tweeted the news.
But with FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, the president-elect took his passive-aggressive routine to a new level of humiliation.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, Trump posted 159 exuberant words to announce this overly faithful one Grifter and his vengeful friend Kash Patel was his choice for FBI director, with no words acknowledging that Wray, Trump's first nominee for the job, still had more than two years left of his 10-year term. For 11 agonizing days, Wray tossed and turned until, on Wednesday, he accepted Trump's unspoken invitation to leave: Wray said FBI officials that he would resign at Trump's inauguration “to avoid dragging the office deeper into the fight.”
Opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes takes a critical look at the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
He shouldn't have done that. For the good of the office and the nation, Wray should have stayed beyond January 20, forcing Trump to fire him and take full responsibility for the brazen politicization of an institution that, given its police powers, must trump partisanship. By giving up, Wray becomes complicit in the normalization of what is anything but normal.
As Yale history professor Timothy Snyder informed the citizens At the beginning of his book “On Tyranny,” when dealing with would-be authoritarians, he says, “Do not obey in advance.” That, Snyder argued, only teaches those in power what they can get away with.
Shameless Trump immediately sent out a fundraising email upon learning of Wray's surrender. “A great day for America,” he said was happy in the tender and on social media.
Barely. Trump is not yet president and is beginning to fire an FBI director for the second time, expressly because Wray, like James B. Comey before him in 2017, would not profess loyalty and drop the well-deserved criminal investigations against Trump and his allies . And in a particularly egregious example of the projection for which Trump is so well known, in each case he accused the FBI directors, both Republicans, of being the ones who politically weaponized the FBI – against him.
Just because Trump's destruction of norms no longer surprises doesn't mean it shouldn't shock. Yes, he has the right to fill his cabinet with people of his choice – with Senate approval, a constitutional hurdle he presents tried to duck – or fire her. But since the Watergate era, federal law and Justice Department policies have created some unique barriers between presidents and the FBI because of the proven potential for its broad law enforcement powers to be abused.
The director's term of office – only one year out of ten – should be a primary limitation. Congress set the limit in 1976 in response to a series of FBI abuses: first by Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose 48-year dictatorial rule and wanton violation of Americans' civil rights ended only with his death in 1972, and then by President Nixon, who resigned in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandals, in part because he had used the FBI to specifically persecute his people Enemy list.
The purpose of the law was expressly to avoid lifetime directors like Hoover, but also to keep the term long enough to overlap with the four- or eight-year terms of presidents, thereby helping to insulate the director from the political pressures of the to shield the White House.
As Senate report According to the law, an FBI director is “not an ordinary Cabinet appointment who would normally be considered a politically oriented member of the President's 'team'.” The report added: “Makes the office of FBI director unique.”
But now we have a once and future president who insists that all the people he appoints are “team players”. To that end, Trump has now twice ignored the legal 10-year term, unlike President Biden, who kept Republican Wray in office without question. Trump is trying to install someone, Patel, who published a “deep state.” Enemy list to seek Trump's leadership — something of a resume sweetener in Trump world, it turns out — and has vowed to “destroy” the office and the Justice Department. And who else? sold Trump-branded merch under the “K$H” logo, including children’s books depicting “King Donald” and Patel himself as the monarch’s avenging wizard.
Every FBI director since Hoover has been a Republican, and Democratic presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden have either elected or retained them to symbolize that the job is above politics. Before Trump's two defenestrations, the only firing of an FBI chief was Clinton's Firing from William Sessions after taking office in 1993. However, Clinton responded to findings of Sessions' ethics violations after an investigation was launched under President George HW Bush.
The 1974 Senate report justifying a mandatory ten-year term recognized that a president's authority to remove a director within that time period is “formally unlimited.” It was suggested, however, that the Senate, given its power to confirm a successor, would act as a check on that removal power — and will tolerate its exercise only for good reason — and not just because a new president desires office “. own man' in the position.”
Unfortunately, the authors did not count on today's Senate Republicans, whose subservience to an angry Trump exceeds their respect for the prerogatives and independence of the Senate. No one has publicly opposed Patel's confirmation. Never mind that when Trump tried to make Patel deputy FBI director in his first term, then-Atty. General William Barr said “over my dead body,” according to his memoirs.
Now Barr is on the Patel-Trump enemies list. Now it was Wray's turn to take a stand against Trump and Patel's rise, underscoring through his inevitable firings how transgressive Trump's actions are. That Wray caved instead is another bad omen for the next four years.